That's all well and good if you have the luxury of picking and choosing from multiple offers. Here in the real world (i.e., not in SV), getting a decent offer (if you're not entry level) that's at least equal to your current pay generally takes 6 months - 1 year of hard interviewing. If I demanded a prospective employer scored even 50% on the Joel Test, I'd be perpetually unemployed. Which is probably why employers generally get away with providing sucktastic working environments for software developers.
I find it especially disheartening that the only one of Joel's 12 'tests' that's pretty much a universal 'yes' these days is uses source control.
So individual programmers were basically forced to work without any of the benefits of an scm. The designated repo master would place a zip of the latest code in a folder, the programmers would copy it to their home area, and when we wished to 'commit' something, we'd copy our files to a staging area and put in a request with the QA to do the actual commit.
Can't I just commit to a branch and let the QA merge the branches into the trunk later? No.
I need to edit a file, time to: cp file.c file.c.bak1
Assuming you're entrusted to install software locally, that is.
BWAHAHAHAAA! No.. :(
At my current job, I've been waiting on a software install request (you know, just an IDE, a small thing) since early February. Coding in Notepad++ till then (w00t). Been waiting on a RAM upgrade (stuck at 4GB) for... well, since I started back in October.
Programming as a job sucks. Can I do something else and just keep coding as a hobby (at home, where I have decent tools and don't have to ask permission for every $%@! little thing)? I swear, if I could get paid just as well to bag groceries/serve coffee/etc. and not have to deal with an antagonistic/uberpolitical IT dept run by Vogons, I would do it in a heartbeat.
One example: where I work we have our choice of windows/mac/linux (though if you want to run a linux other than debian, ubuntu or redhat/centos, you're on your own as far as IT is concerned); workstation upgrades are every 3 years. I'm due for a new one in May, so I only have 8GB of ram right now. Every desk has at least two monitors, and every office has a door[1].
This is not in SV, nor is Fog Creek (where Joel wrote the "Joel Test" from).
It costs nearly $200k to employ a software developer after taxes and benefits, so not being willing to shell out a few thousand a year in tools that will give a performance benefit (even if it's just making that person happier in their job), is wasteful.
1: There have been points in the past where cubes were used as a stopgap while we were finding more square-footage, including when I started. The person getting me set-up apologized for putting me in a cube.
I hope your situation improves soon.
How's that too many?
One nice factor of the Joel Test (not that I saw it being used in reality - but as a mental model anyways), was that you could easily categorize companies into places you want to work or places you don't want to work. A perfect score? You want to work there. More than 2 things they don't do? You don't want to work there. 1 thing? Maybe look into it and see how important it is to you.
With this, your scores could be all over the map. What's more, the questions a company misses on might be ones that aren't that important to you (having a library), or even where a 'no' might be preferable to you (daily stand-up).
Even once you get past all that, many questions aren't easily answered objectively. What's a short iteration? I've worked in places that touted 2 weeks as a remarkably short iteration, and others who bemoaned how long that was.