Historically, so far, the easier you make it, the harder the problems become.

One of the most visible examples of this is in frontend web development. Now that we have jquery and a billion javascript librairies, we don't do the same simple web pages we used to in a fraction of the time (something that would have taken a month back then takes literally seconds today). Instead, we do crazy shit that were never meant to be done in a browser.

If we make that crazy shit easier, people will just go and do crazier shit.

Google's search can't remove a part of a page though. Either the whole page goes, or none of it goes.

Google already has search parameters to not look at older content though. Its in the search options, you can look for stuff of the last year, last month, last week, etc.

Its downright necessary if doing any search on JavaScript technologies, since they change every other week and anything older than a month is virtually irrelevant.

It does have ramifications though.

if I don't like a news article on a specific news website, can I just post a comment under the news article, then request my right to be forgotten to get that link taken down?

Careful though. FiOS is 100x worse than Comcast when it comes to throttling. On (most of) the east coast, if you have FiOS, you'll be happy to be able to stream Youtube at 360p with buffering (Google for a while had a page with their statistics on that, and FiOS streaming speed for youtube was a fraction of anyone else's, INCLUDING Comcast). And their peering agreements are pathetic, so if you're playing an MMORPG thats somewhat far, hello unplayable lag (and a VPN that changes the route or shape traffic will fix the issue instantly).

Don't get me wrong, I hate Comcast, I want them to die in a fire and suffer. But FiOS is worse. Much worse.

Too much of the US is under insanely long contracts or corrupted to the core. A lot of major cities can't get Fiber because of insane exclusivity contracts with Comcast or others.

The politics around it will stop all but a fraction of the country from evolving.

Major laws would have to be passed to invalidate all of that.

It works in a lot of other countries.

So the trick for them is to be sneaky. Do it only in areas without google fiber or other competition (thats still most of their market base). Then put the gap quite a bit above the average netflix watcher.

That 300gb is probably at least 100gb above that threshold. Marginalize publicly the crowd that uses torrents and stuff (youths and techies may see through that, but the average joe can still be convinced that piracy is "evil").

Then the people who bitch about the cap would get shut down pretty quick.

Evil as hell? Yes. Would it work? Absolutely. I mean, Comcast already has a soft cap in most areas after all.

It may sounds crazy, but it just seems like the lesser of 2 evils.

If the likes of Comcast had a vested interest in you using your connection as much as possible (imagine a world where there's no base monthly fee, at all...if you don't use it you pay $0, and then $0.001 per mb or something), yeah, there would be the occasional issue where someone would try to make you install software that sucks all your bandwidth and the kid who downloaded 50 movies without telling their parents...

But it still seems like those issues would be so much easier to handle and resolve than what we have to deal with. And then the big ISPs would have wet dreams about you watching Netflix 24/7 instead of nightmares.

And a standard exam before your specialize wouldn't be a big deal. I wonder how many of those doctors would be able to pass the same standardized exam 10-20 years AFTER they specialized.

And the top 30 hits and accepted answers that come up on stack overflow are all wrong. You need a fair bit of experience in the particular language to weed them out.

Generally, people who know "the right way" are too busy doing stuff to answer questions on stack overflow, leaving the peanut gallery to answer with the "I read somewhere once that this maybe will work" way.

I've hopped jobs a fair bit over the years, and every time I start at a new company, and look at their code, there's always a bunch of things that make me go ::Gasp! I've done it wrong for years!::. Because short of the occasional company that open source some really cool stuff to show you how they did it, the "real solutions that work" are never published or talked about unless you work with them.

Pretty much. Reading comments on this article really shows that much. You have the California/Mass/NY people going "I can punch my boss in the face in front of everyone and make 300k/year!", followed by the "I asked for minimum wadge by an illegal got the Senior Architect job instead of me!!!".

As you said, extremely region dependant. Though culturally, developers are generally more prone to accept relocating.

Thats not too bad. Even though I haven't written a linked list in 15 years, I probably can spit out the basics.

What sucks is when they ask you to write the full code for a balanced n-ary tree on a white board, then throw in the extra "how would you generate a unique hash from it for a performance intensive application?" to add insult to injury.

Yeah, I write those everyday! Let me get right to it! The irony is that the greener you are, the better you'll be able to answer that question... I did those on paper during finals a million times in college. But that was over a decade ago.

Google and any companies that hire a large amount of people from big name CS schools. Its what they're taught, its how they have been interviewed, its how they'll interview.

Where I work currently also has the same interview style. Please pump out an algorithm that takes this or that and optimize it in so and so manner, and make sure it fits on this tiny little white board. You have 12 minutes.

Oh, and make sure to remember whats the specific backing algorithm for this particular data structure of the std. No I don't care that its log n, what is the SPECIFIC algorithm?

(nevermind the interviewer didn't know until they double checked their internal wiki 5 minutes before asking you).

Fun times. Even worse now that I'm the one forced to ask these questions to other people.

Your initial post I replied to started with "At a minimum, most programmers today need to be competent with SQL".

But what do most programmers do? Write little e-commerce websites that duplicate functionalities already available in open source CMS packages and a few in-house plugins you could write in a week? No.

Of course there's all the app developers for mobile that consume existing APIs. There's all the scientists who write all the algorithms necessary to do anything that hasn't been done a million time already. Embedded system devs. UX devs (the javascript ecosystem is quickly becoming deep enough that you need specialists to do meaningful stuff in that field). All those Hadoop shops you see everywhere (quite a few are pretty successful). All the desktop application developers. All the game developers (most new MMOs are not backed by transactional databases except for the part that handles $$$).

And so on and so forth. Its not to say database development is dead, or that its not useful. But you only need it for a very specific type of jobs. If you don't want to do databases, there's thousands of high paying, rewarding jobs that don't need any of it.

Transcriptional web apps are just a small fraction of what a programmer can do these days. Sure, in 2004 it was probably the majority. Today? Nowhere close. And if you want to work for a big name tech company, then you REALLY don't except for specific departments. You don't really think the guy who codes Amazon's website's UI is the same guy that writes the stored procedures, do you?

Only in small companies do everyone need to know everything, and again, only if that company even does everything.

You only need a transactional database for transactional system. Sure, your shopping cart needs ACID transactions. Bit if your website is letting people upload LolCats all day? Not so much. NoSQL in 2014 is the general case, not the specific one.

And lol. The vast majority of developers at Google don't do SQL, most don't know SQL (its not taught in big name schools in any mandatory class and they don't use it most of the time, why would they?), and its usually not part of the interview.

I work for a multi billion dollar e-commerce site. I've been a DBA, I worked on transactional portion of websites for a decade, but for my current role, I never have to touch the database. There's 40 million lines of code on top of anything data access related...hundreds of people are working on that part, and only a handful are working on the section that actually touch the various databases (we have probably 50, totally a few petabytes of data...and its only a few teams that ever have to deal with them. I'm not one of them).

Any meaningfully large project will require specialization, and the database is just a tiny portion of it. And that's if there's even a database.