Another thing that employers sometimes like to pull with salaried employees is not paying a full week's salary when there's a day or two when the office is closed during the week (holidays, etc.). If work was available at all during the week and you were willing and able to work, regardless of the number of days the office was closed, you're supposed to get your full week's pay unless it was the first or last week of your employment. If an employer has a policy that formally disregards that rule, or doesn't have a policy but regularly violates the rule, they risk losing the exempt status for their employees at that location.

Date libraries, as it turns out, are rather monstrously difficult to make.

They're not too bad if you have only the U.S. to deal with, but throw awareness of time zones worldwide into the code and it becomes a mess quickly because of all of the 30 minute, 45 minute, etc. changes. I had to write a separate date library for an airline reservations system many years ago simply because the stock C++ libraries wouldn't deal properly with Australian time zones. Maybe that's changed since then.

Plus, you can admire your new interactive button anytime you like - you're not on the art gallery's schedule.

Additionally, everywhere that I've worked has been fine about changing the agreement to state that only stuff I work on during work hours belongs to them. Anything I do on my own time is my own. If they want you bad enough, they'll change the agreement. If they're not willing to do that, are you sure it's a place you really want to work?

But if you're north of 35, look at your local state agencies, no one would blink an eye at a 40-something applying for a job.

I've actually looked into public service work a few times, but one thing that I see quite commonly (in my state, anyway) is that skills are extremely undervalued in terms of salary. It's tough to justify going from a position making $90-100K to a comparable one making only $65K, although there are often benefits like pensions that can offset that somewhat.

Another example is that really through no fault of my own I had to swap employers several times in a relatively short amount of time, I know I could explain it well in an interview but it raises flags if you're just glancing through my CV. So now I'm planning to stay with my current employer to build credibility that I can commit and won't just head for greener pastures in less than a year.

Same situation here. Where I am now, I'm one of the youngest devs at 47, and the majority of the rest of the dev team have been there in excess of 20 years. The environment is a little stagnant technically (although they're making a good-faith effort to bring things into a more modern setting) and the job is kind of a "it's time to make the donuts" kind of gig for me, but my boss and all of my co-workers are really easy to get along with and geeky enough to want to learn new things. They're also very forthcoming about the vast amount of institutional knowledge they all have, and everyone is happy to answer questions about anything at all. I have a much better degree of job security now, and I continue to keep abreast of new developments in the industry and do plenty of work with more timely and relevant tech on my own time so as not to get stale myself.

The key thing is just to never stop learning, even if it's outside the scope of your current employment. There are far too many people in the development field that don't take an active interest in what they do for a living. For me, learning new things is mostly its own reward, but having competency with a wide breadth of relevant skills sure helps a lot when you're looking for a new job.

I know the lawyers have a legal term for this kind of bad faith, but I've no idea what it is right now.

I think you're probably thinking of barratry, although strictly speaking what Rightscorp is doing seems more along the lines of simple extortion.

Most if not all carbides will readily scratch sapphire, although in fairness you're not going to encounter many of them unless you work in a machine shop.

Actually, on the basis of the production of an unwinnable war, we could go back to 1971 when Nixon declared the "war on drugs". This has been the justification of any number of bad policy (seizure laws and practices in particular), although generally more in the context of law enforcement than the military itself.

But your problem is you disagree with the voting community not that they aren't accountable to it.

It's not a difference of opinion with the voting community. It's that that prosecutors and law enforcement officers are generally not elected positions, and thus any "accountability" to the public is arm's length at best. The district attorney himself may be elected, but his staff certainly is not. As I said before, what we have now is what you're already suggesting, and it *doesn't work*. Cops can cost their departments hundreds of thousands of dollars in civil judgments, and they continue working as they did before even in the presence of overwhelming public support to have them removed. Prosecutors run roughshod over the rights of people, and it takes a huge media interest and the efforts of wealthy people to get merely the most egregious examples dealt with. The Duke lacrosse case showed that quite clearly. You get exactly as much justice as you can afford, and no more in these situations. Often the public is not even aware of what's going on, so is it okay for individuals to be financially ruined or carry around an undeserved criminal record just because the voters didn't make a big stink about it?

That's not good enough. That's the way the system works now, and what we have now provably doesn't do enough to curb the abuses often seen in either group. Both groups need to be personally accountable for their actions, beyond the lip service to accountability that they already have, but for all practical purposes doesn't exist.

It all stems from the fact that the government never actually is held responsible for its mistakes.

I would argue that it's not the government itself, but the guilty people within the government that should be held accountable. If a cop beats someone up, the department/city gets sued and pays, not the cop himself. Nothing's going to change until those individuals that are willing to go outside the law have some real skin in the game.

IMNSHO, that's about when everything took a major wrong turn, with the neo-cons coming to the forefront.

I think you can pin it down even more accurately to on or about September 12, 2001, when the American public collectively lost their critical thinking skills and bought into practically everything the government told them.

An easy fix to that is to discard plea deals from the evaluation. How many *court cases* you've won, not how many pleas have you forced. It still doesn't fix all of the problems inherent in the current system, though.

For a justice system to function guilty people need to have reason to confess their guilt and engage in a process of reconciliation with the community.

This would need to apply to law enforcement and the prosecution as well. Not going to happen here.