Management is an *activity*, not a position. U.K. and American companies seem (as a rule) to have waaaaaay more managers than needed. The best companies I've worked for had about 1 manager for every 30 to 40 individuals. I'm excited to see what Zappos can do here.

I've had similar experiences. I've done Win32 and OLE and all that jazz, and then .NET in its heyday. Although .NET has evolved, it seems to be falling further behind the JVM ecosystem overall. Here's what I mean by "overall":

1) the JVM itself is extremely battle tested now. There are even viable alternative JVMs. In terms of troubleshooting, reliability and management, the JVM is a non-issue. It's like the sun rising in the morning.
2) The knowledge base of solved problems, libraries, projects and skills for the JVM world dwarfs .NET. Further, it seems that with the exception of a few guys like Brian Beckman, the smartest people in the world have made their choice: they do their work on top of the JVM. If you want to do massive streaming and/or parallel computing, you're going to turn to one or more top level Apache projects running on the JVM.
3) Interestingly, the world of Java.next languages such as Groovy, Scala, Clojure is really getting traction. This is closely tied to #2, the smartest people in the world work in the JVM space. Clojure in particular is very nice, and you can deploy Clojure apps as Java jars, so in a stodgy big company setting, you can actually deliver.
4) Finally, a problem I've seen since with Microsoft over the years (still a problem) is that MS solutions tend to address a problem facing *Microsoft the company* but do not address problems facing *developers and customers*. MS is reactive. When Java began to shake up the scene, MS rushed to market with a "me too" version (the .NET runtime and C#). Same deal with Windows Phone (answer to iOS), Silverlight (answer to Flash), and on and on. Here's the kicker: Microsoft's track record in keeping their promises is not good. If you tied your fortunes to MS tech initiatives in the last 15 years, you've lost a lot of time invested. Whereas with the JVM ecosystem, similar to the *nix ecosystem, everything you learn retains value. And the JVM ecosystem just evolves around problems and grows even more--whole branches don't go extinct as with the Microsoft / .NET ecosystem.

Much as I love and admire my U.S. colleagues and am honestly grateful for what the U.S. has done as benevolent conqueror.. it is just too easy to imagine how the "Hell Yeah" school of American politics would deal with Danish ownership of a lot of oil. Dumbass Danes, it's their own fault they have a weak military. Hell Yeah! Here's hoping everyone has evolved far beyond that by the time anything like drilling for oil in Arctic is ever held feasible. If only there was a way to add 20-30 IQ points quickly to everyone in the developed world :(

It's pretty transparent really. To "sell" the idea of ever higher H1b quotas, the titans like Zuckerberg have to put on a convincing act, with feigned signs of desperation about hiring. Part of that act is dog and pony stunts , astroturf campaigns, etc. Anything to create a "narrative" as they say in U.S. media where it becomes accepted wisdom that desperate measures are needed to bring on more programmers. ( As long as one doesn't look at actual numbers, such as wage changes indicating market forces responding to shortages, or anything like that )

the consequences follow.

From a Euro perspective it would be difficult to prefer Florida over California, all else held equal. But you bring up a good point which is in CA's favor: - in California, having crazy people means they will stick flowers in your car - Florida, having crazy people means they will get amped on bath salts meth and try to eat your face

Various steady state economists seem to have thought this through pretty well. There's the notion of a citizen's income and so on. Highly recommend the books by Herman E. Daly, or the site at www.steadystate.org

If this is the best that Zuckerberg and pals can do to sell H1b visas ... well then. It's worth watching. Content free, and attribution free. Nice!

Especially in the U.S., marriage + mortgage = monotone wage drone existence. Don't step into that if you can possibly help it. Just the choice of building a life around GF/partner, two mature and independent adults, will work wonders for your spirit, physical health, and the energy level you bring to work and after work, every day. Wife = downward spiral for you. Look around if you don't believe me.

From what I've read this has only accelerated since I saw it happening working over there in Mountain View. I finally found the right English word for the phenomenon of code.org and other astroturf campaigns about programmers in the U.S: "mendacity"

Why the U.S. lets this happen is a mystery to me.

This makes perfects sense, if you are a corp like Facebook, you want to say "we've tried everything, it's no use, please raise the H1b quota" It's a lot like Microsoft cynically concluding that paying large anti-trust fines was a rational business decision, the revenues outweighed the penalties.

Reading her bio, she sounds really good. And the projects she's worked on make it clear that she likes technology. If the U.S. won't take her, I hope Germany or the EU will.

I'm painfully aware of my own country's misdeeds in the past re: land grabs. But the pattern is clear and we must not forget the lesson: A bully like Hitler in 1938, or Putin in 2014, only has his appetite increased by eating. The West can stop Putin now at a small cost, or deal with him in a few years at a staggering cost. The Russian people deserve better than what will happen to them eventually under Putin's direction. Berlin 1945 == Moscow 2020. For the sake of ordinary Russians, if no one else, Putin's gang must be checked *hard* in their attempts to eat Ukraine piece by piece.

Bugs can be isolated with unit tests, and / or fixed in future releases. Executives who are over their heads, however, make decisions that cannot be unf#cked and destroy thousands of lives. You'll get much more bang for your buck by wiring executives and board members up to monitor their alertness and comprehension. With one headset on one executive this could have been prevented: "Metro UI everywhere? Uh...ummm....so tired, so many words, I want to go golfing so bad...sure, sounds good, Metro UI everywhere, do I sign at the bottom?"