I had the same thought after doing similar math. Saving that many more lives == that many more mouths to feed. People die of starvation every day, particularly in the kind of under-developed countries that might be most deficient in their vaccination programs. I'd like to know what the plan is to keep the people saved from death-by-disease, from dying of starvation when villages of 150 become villages of 250 due to the increased life expectancy of residents. Reducing the expected population increase rate through birth control seems one way to do it.

Still, it's an impressive goal. I can think of many worse uses for that level of financial commitment, can't you?

Parent article said: No, most programmers in the US work for companies who CLAIM they are classified as "exempt". There are specific legal requirements for such classification, and the truth is that the vast majority of programmers _do not_ meet them.

Mod parent up. IT tech support staff working primarily from troubleshooting guides, attorneys reviewing documents, and other "professionals" have found to be misclassified as exempt from OT. It certainly appears to be the case that there are more jobs classified as "exempt" than there are jobs that are really exempt from OT compensation. Note that the specifics of the laws vary from state to state.

IANAL, and I last looked at this a while back, but I believe that when looking at a particular incidence of possible misclassification, you match the situation against both federal and applicable state laws, and whichever laws are more favorable TO THE EMPLOYEE apply. In some cases, exactly what you do on the job (not your title, but your actual duties) in IT may be the deciding factor. (Please check that before relying on it, of course. But I'm tossing it out there in case it's useful to someone.)

Grandparent MemoryDragon wrote:
I refuse to work in an industry which has a history of abusing its own employees up to levels where it becomes dangerous for your live.

Parent post replied:
Are you serious? Dangerous to their lives? [...] THEY ARE DESK JOCKEYS, get some fucking perspective people, for fucks sake.

The author of the parent post clearly gets out too much. :-) Lucky him.

For the benefit of those who've never had the experience, I'll explain. After you've done a 390 hour month followed by a 340 hour month followed by a 370 hour month, in an effort to complete something that will save your employer hundreds of millions of dollars (don't ask, please), you are tired enough that yes, your well-being and possibly your life is at risk.

This isn't an over-dramatic comment, just reality. It's difficult to eat well, it's impossible to sleep well, and the combination wears you down. You start doing things like misinterpreting traffic signals when crossing the street, your physical systems go into overdrive (high blood pressure, heart racing, etc.) because your body doesn't have the chance to adequately recover at night, and sometimes you aren't the best judge of whether it's safe enough to try to get yourself home from the office or whether you'd better crash on the floor for a few hours before navigating roads.

I've done the 90-100 hour weeks for months at a time. I've done the 72+ hour weeks for years at a time, after the 90-100 hour weeks, with no break in between. And I haven't been in the game industry since 1984. Sometimes it's just part of the job. The trouble (as is mentioned in the article) is when it doesn't end in I've had the distinct pleasure of having management srecommend to me that I go out on disability if I wanted a break from the 72+ hour weeks and months of 90-100 hour weeks, because they simply weren't going to assign me only the amount of work I could get done in 40 hours.

[ FYI, I lost significant golden handcuffs when I left that employer. I wonder if that's at all a factor at Rockstar. ]

And for those of you who think this is just another sign of how screwed up the US is, the Japanese have coined a term, karoshi, for death-by-overwork in their country.

Established companies knowingly pay huge amounts on dubious claims just to raise the barrier to entry of their turf. In the long run 0.5 bill is not a big sum for Microsoft. Further there are likely to be silent undisclosed deals specifying that a huge portion of the pay out should be used exclusively to enforce the widest claims of the patent on all violations fingered by Microsoft. There is a precedent for that.

Oh, I wish I had mod points today.

This is the first time I've seen that angle discussed.

(I'm still in the "please get ajax off slashdot" camp though, as it doesn't play nice with my netbook.)

For me, I can have the news or a sitcom or some such audio (to an extent, even old Saturday morning cartoons) with conversation going on in the background and tune it out happily enough, while letting it serve its purpose of masking background noise.

However, put music in there, and my bain involuntarily starts to pattern match on the harmonies, chord progresions, etc., and I don't get to use all of my brain on the task I'm working on, because no matter how hard I try to keep it on task, it gets pulled away by the music. Listening to music for me seems to be necessarily a "foreground" task even if I attempt to put it in the "background" because my brain seeks patterns and it finds them in music, but not in random spoken audio. Based on how my brain reacts to music in headphones while I'm trying to do analytical work, I would not without anecdotal evidence to the contrary from colleagues believe that anyone could work with that cacophany going in their ears.

From talking to other engineers, I believe my preference for spoken audio rather than music is unusual but not necessarily rare.

This seems to be one of those things where it just depends on how your brain works. Maybe that can be explained to the boss? It's definitely not a one-size-fits-all thing, and I completely understand how someone could end up with his perspective. Time to widen his focus a bit, I think.

Actually, I expected that they'd store messenger chat logs for at least 30 days, in order to review them after some alleged incident took place, to look for evidence. It's interesting that they don't. I wonder whether volume or performance is the constraint. And IKEA Billy bookshelves are not junk fit only for 0-25 year olds. They're sturdy enough to hold lots of hardback textbooks and, with glass doors, their clean lines look better than many "real furniture" bookshelves.

Wow! I never thought I'd see a "crappy Microsoft software made me disabled!" post on Slashdot.

(Puts hand up) Never, really? You haven't spent as much time marking up Word documents with bold, italic and other random tags, or working with people who have, as I have, then. Multiple people doing similar work on a crunch project would go home at the end of the night after about 14 hours, hands/fingers/wrists too sore to continue, because the actions required to highlight text accurately in MS Word either by keyboard or mouse are hard on one's hands and wrists.

Yes, day after day of 14 hour days or longer will be hard in any tool. But I've been able to work in various text editors (programming or doing similar document markup) for similar long stretches without coming home with hands so cramped that I couldn't even pick up a bowl to make soup. The experience reinforced two things I knew already.

(1) Just because a tool CAN do something, doesn't mean that that tool SHOULD be used to do it.

(2) The easiest tool to learn how to use passably enough for casual work is often not the best tool for intensive repetitive work.

Epilogue. The company eventually developed a tool to replace Word, which did not require engineers to perform extensive visual markup for bold, italics, etc. Sounds good, eh? The tool is based on Word. It requres extensive semantic markup which is used by a back-end process that replaces the semantic markup with visual markup. Lots of smart decisions were made by the managers who ran this project. Using Word as an XML editor (and requiring that files contain all of the Word XML overhead, thereby making it next to impossible to use any other tool to edit the XML) was not, IMHO, one of them. Really, I understand vendor lock-in as a marketing strategy, but for an internal tool?

Company name omitted for obvious reasons.

Ohmygosh, NOOOOOOO!

Then I would have had to go through 65 web sites and autopays and put the new info in. And then subsequently pay late fees on the 17 sites I forgot to update (do you really have a "little black book" of everywhere you've left your credit card online?) that tried to debit on the old number at some point when I wasn't paying particular attention, the debit failed due to the card being cancelled and I didn't realize payment was overdue until a late charge had been tacked on.

The point of refusing the let the bank cancel the old number, as I mentioned, was that I didn't want to incur that huge time and financial hit while working 70-100+ hour weeks, as I had to at Microsoft for much of my time there. (No longer there now.)

When it eventually the card was cancelled anyway because of the ATM incident, it was a major pain in the neck for months and cost me probably a couple hundred dollars in late fees. Why that? I had longstanding auto-debits attached to accounts with email addresses at old ISP's, old employers, etc. from 10+ years ago. It wasn't always possible to notify me promptly when the autodebits failed, and these were things that might bill once a year, or only when there was a bandwidth overage, etc., so they weren't foremost on my mind either.

That's why I'd said that the *ONLY* good thing about losing the card in the ATM was getting rid of freecreditreport.com. There was an awful lot of hell that went along with losing the card in the ATM that made that experience into quite a net loss.

I had the same problem. With new addresses every few months while I was on partial sabbatical years ago, I amassed quite a stack of previous locations. Their 3rd degree authn process required me to know all of them. I didn't.

Never could access what I was paying for, and you'd think the company would be required to cease billing if not providing the service, right? I I called them up, pointed this out, tried to get cancelled, tried to get charges refunded. Well, guess what? As far as they were concerned I couldn't even prove to them sufficiently that I was who I was, for them to allow me to initiate the cancel operation!

You'd also think that you could appeal to your bank when you couldn't cancel it and you weren't getting the service paid for, right? Well, according to Bank of America, I had to completely disable the card number. They couldn't refuse to honor that one recurring debit against it.. That was my main card on hmany dozens of online sites and autopays. I paid a couple hundred to freecreditreport over a couple years for the convenience of maintaining my card before it was finally eaten by an ATM machine and the bank disabled that card's number as per their policy. The only good thing about the card getting eaten was that I was then free of freecreditreport.com.

I've worked as both a developer and author for a couple decades, so I've seen this a few times myself.

It isn't clear to me whether this is a personal project or a work project. (I'm hoping with nothing done after 6 months, it's a personal project, but it might just be a minor item on a gargantuan corporate to-do list.)

I agree with those who've advised "changing things up" a bit. Exercise and/or play a musical instrument. If you already do, pick something new to try, where you have to learn a new motor skill. You'll get to use your brain in a different way. I recommend fire staff twirling (without the fire of course, at least to start) or juggling. Both of these require intense focus, like that required for coding, but it's a different context. Learning a musical instrument works for a lot of people, but didn't work for me; staff twirling on the other hand is just magic, for what it does for my concentration and, through the process of learning new tricks, determination and sense of forward motion.

I also agree with, find a buddy you can discuss this with on a regular basis. Maybe more than one buddy (a UI guy, and an algorithms, or database, or framework guy depending on what your project involves). This is probably easier to do for a personal project than for a work project unless you are on great terms with a coworker; most workplaces I've seen lately are very busy. It provides accountability plus, as another poster pointed out, that all-too-important voice of reason when you're stuck on a winding road and someone can point out the straight line you've missed. If this is a personal project and you think you have The Next Big Internet Idea and you don't want to cut someone else in, well, you either get it done or you don't. Your choice. If you don't do it, someone else will, and they might already be working on it indepedent of you. If it's a personal project, maybe you can farm part of it out to someone else to get it started? Even if it's The Next Big Idea and you don't want to talk about, maybe you can talk about PART of it without giving away the whole thing? If you have a sorta-technical-but-not-really friend, they can be good to bounce ideas off of -- if you can explain things in a way that they understand, then that is feedback to you that YOU understand.

If this is a personal project, for gods sake, LEAVE THE HOUSE! Take your notebook to the nearest coffee shop, shared-workspace office, pub, or wherever. I find that having life going on around me shuts off random thoughts that get in the way of getting things done sometimes. It sounds like you've already tried the reverse (alone, quiet), but if you haven't, try that, too. The "leave the house" strategy is particularly good, for me, for more rote-type activities, like keying in database schema that can be a bit repetitive and don't require much creative thought. For creative thought, I like to go hide, and often take breaks every couple of hours to keep myself fresh.

If this is a work project, change up your environment somehow. While working as a contractor a few years ago, I was doing a project involving several layers of components in multiple languages (ajax, server-side stuff, glue scripts, random on-the-fly generated script, build and verification tools). Debubgging it was not straightforward, complete with conferences with devs responsible for other components when there was an issue whose cause was not readily apparent. Although we were supposed to be butts-in-seats visible every hour we were on the clock, my management trusted me and I just sent them a note saying, "I'm going to go hide and get this done. I will be on premises, so technically still within the rules, but won't be on email, won't be easy to find and will have working code before Monday. If you absolutely need to know where I am, call my cell phone." As I recall, they had working code the Thursday before that Monday. Once I went into "war" mode, made things NOT like business as usual by finding another place to work for a couple days, laser focus and professional pride took over, and that was that. I changed the rules a bit to rules that would actually WORK given our time constraint, grabbing a copy of the others' code, and making my own changes to it because it was often faster to locate and fix the bug myself, than to convince the person who owned the code that it had an issue. Under less urgent circumstances, it's better to have that dialogue, because I had been doing a bit of useful education by letting folks puzzle over what was wrong with their code, but in this case, we were too close to due date and that tradeoff was necessary. I sent the changes required in others' components back to them for review, and everything got checked in before Monday.

As others have pointed out, changing your choice of beverage may be useful as well. If caffeine works, try that. If beer's what puts you in more of a coding frame of mind, go for it (but not on the clock if your employer doesn't sanction it!). Microsoft used to have beer bashes once or twice a month on Friday afternoons. You'd think many people went home after them. You'd be partially right. But many people stuck around and went back to work, refreshed and in a different frame of mind -- yeee ha, the manager is gone, all the PMs are gone, it's time for us to get things done! I wouldn't recommend that strategy for live updates to amazon.com or modifying the software in your homemade aircraft, of course.

Good luck.