Of course you can. It's called Congress.

This makes me wonder if there are exceptions.

Being mostly deaf, I use IP-relay a lot, and use an IM client to access it. Does the simple act of logging my IMs turn me into a criminal?

Agreed wholeheartedly. I've had clients in my face, screaming.... and have never reacted like Paul did. At most, I excused myself for a few moments to make sure I was composed.

When the error's on your end, suck it up and get ready for some unhappy people.

Which is why my wife and I worked this out LONG ago:

Pull the damn plug.

I recently spoke with another deaf tech, and yes, it's a problem. Rather annoying to find people with a quarter of your experience hired over you just because you can't hear on a phone.

Depends. Do you currently find yourself sculpting landscapes with mashed potatoes?

Agreed -- I left in 2008 because it was painfully clear that despite good performance reviews and two promotions, my raises over 7 years amounted to inflation, plus the two bumps at promotion (a total of 15%). IBM wants to pay everyone below upper management an average salary, no matter how much better than an average job they do. It's entrenched in their compensation model and no first-line manager can do anything about it for his/her best employees. Every time someone is paid above the average for their band it's a constant battle to get them even cost-of-living adjustments, since they're above average.

I had to google Theory X, but I don't see what it has to do with annual performance reviews, which have existed at all 5 places I've worked as a professional software engineer. What's wrong with an annual performance review?

In my experience one does not yet know what they are actually working on after 18 months or 24. In my experience it takes 3 years to have a sufficient depth on an area to be a solid contributor, and sometime between 5 and 7 years, if you're still working on the same thing, you're losing flexibility.

I've done several jobs over the years, and while no individual project is multi-year, even when working on a codebase as small as 400 KLOC it takes years to get to know enough of it sufficiently well to not introduce as many bugs as one fixes.

But maybe all these young kids don't work on anything as hard as 400+ KLOC systems.

So, in essence, {and pardon the food analogy} you're saying that most matter is like an 3-scoop ice cream cone - two vanilla, one chocolate, or two chocolate, one vanilla - and what they've found here is one scoop of double-mint truffle fudge, two scoops gold-leaf-covered Cherry Garcia? (ie, it's still an ice cream cone as expected, just with more exotic flavors.)

George Bush bought an iRaq, though.

<rimshot>

This. It was a hard enough transition for me leaving all the various little office habits I had from 7 years at IBM. I had to learn new source control system, new way to build and install the OS, etc, in addition to spending several years where I didn't know intimately the details of the code I worked on. After 7 years I was a subject matter expert on a decent sized chunk of the AIX kernel. After two years at the new place, I finally felt like I knew enough code to say something authoritative about it. That was hard and frustrating.

However, it's also left me feeling sure that the only way to avoid irrelevance is to regularly make myself uncomfortable, so that I don't get too attached to the comfort. At this point my personal feeling is that it takes 5-7 years for me to become saturated on what I'm working on and to need that new thing.

Having kids taught me the same lesson too. As Kahlil Gubran wrote, "Verily the lust for comfort murders the passion of the soul, and then walks grinning in the funeral."

I suspect it's harder to hire someone who's older simply because the pool is smaller. That is, almost everyone at 21, or 23, or 25, whenever they finish college or graduate school, will be interviewing for a job. A lot fewer people at 40 will have a reason to leave, especially if they've become Senior and somewhat indispensable at their company.

I left IBM three years ago to work for a company not far past startup days. At 33 (at the time) I was one of the oldest developers at the company. Now, though, as the company has grown (and been acquired), not only are there more older people at the company, plenty of people who were young when it was founded 10 years ago are in their mid 30s and now have spouses and children. Several senior people have now gotten married or had kids, so in that sense the whole company has aged up toward me in just the three years since I started (age is often as much a particular position in life w.r.t. how long one has been married or how old ones children are).

And very few of these people now in their late 20s or mid 30s are looking for a new job, because they have one they like. So the pool of available interviewees continues to be heavily biased toward college graduates.

Yes, I've noticed no one is writing operating systems or anything else in C anymore. I better learn the language du jour.

Except that my experience with multi-threaded systems programming is still useful. Even when everything is virtualized, there will be C code running on the bare metal that someone needs to create and maintain. New hardware products will need drivers written in C, or entire embedded systems written in C.

Sure, the next social media website won't be done that way, but for some of us writing that high a level of application wasn't that interesting.

And didn't I just read that Facebook had to highly optimize malloc(3) to support its operations? What's malloc written in? Oh yeah, C.

I saw a Star Trek classic VHS tape as a kid (when VCRs will still kinda new) and puzzled over the word "annihilate" for a while before deciding it must be pronounced "annie-hi-late".