The prim sergeant cleaning the toilet story is getting old, but the rest of the article after that was actually pretty good. Persistence, reluctant readers!
I think Joel's actions, by themselves demonstrate humility and the quality of being down to earth. But the article...I think it would it would have come off a lot better if someone else wrote it about Joel.
I agree that it might come off a bit as preening, but to be fair Joel's column hasn't stayed away from mistakes and bad decisions he's made as well. As such I take the tone as being closer to "this is what I've done and why I've done it" than "look at this awesome thing I did".
If you truly believe you're awesome, I'm not sure it's beneficial to sit around and wait for someone else to recognize it. People won't ask you to contribute to the conversation; they'll assume that if you have anything to say, you'll speak up.
Just off the top of my head, I remember one Fog Creek get-together when one of my guests (Joel barely knew her) mentioned to me that she was thirsty, and before I could do anything about it Joel rushed off to get her a glass of water. While not a huge deal, fetching water for his developers' guests is not something that Joel really has to do.
...and even if I were to assume the basest of motives (that Joel wants to keep his developers working at Fog Creek so they make him lots of money), it's still a compliment as a developer and the type of attitude that makes me enjoy working hard.
Since self promotion is more rampant than ever, it's very hard to separate the marketing from the information.
He and his execs did not get out of the way and let us do our jobs, they actually did the opposite and made it harder to do our jobs, mainly because we had so much trouble figuring out what it was that they wanted us to build for them.
And naturally they expected us to make up the difference from their dawdling and indecision and ship on time, even though they ended up delaying almost all of our projects by around six months.