I agree 100%.

Far too many parents push their kids way too damned hard and way too damned fast.

Let the kid be a kid while he can! He has plenty of time in life for becoming a programmer, a doctor, a pianist, or whatever fucked up projection of your own hopes and dreams you want to foist on his poor life.

A TV star has more followers than a tech grunt. What a shock.

Next thing you know, someone will purport surprise that a music or movie star is more popular than someone who works for a living.

*LOL*

If you're still thinking in terms of "which SQL" rather than knowing how to move between dialects, then you don't KNOW SQL. You know a product.

And 95% write loops updating one record at a time instead of using a WHERE clause on a single update statement. :(

Myself, I've learned to dislike Python rather than the tabs.

Nobody can see your "junk" without a microscope... :P :P :P

Windows had a colour graphics API; the Macs of the period were still black and white.

Personally I thought the Amiga was better than either (and so I bought one), but they're not around to lay claim to being first with graphics accelerators and special-purpose sound chips.

I think it's perfectly reasonable to have a "programming" expert. To me, that's someone who has such a broad base of experience with different languages and tools that they can shift between procedural, object oriented, scripted, functional, and other language paradigms with ease.

An "expert" programmer is someone to whom the syntax of a language is "just details" because they already have a grasp on how the language works and what it does based on minimal summary points of it's features.

That's not to say an "expert" programmer will produce perfect code in any language that gets thrown at them, but that they can be up and coding at speed in a matter of days or weeks, producing code as good as and at a volume equal to people who've already had a few years experience with the language or toolkit.

Really, an "expert" is someone who is an expert at learning new things, not someone who has experience with everything out there. They're the people who are so confident in their abilities that they'll jump in feet first on a project using a language they've never coded in with a framework they've never seen, and be confident that they'll still meet the deadlines.

He was also a rather obsequious ass-kisser who would constantly praise my knowledge and skills for 5 minutes before getting around to asking his question. Drove me nuts. How I wanted to just pimp-slap that useless tit!

I didn't start minding the tap on the shoulder until I worked with a fellow who would tap on "the expert's" shoulder every 20 minutes instead of @%)&@)%& using Google or reading the company Wiki. :(

An "Expert" is not someone who knows everything. An "Expert" is someone who knows the most important things, including THE most important thing: how to get the answers to questions that they don't know.

Noise levels have been an issue at many places I worked, forcing me to use noise cancelling headphones and to play music whenever I was trying to get any actual coding done. And it's not just noise -- it's interruptions from people sneaking up behind you and tapping you on the shoulder when you're obviously busy.

As a result, even cube-land is vastly preferrable to the "open office" that some work environments provide. An "open office" just lets management see whether everyone is working at a glance -- it provides zero benefits to the people who are actually trying to get the work done.

I'm not advocating closed-door offices, though -- those destroy the team environment, and turn everyone into isolationists.

But damnit, man, don't insult your people by expecting them to put up with hearing everyone else's phone conversations and cursing-at-the-computer at full volume because there are no dividers in place to reduce visible distractions and dampen noise levels!

I worry more about Israel launching a nuclear war than Iran. The Israelis are such loud-mouthed warmongers it isn't even remotely funny. Sure, Nutter'n'Yahoo has to pander to the conservative voting base, but that means that there is a huge segment of the Israeli population that supports that warmongering.

Despite Israel's claims that Iran is threatening to wipe them off the map, those statements never seem to make the news in any of the websites I read -- not even the Iranian one.

I disagree completely. We need to audit the auditors of the auditors as well. Eventually we'll need to close the loop by having the original auditors audit a set of auditors so it's a self-perpetuating circle of audits. :P

*LOL* And this is the year of the Linux desktop, too, right?

There is a lot more holding up C# domination of the world than Java. Like itself.