Many of these are completely subjective. Do you have "Healthy oncall" and "Technical managers who build trust"? Most companies you could argue either way.
> Celebrating people taking initiatives. Are people taking initiatives to make things better celebrated or rewarded over this seen as unnecessary distractions?
What does 'celebrate' mean? Yay... colleague introduced a new initiative for doing XYZ, but it violates the current standards and now requires upgrades of other legacy stuff. It's not providing any measurable or substantive benefit, but... if I don't "celebrate" it, am I part of a 'destructive' culture?
The question is a bad management detector.
However...! Them things that are most valuable are often[0] least quantifiable. Sure "Technical managers who build trust" is probably completely unquantifiable but if you work for people who are willing to mess up your work, it's very bad indeed.
I worked at a place that used source control (we all do now) but oh hell, the boss could not help pissing about weekly with the project's aims, growing it every time, no clear direction, etc.
It's a bit like code comments then, the value of which can be indisputable. Perhaps require 33% of your code to have comments? Seems like a metric! Now how valuable is that when enforced? Some programmers will do little more than paste code lipsum. We want quality comments - and now we're back to subjective. The best stuff is.
[0] That needs some thinking about which I haven't done.
But if you're in a job interview, and you ask your interviewer whether their technical managers think trust is important, even the most toxic employer would agree it is.
The same way a prospective employee, when asked "what's your greatest weakness", wouldn't admit to any truly great flaws.
The Joel test is not “feels outdated” and there was no evidence presented to support the claim.
A 12/12 on the Joel test doesn't mean you're a great company, it means you're not a total garbage fire.
I'm not going to presume I can come up with a whole new test on the spot, but I'd expect a "modern" Joel test to have questions like:
- Do you use CI? - Do you deploy changes individually? - Is your code coverage > (some amount)
This might be, but there are a whole lot of companies in the world that can't even make table stakes.
For example, if you were writing the list today "do you make daily builds" would probably have updated to "do you build and test every merge into master"