It may be U.S. only (I hope so!) Others can talk all they want about "well-rounded" but the economic reality is that English, History, etc., courses do not produce graduates who earn more money. And so the only way those departments survive, since they can't on their own merits, is by forcing all students, some of whom *will* increase their earning potential, to take them.

It's pure economics -- there's a bunch of economically useless professors, who have plenty of time to petition the President of the school or the state legislature about why their brand of "well-rounded" is so useful, and thereby gain a fraction of a lot of student's tuition, instead of the very small piece they'd otherwise have.

Now ask yourself this: is college the only time in my life I am able to read classical literature or study art history or any of these other things that somehow make one well-rounded? Of course not. So the idea that one needs to study this in college is ludicrous, except to those departments that don't produce economic value trying to justify their existence.

Ah, I found the relevant wikipedia article. I remember now that we never shipped a 6.0 (another marketing ploy since no one runs the .0 version) and jumped straight to 6.1. It seems that with the new clustering and such technology they jumped again to 7.1 instead of 6.2. The version numbering makes no sense! But that didn't change in the 7 years I worked there.

Wait, AIX is up to version 7.1 already? When I started in '01 I think they'd just shipped 5.0 or 5.1. When I left in '08 we were just shipping 6.0 (renumbered from the planned 5.4). What happened to 6.2, 6.3, etc? IBM was usually so conservative in bumping up the version numbers.

Dammit, I've been using facebook too long. The first thing I looked for after reading your comment was the "like" button. I've gotten used to seeing what comments people think are funny with that kind of upvoting.

It's a lot now.

• MacBook Air in the morning to check email and webcomics
• Linux desktop at work
• I work on a product built on FreeBSD
• Windows 7 gaming rig in the evening for Netflix

This isn't counting the iPad or iPhone since Apple has a single CoreOS team that is at the root of all their products. This also doesn't count Windows XP; I have a VM I boot a few times a month for handling corporate BS that won't work on my Linux desktop. It also doesn't count the embedded OS that is inside my car stereo, the Wii, etc.

U.S. Steel companies had their most profitable quarters in decades just before going under. Read The Innovator's Dilemma.

Not sure how much it costs sine $WORK bought it for me, but all over these threads I see 1920 x whatever and it all sounds very small. I've been working for three years using a 2560x1600 and that's quite nice. I can get 4+ xterms wide at the top to monitor my cluster, and three emacs windows below that with space for a terminal window on either side for grepping through code and other tasks.

The company I work for has lots of openings, and we recently hired a guy with a PhD in Nuclear Physics but no CS background to be one of our testers. The qualifications for the job involve some Python knowledge, and the ability to think.

Actually, we'd probably hire someone in Dev without a degree in CS as long as they again met the basic qualifications of knowing something about the relevant programming language (for us, C, C++, and Python), knew CS fundamentals (data structures, analysis of algorithms, etc), and had the ability to think.

I'm on Verizon, and the unlimited data probably doesn't help me. I'm not a big mobile user. Oddly, the minutes for our two iPhones are shared with my wife, but they didn't share the texts per month, so I have some and she doesn't.

In the software world, older has benefits too (from my perspective as a dev who's worked with both old and new devs). After 10 years in the industry I can foresee dozens of problems that newly minted college grads can't. Foresight means early prevention. My former colleagues at IBM with 25 years in the industry saw even further than I.

Send me your resume, or just go to the careers part of our site. EMC/Isilon is hiring; we have an office in Campbell though the main one is in Seattle. I'm 36, but there are people older than me doing dev work.

Now if by "no one wants older guys" you mean "won't pay what I demand", well, that is a part of economics. I'm paid significantly more than a starting employee. Maybe not quite as much as I could get elsewhere, but it seems comparable with industry pay for my level.

Hmm, so a baby at 36 weeks but still in the womb isn't alive? Even though, were the child to be outside the womb, it would survive on its own without any medical intervention?

See, it's not an easy question. With neonatal incubators babies as young as 23 weeks have survived.

I seem to remember a young man named Osama bin Laden committed terrorist acts in Afghanistan to get the Soviet Union out of it. So the Soviet Union did suffer terrorism.

Well, I can't speak t your experience, but at the formerly-small company I work for (we were acquired a year ago and have grown headcount by at least 50% in the last year, and have budget for 60% more growth on the team I'm on) not only is it not a race to the bottom, but there's lots of jobs.

It's true that when I started, at 33, I was one of the older devs. As the company grows, we're hiring more college kids than older people, still. That has nothing to do with anything but the people who are applying -- I haven't seen a lot of resumes from older workers. But we don't look at age at all, we look at talent. Definitely there's been some age 50+ hired for our east-coast branch.

The "pointy-hairs" in the company I work for are former engineers, who in some cases realized they're not great at writing software and moved into management. The first line managers are expected to be technical contributors. The company founder / CEO was an engineer.

And to the point of outsourcing: it's a temporary thing. The problem is quality -- if you are a foreigner who can write software as well as anyone else, you will not continue accepting less money for the same work for long. The only people who cost less are the ones who don't do as good of a job.

I've also been writing software professionally for a little over 10 years. I've worked on multiple projects with IBM, and now I work for a small division of EMC (the start-up was acquired). In my experience there's lots to do and learn still. The world of systems programming is never-ending -- there's more restrictions on how and what you can do, and that increases the challenge. Coding in user-space has some challenges, but when a language will do a lot of things for you; when you can rely on the OS to clean up after your mistakes, memory leaks, leaked file descriptors, etc., it's just a little boring to me. No one needs a perfectionist writing their user-space code.