GedByrne

I think the significantly better performer is something we see in all areas like sport, music and craft.

I think Anders Ericsson does a good job of explaining the phenomenon in his book Peak: http://uk.businessinsider.com/anders-ericsson-how-to-become-...

What we should be doing is looking to create companies that can allow workers to reach and sustain peak performance in all areas, not just coding.

For the programming use case there is also Leo.

http://leoeditor.com/

Leo is of particular interest because it automatically syncs between the tree and code files: http://leoeditor.com/tutorial-programming.html

The approach is documented here: http://leoeditor.com/appendices.html#the-mulder-ream-update-...

Am I alone here in actually wanting a place of work with a desk and co-workers.

I worked from home for a year and found it very stressful. There was a lack of human interaction and no clear line between home and work.

My current employer gives me a good balance. I usually spend 3 days in the office and 2 days at home. This is mostly because of the 2 hour commute into London. I'd love to work close to home and visit the office every day.

Looking at some of the comments here (for example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12311632) it seems that the new work culture is being based around the approach adopted by a proportion of the population whose need's are different. These people thrive in this environment.

There is an assumption that the way that this group works is the future, and that it is just a matter of time before everybody else follows (See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12311689).

There are others, like myself, who find this way of working to be unpleasant. We would like to continue working the old way, but that doesn't seem to be an option anymore.

I used to enjoy having my own desk. I had a shelf of reference books and my personal belongings were locked away in the draw.

This is no longer allowed. Every job I've had for the last decade has been 'hot desking' and I have to carry everything with me every day.

Is a desk of my own where I can do a little nesting really too much to ask for?

Has anybody told the story of what happened at Nokia?

I'd love to find out more. I've spoken to a couple of former employees, and I was told that what really stopped Nokia from responding to Apple effectively was that they had started to outsource engineering.

Has anybody written anything reliable on the subject?

Like the professional medical community?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shipman_Inquiry

"The crucial thing is that members of such aristocracy must be quickly and easily replaced when fail or lost support."

How is failure defined or support measured?

What mechanism exists for quickly and easily replacing the EU beurocracy?

It also says the answer is NO if you have "services administered by meat-based lifeforms"

Basic is still alive and well, providing a simple programming environment for beginners.

It has returned to being a hobbyist scene, just like in the 80s. Basic compilers are written by hobbyists for hobbyists.

For native applications my favourite is PureBasic: http://www.purebasic.com/

It's a nice variant that compiles to a tiny, dependency free executables for Windows, Linux and OSX.

It also provides a nice gateway to the underlying assembler. http://www.purebasic.com/documentation/reference/inlinedasm....

It also has an online version called Spider Basic that compiles to JavaScript: http://www.spiderbasic.com/

Not supporting custom fields was a deliberate decision: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/news/20020912.html

"But the dilemma for us is that many customers are evaluating bug tracking software and they consider the lack of custom fields to be a major weakness in our product.... But it's still rude of me to tell customers that we don't have that feature for their own good, even though it usually is, and we're losing some sales because of it."