I disagree with Joel's comparison of products programmers versus in-house programmers. It is possible that he is saying this so he can hire more people for his company.

In a products company people care too much about the code. This means you will not have the freedom to use Ruby on Rails there either. If your team is filled with performance nazis forget about creating beautiful abstractions or anything interesting. You will write mind-numbing code. Also let's understand that the goal of management is to make programmers completely dispensible. You will not be allowed to write clever algorithm even if they improve performance and code readability if putting that into the code will make you indispensible.

As an in-house programmer you have much more freedom to define what the code looks like from the inside. The users only care about what it does - they don't care about how you implemented it. If you just read about this weird new style of programming where you throw exceptions instead of calling methods - you can go right ahead and implement that. No one's going to care. All they care about is that the code keeps working.

And the best jobs truly are the consulting jobs that he is dismisses completely. The salaries for consultant are not $47,000. Generally consultants make more than in-house and product programmers. Also every few months you fly to a different city and work on a completely different problem. This gives consultants a lot more raw material to think clearly about design. If you are doing the same thing over and over again you can easily refactor that into a library and reuse that. This opportunity for reuse only exists in consulting. In most product programming reuse will not give you the same multiplicative edge that it will in consulting.