By Sturgeon's Law, most colleges that offer CS degrees are diploma mills. That isn't to say they're all scams, and you could certainly learn how to program well despite your shitty education, because after all, you really learn how to program on your own in any case, but simply because they teach things like Java and SQL, instead of things like actual fucking CS, you're not going to learn how to solve interesting software problems. You're going to learn how to be cogs in a corporate hierarchy and do what the people who inspired Dilbert ask you to do, valuing keywords on your resume instead of demonstrable achievements.

But if you got a CS degree from one of the schools near the front of this list, it's a pretty good bet you're not a retard, and if even if you're not yet a great programmer, at least you're not one of morons who can't pass fizzbuzz, and we can assume you'll learn on the job and have the theoretical background to keep up.

"Oh, but I'm such a great programmer and I learned all that theory stuff on my own and you can't judge me!"

Who said I was? You're the one framing it like that. Every good programmer is an autodidactic dilettante in many things. You have to be, because every job requires you inhale a bunch of domain knowledge about the real-world problem you're solving in addition to the technology you're using. You're not special.

But the people who spent four, or five, or ten years surrounded by the some of the smartest people their age doing nothing but having fun and (mostly) learning what interests them is going to be a lot more well rounded than the kid who went chasing dollars right after high school. All else being equal, the kid who went to a good school is better at this than the kid who didn't.

The vast, vast majority of tech engineers that I talked to who are from the United States are very supportive of bringing in people from other countries because they want to work with the very best."

He's right, I have said that. Of course, I always follow it with "but only if they have unrestricted visas that give them the same freedom I have to shop the market and work for whomever they want", and I suspect everyone he's talked to (presuming he isn't making it up) have said something similar.

Because when the best of the best make $200k a year, it kicks the wind of out the whiners who complain about the the average programmer salary. But when they work for $80k and they can't switch jobs, that depresses my salary, and that is precisely why lying fuckwits like Joe Green and Mark Zuckerberg want to bring them here.

I lean on the side of it being perfectly ok to hate people for their attributes, regardless of whether they can change them or not, regardless of whether they are willing to change them or not. And that it is why I have no problem fucking over the anti-gay ideologues and I laugh at your precious concern for their freedom of "conscience". I don't give the slightest fuck about your religious beliefs, your oh-so-logical arguments, or the cultural norms you grew up with. There is no sane defense for that nonsense, it's as irrational as racism and as stupid as astrology. If you side with anti-gay bigots, there's really no way around it, you're basically a cunt.

But the hypocrisy, you cry! Don't you remember the parable of the Nazis? After they came for the bigots, there was no one left to speak for me! I need the bigots to speak for me!

Hating gay people doesn't make you a protected class. It is our choice to hate those people who believe that our hate of their hate should make them a protected class. The difference between us and the bigots is that history is never going to decide that hating bigots is a horrifically immoral crime, you know, like every over thing the bigots once supported. But go ahead, liken us to Jim Crow and the Red Scare, it's hilarious. I hope they all end up unemployable like the child molesters who live under bridges. If we could start a blacklist to hasten that outcome, I'd be snitching on them like Reagan.

The work involved in telling computers what to do is markedly different than it was even five years ago, and it's quite possible that any Rip Van Winkle-like developer who slept through the past 10 years would be unable to function in the today's computing world.

This is quite possibly the stupidest article ever posted to Slashdot.

Ok, this month.

I like how you recognized that the "brogrammer" stereotype contradicts the "socially maladjusted" stereotype, so you had the presence of mind to frame the "brogrammers" as only managers.

specialized IT services firm

Is it Wipro? I have heard such good things about Wipro.

It basically boils down to "cool" people mad that the "uncool" people have more status than them.

And they wouldn't dream of "occupying" Apple or Google, it's too far from the city and they'd look like hypocrites. Hippies tend to have more iPhones than mutual funds.

I think the real truth is that developers are specialized and like to look down on anyone not in their specific specialty

Only morons do that. You almost get the point I'm making, but you confuse domain knowledge with programming.

Knowing how memory allocation works is not freakin' domain knowledge, at least not to any programmer worth a damn. It's basic year one stuff. It's programmer potty training. If you don't understand it then it means you're happy treating the whole software stack as a magic black box. It means you had a deficient education.

I know I have a wider exposure to that stack than most people, having worked on virtual machines and embedded systems, but for fuck's sake, I learned how malloc worked in school. I was able to pick these things up on the job because I had a solid background in CS.

ask a driver developer to write a video game (what I do) and he knows fuck all about 3D, 2D, GPU optimizations

You have a really dim understanding of the kind of people who do driver development. You think GPU optimization and game engine design isn't the sort of thing that gets their dick hard?

Probably because the only people who care, and care so much they trumpet it from the rooftops in books like this, and get all passive aggressive with their "just asking questions" and whining about "political correctness", are dumbass racists.

Those who can write in Java, and those who can write Java.

Or those who can write in C#, and those who can write the .NET runtime.

Or those who can write in PHP, and those who can create PHP. Wait, those are the same.

You get what I'm saying. The programmers who whine about requirements to understand low-level memory management are in the first category, and their knowledge and skills are laughable compared to the kind of programmers who get hired by the likes of Google, Apple, and Microsoft.

Stop trying to pretend you're as good. If you were as good you'd be doing something interesting instead of slapping together enterprise bloatware.

If you have to go to Slashdot to use Google for you, you'll never be capable of mastering the toolchain, much less learn the arcane bullshit necessary to run native ARM code on a Palm device.

Not one person here that I know is offended by the name the redskins

The general counsel for the Onondaga Nation is rather offended by it:

http://www.syracuse.com/news/i...

Your "spiritual leader" is no fan of it either:

http://www.syracuse.com/kirst/...

So I'm going to go out on a limb and say you're full of shit. What's up with your spelling of "onodaga" anyway?

Nobody has a right to be un-offended.

And no one has a right to trademark a racial slur. No one is stopping them from continuing to use the name, and now they can't stop anyone else from using it also.

So why are you so mad about it? Freedom has increased, yet you're the one offended.

If I get into the interview I almost always get the job.

Almost always? Nothing funnier than an Internet braggart who must equivocate.

What's it like knowing that the only thing people will remember you for is that you're a dick?

Do you want to remembered differently than your words and deeds in that documentary portrayed you, or, as in the words of Jack Sparrow, is it simply enough that "you have heard of me?"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...