I'm kinda curious about this sentence. Are there people out there who didn't know that Joel runs his website/forums/StackOverflow for Joel's benefit and not necessarily for the benefit of those who contribute?
I read a bunch of Joel's articles in college, then decided that his site wasn't the place for me. I felt that I wasn't really learning anything new from him, and that the forum participants were rehashing really basic stuff that I'd already learned and wanted to move on from. When it came time to get a job (which was right around Joel's big "Great Programmers Work for Fog Creek" push), I kinda laughed and figured that if I were really a great programmer, I'd rather go build search engines or financial models than bugtracking software. So I just quietly applied to financial software startups, stopped reading JoS, and didn't make a big stink about it on the Internet.
I thought about not writing this comment because, as Raganwald notes, I'm being part of the problem and not part of the solution. But I found my life got so much easier when I started worrying about my goals first and other people's second, rather than assuming other people were looking out for me and then feeling betrayed when it turned out they weren't. That doesn't mean being an asshole or never lifting a finger to help someone. It means that when I help someone out on the Internet, it's because I want to, and I don't expect Reputation or Karma or a job offer because of it. They're nice if they happen, but not something to expect.
I don't care who Cletus is, I was responding to what he(?) wrote. If his post was good but he had a low SO reputation, would I discount his opinion? And I have no idea there is a cletus here as well as there. I wasn't paying any attention to who he is for the same reason I was dismayed by how many words he(?) used to discuss who Joel is.
Finally, I never said his post was not truthful. There is dreck in the world. I know that and so do you.
p.s. But yeah, I hesitated before commenting on account of the irony. And then I removed the first paragraph, which originally read:
Fuck. fuck. fuck. fuck. fuck. fuck. fuck. fuck.
Not my most articulate writing by a long shot...
Stats & origin: http://www.thinkbabynames.com/meaning/1/Cletus
Cletus's post raises very valid points and expresses the feelings of betrayal of many people who contributed to StackOverflow many hours of work for free. And he shows several contradictions in what Spolsky preaches and what he practices.
Ironically your comment doesn't add much to the discussion and criticizes Cletus' blog post for being a negative post. Also you seem to confuse the author of the post with the submitter in HN:
http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=fogus http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=cletus
Finally, you say Cletus is telling people "which blogs are worth reading", what makes me think you actually didn't read the whole piece.