The law of averages also produced very average results.

There are simply cases where people and the environment their in don't match up. In the valley there's a sufficient amount of start ups with cash out there that can attract those folks suitable for that kind of environment.

They're often highly technical and leaders in their areas of expertise quite often and have that option of staying with a company or leaving. I value the stability of a job, but in general most of the work is of a 'sustaining engineering' capacity and isn't suitable for very senior level engineers that can do principal engineering of various sorts. Your career stagnates and your overall value as an engineer to other companies declines as you become more and more of a bug monkey.

The strategy of moving from company to company is effective if that can be used as fundamental manner to promote yourself upward in the technical food chain. It's difficult for folks that are risk adverse but I find those folks to be pretty fucking boring.

My two cents

Yes, iPhone & Android fanboys just don't know.

However WebOS has its fair share of nasty bugs that include a system-wide memory that forces you to reboot at some point. The messaging app is barebones and need notifications for when a user comes online.

The cloud aware contact integration is pretty much out of this world at this point. I was able to add a simple Jabber protocol and it was able to 'join' folks I know against all existing contacts intelligently.

The browser could be better as well, fewer bugs. Overclocked kernels running at 720mhz with 24M compcache seems to be the magic sweet spot now for the original Sprint device.

A lot of folks in the homebrew community is pretty hardcore about hacking this device.

Yeah, but I'm willing to bet that the cost of living is also much less where you are. San Francisco and other technological cities in the US are often the most expensive places to live in across the country.

Yes, we're paid a lot of money but in the end the living standard is roughly the same in that you can afford this and that in roughly the same way that we can. Can't comment on the infrastructure of your nation, but having food, housing and healthcare are big pieces that make things so much common between both workforces rather than creating a massive difference in living standard.

There are good plans out there via Google. I made one out of mylar and some left over plastic for a bridging a wifi connection across a canyon. It worked well and it shouldn't be hard to modify it for the cell phone spectrum of your choice.

...and then use a hands free headset. DUH ! (grin)

Just a build a parabolic reflector. There's plans online for doing that in the 2.4ghz spectrum that can be adapted for cell phones.

Yes, that kind of thing happens a lot. It's the "blame game". I've been caught in it more than once. The first time was dealing with a manager that was very politically conservative and really clashed with software engineering types.

The times I've been fired to been put into very bad professional situation were with folks that were either completely nuts managing me or were very judgmental and too narrow minded.

For the sane case, they fail to understand that other folks with very good technical backgrounds can do things completely different than they do can also get important work done. There's a loss of mutual respect there out of their own ignorance.

I left a job because of these circumstances where I was blamed for failing to get stuff done in a manner that an enemy faction would have liked. I eventually showed it to them that I didn't fit that negative image of me that they had, but by then I happily had submitted my notice and moved onto an all our better job, higher paying, more interesting work. :)

Depends on the situation. If you can get a good coding job in a good situation where you can learn a lot, then the master's degree isn't worth it.

I'd continue with education if I couldn't find a decent gig. There's something to be said about doing and open source project as well to get experiences that you can't get in either college or a job situation.

These days, if you have the raw skill, say for kernel development, going through a master's degree program at a University of California minimally would be a waste of time even for Berkeley or something like that.

You can even cut that off sooner than that in that a wide variety of folks drop out of college to do the same thing and just do not suffer from not having either degrees.

It's situation sensitive however.