amcintyre

That's great, unless your employer/client/etc. is allergic to open source. I really can't consider something part of the language unless it's in a standard library that comes out of the box with the major compilers.

For me, work is about doing something that produces value for the shareholders so they can afford write me a paycheck on a regular basis. When I've finished doing that, I'd like to use my time the way I see fit, thank you very much.

Sure, the work sounded interesting and the people seemed competent and friendly, but the view of an open floor plan filled with those desks really dampened any excitement I had about working there.

This should be no more surprising than running across a CEO that doesn't get on with computers (if he actually commanded), or an electrician or car mechanic that doesn't get on with computers (if he was an enlisted crew member).

There are lots of jobs on Navy ships that have absolutely nothing to do with computers, and some of the things you might assume are run by computers are controlled with very old (and coincidentally reliable and/or fixable with common tools) technology like switches, relays, reach rods, and magamps. (Or at least this was the case on many ships that were in use during the Gulf war.)

I guess I'm gonna be a negative Nancy here, but I know some very good developers that don't make anything about themselves public. I expect some of the very best are completely invisible on the internet, at least by their real name, because they're too busy working on things their employers would rather keep as trade secrets.

Damn right it's good--for me--that most programmers think low-level programming/machine knowledge is obsolete. I'm pretty certain it means I'll never want for a (good) job as long as I can still think and move enough to edit code.

Toyota's Prius C will do 55-60mpg if you're not out on the highway a lot, provided you adjust your driving habits to fit with the hybrid system behavior. Highway mileage is closer to the advertised 48 or so.

I may just be cynical, but I don't see how that automatically follows from rapid tech advances. I thought most of the problems of distributing food and education were "people problems" that won't just go away because you have fancy gadgets.

I'm not sure what I'm supposed to gather from this John/Norman comparison. If John has the same amount of natural talent as Norman, after a few years of full-time professional development work he's likely to be just as valuable as Norman. There's plenty of time to become really competent and valuable even if you start very late (like in your 30's or 40's, which I assume classifies as "freaking ancient" in many companies' eyes). I don't see how one person having some imagined head start figures into whether there's a shortage or not; but then, I don't live in the valley, so perhaps this is a cultural thing there.

I do agree, though, that there's a lot of companies out there that seem to want the top 1% (all the while offering bottom 25% rates).

My own experience suggests this: If you've learned to work hard when necessary to meet your own internal standards, and make sure you keep pushing those standards up, you'll probably wake up one day to find you're way more competent than most people in at least one area. That can be really fun (and sometimes lucrative), even if at the same time you're self-aware enough to know you're not a world-class expert that somebody would find interesting enough for an article.

I was thinking about going to graduate school there in 2008, but somehow it was cheaper to take 3 classes remotely at out-of-state rates (at a higher-ranked school, mind you) than to drive 15 miles into town and take 1 class at UVa as an in-state student, so I decided against it.

Edited to add: I later moved to start a PhD program at the other school, stayed here and got a job, so UVa's high tuition indirectly removed me from the pool of people that would work and pay taxes in VA.

Oh how I wish my bank and mortgage lender would let me choose easy-to-remember passwords like that.

Adding the "Command line here" context menu item is nice, too (although that's available by Ctrl+right-click in at least Windows 7 anyway).

You can probably leave out "my age" and it will still be fairly accurate.

I'm not in any way suggesting that the article author (Devlin) is like that, just that I would personally try not to make a statement like that without proactively making it clear that I'm not "that guy."

I thought that was the tilt of the entire blog/reddit/HN-osphere.

I might not have been ready to choose a career in 9th grade, but I sure as hell would have taken a class on linear algebra, astronomy, computer science, etc. if it had been available. Having the choice to take advanced classes in any interest gives you a much better foundation to start with no matter what career you choose later.

This kind of approach reminds me of Richard Hamming's "You and your research" talk: http://www.cs.utexas.edu/~dahlin/bookshelf/hamming.html

"Under these circumstances it seems better to live a life in which you do important things (important in your eyes, of course) than to merely live out your life. No sense frittering away your life on things that will not even appear in the footnotes."