This project will help us to identify and remove mundane tasks that drain your energy so that you can focus on the most engaging and highest value work to make your job better.

Is this the latest corporate euphemism for "Mo metrics, mo better"?

If you, like the Alabama Supreme Court, think that everything short of a perfect live birth for every embryo is grounds for prosecution, what's to keep every pregnancy and behavior of a pregnant woman free of potential scrutiny, litigation, and potential prosecution? Alabama is sending a message loudly and clearly to every woman: If you find yourself pregnant, get the hell out of Alabama before they decide that you aren't giving that lil' ol' baby inside you proper care and decide to send you to prison for a few years. The sad thing is that is the stated viewpoint of a certain political party and soon people stupid enough to vote for this party will find themselves exposed to this sort of stupidity. Poetic justice? Probably. But then, stupidity has always produced it's own reward.

It's another reason why most mainstream languages suck. You can't install a new version of Python without it breaking half your code. Constantly changing versions of widely used libraries because "worse is better" and the developers couldn't be bothered to get the thing right the first time. Oddly enough, there are languages that try to avoid this. Common Lisp hasn't changed since the 1980's. Clojure avoid breaking changes like the plague. There are also languages outside the Lisp family that make stability a priority. My recommendation is that people who value their code avoid non-stable languages. It may be easier for lazy language developers who deliver half-assed features, but it makes life hell for people using the language.

It's a crappy system for sure. Cities have to figure out why it's a losing game and stop doing it. Maybe a Federal law against local bribery of businesses would work.

It's also an indirect argument why MLB needs salary caps (and in the cases of quite a few owners, salary minimums).

To be fair, the guy who suggested this did have a device that gave him useful output.

Most of us just look at our phones to see what time it is.

Get rid of the pesky humans that might form a union or show initiative. in some sub-optimal way. Replace with robotics. Everybody wins. Especially the shareholders. But also the human who no longer has to deal with a boss yelling at them. That thought will comfort them as they starve to death and we're rid of them once and for all.

I've been threatening for years to write a wonderful paper called "Why Agile is (Mostly) Bullshit". However without a replacement methodology to give managers a set of pretty charts and the appearance of control, it would do no good. In fact, having been in the industry as both an individual contributor and/or manager for 40+ years, I could safely broaden the title to "Why Methodologies are (Mostly) Bullshit" without much change. I think as long as IC's understand that their management is for the most a bunch of insecure flunkies and that methodologies are (mostly) security blankets to ease these insecurities up the management chain and provide (usually poor) estimates to allow upper management to budget and make (usually inaccurate) promises to customers, everyone can play the game without too much grief. But whatever the methodology, it simply acts as a multiplier for any behavioral pathologies that are in the organization and so can turn life into a living hell if these are not quashed or managed effectively.

... the java guy, he needs a two hour introduction before he even walks on the main stage.

That's not an introduction, it's an apologia.

I was hired for my current individual contributor job at age 65. I guess the cutoff must be 70 now. Of course it helps that I do have three somewhat esoteric skills that were needed by the company that hired me, but it's nothing a relatively good programmer couldn't pick up in a reasonable amount of time.

Let's just say that commonplace skills don't cut it the older you get. Someone who knows ONLY Python and SQL will be out of a job by age 40. Being expert at C++ might keep you in the game until age 50. You might be employable to age 60 if you know OCaml or Haskell.

In the end it's all supply and demand. If your skills are a dime a dozen that's what you'll be paid. And you'll be replaced by a younger, cheaper person as soon as they can find one.

You obviously have little clue as to current compiler technology, that can provide JIT compilers for a variety of languages targeted to just about any platform, These compilers approach or exceed the performance of native-compiled binaries because they can take advantage of run-time information about the data types and values actually being used by the code rather than trying to infer them (usually poorly) at compile time. The fact that Python does not have one of these yet is more a testament to its developers' sloth and seeming abhorrence to linguistic stability rather than any technological factor.

Everyone knows SVO order is much more understandable than SOV. Just ask anyone from Germany.

When it comes to security and Microsoft, why should this day be different from any other day?

As far as I'm concerned, the world will be a better place if they both go scorched-earth on the other.

Google's too young to be really good at doing evil. IBM has had the "Do evil" model baked into them since at least WWII. IBM helped the Nazis keep the death camps humming. It's hard to compete with that.