[capstone]

Oh I get that (did read the whole thing) however conversely, couldn't it then just be titled, "Smart" with an explanation further down that smart people know that they have to get things done or else it's just talk? I mean, you can redefine and contextualize anything, but I think if you promote a slogan as strongly worded as Joel's quote below, you have the responsibility to make it complete without a further explanation.

The #1 cardinal criteria for getting hired at Fog Creek:

Smart, and Gets Things Done.

That's it. That's all we're looking for. Memorize that. Recite it to yourself before you go to bed every night.

He wants us to memorize a short slogan, and that slogan, in programming speak, is buggy and wasteful (wasteful in the sense that I described above, and buggy in that a smart gets-things-done a-hole will single handedly kill your project). Gets Things Done and Gets Along on the other hand is complete in and of itself.

[arctangent]

There are a lot of smart people who worry so much about getting things perfect, or doing things in a too-general way (i.e. "architecture astronauts") that they never actually get anything useful done, or they take far too long to get things done. These people often lack pragmatic business sense.

[rubergly]

You can argue that it's a matter of semantics whether "getting things done" implies "smart" if you start defining "done" to mean more than what most people assume from the word, but it's definitely not true that "smart" implies "getting things done" even if you start to stretch meanings. There are plenty of people who are really smart, but who do not get anything practical done.