You know, you shouldn't lead like that. It took all my willpower not to be awful and make an "Ow! My Ballz!" reference.

In the 3 years I've worked here, we've lost 2 employees this way.

Well, if you haven't noticed yet, your employer's doing something wrong. You need to give developers a bit more freedom if you want decent bits.

If this hadn't been done ten years before he talked about, it's been done by now. They have everything they want. Live accordingly.

Do what I do... forget it. I'll often just let it ring, too. But that's because I'm the one in charge of my phone, not the other way around.

as for linkedin, yeah, that's a pile of junk too. It's just social climbing and I'm not one of those.

Uh, no. It's marketing and you do need that. At least if you're not an unambitious layabout.

Hullo, I HAVE a smart phone and you can call or text me... Is that too much of an effort for our relationship?

Why do you burden the relationship by your anti-"social" nature? When does convenience of having a given technology give a person a right to ignore you if you choose to ignore it? It's like someone having a phone, calling all their other friends, and because you don't have a phone, they have to write a physical mail to you. It's just inconvenient. Understand that you stay abreast of technology (communication included) or you eventually fall out of life. It's not personal, it's just inconvenient.

WHich site? Dice.com or Slashdot.com? Is there a difference any more?

Wow, LeVar Burton! What's the next book on today's Reading Rainbow?

Or you could take biology and ask "Which one would your son prefer," as well. Oddly Freudian but telling examples, those...

Fundamentalism/conservatism is usually based on someone needing simple moralistic models upon which to base his or her life. Even in engineering there are places where people who never question beyond simple models of the world can still thrive. I've seen several conservative co-workers and even those here on Slashdot who value a simplistic economic model that discards costs of externalities. In fact, they value it so much they'll decry climate science models for having "too many parameters" that "need to be tweaked" and discounting the findings of that model, even though it is the best that modern science has and we gather more evidence each day that this model mirrors reality. I've also seen plenty of personal evidence that scientists and engineers can be narrowly rationalistic, as well, allowing plenty of room for religion. In fact, because engineering models are usually simplifications of the real world, people who like simple models are often drawn to it.

But yet their product sells and yours doesn't. Oh the irony. Or is it some other odd literary technique. I forget. In either case, carry on... I enjoy a good nerd fight.

Taxes are all about values - otherwise a simple VAT works (including VAT on financial transactions - not only because liquidity has value, but multiple trades also introduce overhead - and income transfers, because otherwise you're making valuations on types of exchanges). Since I'm sure Libertarians would hate this solution (because it would mean beaucoup taxes from financial institutions, less from almost everyone else), this example shows that trying to divorce the algorithm from values leads to stupid no matter how you slice it.

The notion of taxes in itself is a value statement that says "We will make everyone who can afford it help to fund a government that, we believe, helps to preserve our society." Or, in slogan: Taxes are the price we pay for a civilized society.

Since when did Libertarians worry about problems of the poor? Well, other than where they align with the problems of the wealthy (albeit to a ridiculously lesser degree), of course...

I wish I had mod points.

A better way to look at it is that big organizations become have worse IT because they contract work out, compounding their own unique badness with whatever unique badness the contractor has. The solution is as you say - have enough budget for in-house staff (contractors will almost always cost more) and develop your own systems. And, yes, I know this can lead to large projects taking a LOOOOOONNNNGGGGG time. The alternative is to have a contractor take a LOOOONNNGGGG time and be of shitty quality to boot.

I couldn't find a valid user name. I tried every permutation with/without punctuation, numbers, upper-/lowercase, etc. each with at least 12 characters. Nothing took.

I even looked through the Javascript looking for clues. I found a validation in one of the javascript file (the first one mentioned on the page) and then augmented/overridden in another (last one on the page). But beyond that, I did not care to waste time.

You're right - basic programming incompetence.