That's hysterical. So why haven't we invaded any other country where they are committing genocide? There are plenty of them.

Because iraq was an oil country.

If we had 10% solar in the mix and oil collapsed to 25 dollars a barrel because the marginally most expensive oil sets the price, the strategic value of oil countries would drop significantly.

It's already happening. Alternative energy (and solar specifically) only needs to destroy demand for 1 to 2 % of oil and gas to drop the price by 50%.

http://energyinformative.org/l...

80% output after 25 years.

Decline is essentially linear at 10% per decade. So 70% output after 35 years.

I.e. put on 25% more panels and you are fine. Or use more efficient devices that use 30% less electricity in 35 years and you are fine.

Well we spent 2 trillion dollars (and 4000 lives) to subsidize oil from 2000-2008 alone.

If we gave 2 trillion dollars to the solar industry, we'd have flying cars.

Military costs to protect oil field are ongoing and extremely expensive.

As an old timer- I don't view it as whining. It is MUCH harder for 20 to early 30 year old people today than it was for me when I was that age. There was no offshoring, outsourcing, etc. There were layoffs but only when the economy was really bad. Now things can be going fine, your company is making a profit- and you STILL get laid off and forced to train your replacement (which is humiliating) and you get the joy of knowing it is illegal since h1b's are only supposed to be used when local resources are unavailable.

Not so much for California Utilities, Disney, etc. who lay off workers and replace them with offshore and onshore h1b resources. Companies no longer have loyalty and in many cases the severance is pitiful.

Another factor is skill sets. I learned a skillset in IT and it was good for 20 years. The one after that was good for 15 years. The one after that was good for 5 years. I think you can see the trend. Constant training at high expense on your own time. No personal life.

Back when I started, IT were the fucking priest kings. We made good money, worked long 55 hour weeks, and had high status. Today, IT has low status, makes good money, works crazy long 60-70+ hour weeks. At my last place we had multiple divorces and heart attacks. There were 30 year olds walking around with black eyes (DEEP black- not just a little dark under the eyes) from lack of sleep.

It is much much worse for young IT folks today. It's worse for all of them in general. It's taking them much longer to get their careers established and even when they established they are never safe. It's much riskier to buy a house or a new car. Things my generation took for granted are gone.

And then on top of that, the safety net we had, the inexpensive college we had, etc. etc. is all gone. Heck- tho I didn't avail myself of it- when I was in school until very near the end, any debt I took on could have been erased by bankruptcy.

Nope. It's very rich and dark.

Keep in mind, 1 kcup will make 10oz in the machine as it is. And from how well this works, I suspect there is more coffee than needed to make 10oz.

They also don't consider that development programmers and maintenance programmers have very different value sets.

Developers pile stuff together and move on to something else. It's not necessarily well structured, documented, or maintainable.

Maintenance programmers love to refactor, document, and polish code so that over time, it becomes much easier to maintain.

Unfortunately, current tax laws heavily incent companies to toss out existing code and write new code (it's tax deductible as a capital expense while maintenance programming is not tax deductible.).

I've found that one K-Cup produces a third of a pot of coffee.

I especially like 2 scoops of Kroger plus 1 K-Cup (Southern Pecan or Breakfast Blend). There is less coffee in the k-cup but it is ground much finer.

I don't own a keurig brewing machine. But I work at a place that does. Sometimes, I'll brew a cup fpr the road and some times I'll just take a k-cup instead of brewing a cup.

It's interesting that Infosys doesn't care about the year you graduated from college but they require your high school graduation date on the resume to consider it.

Blatantly illegal-- I hope they get burned hard on it.

Police studies (linked above) show...
Officers who are not properly trained are more likely to shoot blacks and to do so with less hesitation.
Officers who are properly trained, take longer to decide not to shoot blacks.

Studies show officers judge black children to be much older than white children of the same age. And more willing to shoot a threatening "20 year old" who is actually a 12 year old with a toy gun than a white 12 year old.

Come on dude, even the police recognize they have a racism problem.
http://www.policechiefmagazine...

The law is enforced unequally on whites and non whites.

For example, When a mixed race group of girls were picked up by police...

"officers took the white teen to the lobby to call her parents but brought three of the black teens to the back of the station, where they were locked up and searched. When one of the girls asked why they were being brought in the back doors, one of the officers replied, "trash in and trash out," according to court records."

http://www.usatoday.com/story/...

Don't let the "ferguson" fool you- this happened in yet another town, not ferguson.

Corporations are also immune to imprisonment and execution for crimes they commit. No individual has that right.

As an older programmer who used older languages and then java and who is familiar with java's benefits and drawbacks, I've been very impressed with java's success at "write once, run anywhere." Perfect? No. Much better than even only 15 years ago? Absolutely.

I could recommend using java to code a large block of core business functionality. There are many other languages which I would not do so. Other languages have too few developer, are too unstable, and are even unlikely to exist at all ten years down the road. Meaning you'd have to rewrite a huge chunk of core business logic again- at high expense- and with all the challenges of new development.

They are fine for smaller programs (say under 10,000 lines of course and configuration) where they can easily be recreated with current technology if they are deprecated. Good example- a company replaced the java web order entry system with Adobe Air at a cost of over 30 million dollars. Before they even completely retired the older java version- Adobe Air was discontinued. So they were going to have to spend another 30 million dollars writing it again in HTML5.

And they ended up using the old stable java backend behind the HTML5 Gui. Because unlike it's replacement- it worked and didn't piss off customers. One big reason was that the "air" version was literally sending 200+ megabytes per screen update. Even tho we told them up front that many customers (12-20%) were still on dialup modems out in the boonies. They said the customers would comply... You can guess how that turned out.

And yup-- this was also a case of 40-50 year old developers who knew the business recognizing that the "new tech" solution by the 20 and young 30 year olds wasn't going to solve the problem and being ignored.

No, I can't. I started out and I sucked. I got better eventually through experience. In order for it to be truly bimodal, people have to start in either camp A or camp B and end in the same camp they started in. Because if you transition from one to another over time, any point in time will capture a group of people in between the modes. Now, you can argue that people don't spend much time in between those modes but you haven't presented any evidence for that. What's more likely is you have geocities coders on one tail and John Carmack/Linus Torvolds on the other tail. And in between are people like the presenter and I. And since I'm not instantaneously going from bad to good, the reality of the situation is most likely some degree of a normal curve filled with people trying to get better at programming or even just getting better though spending lots of time doing it and learning a little along the way.

For all your attacks on the presenter, your argument of a bi-modal distribution sounds more flawed to me. I would love to see your study and hear your argument.

To be fair, you can spend a great deal of time talking about something and make progress on the issue without solving it.

For example the current metrics are abysmal so it's worth explaining why they're abysmal. I just was able to delete several thousand lines of JavaScript from one of my projects after a data model change (through code reuse and generalization) -- yet I increased functionality. My manager was confused and thought it was a bad thing to get rid of code like that ... it was absolute dopamine bliss to me while he felt like our production was being put in reverse. KLOC is a terrible metric. But yet we still need to waste a lot of breath explaining why it's a terrible metric.

Another reason to waste a lot of time talking about a problem without reaching an answer is to elaborate on what the known unknowns are and speculate about the unknown unknowns. Indeed, the point of this article seemed to be to advertise the existence of unknown unknowns to "recruiters, venture capitalists, and others who are actually determining who gets brought into the community."

Perhaps ... but that would imply that one does not transition over time from one hump to the next or if they do, it's like flipping a light switch. When I read this I assumed that he was talking only about people who know how to program and not "the average person mixed in with programmers."

But you just said there's no way to measure this ... how could he have collected data? What data set could have satiated us? The answer is quite obvious and such collection would have been a larger fool's errand than the original article's content.