Historically take a sample set of people considered to be at-risk for HIV, give them safer-sex counseling, and then track them against a control for infection rates. This study was different (hate to say RTFA, but it does describe it):

So, in the article he does suggest some process is probably good. That's good. But then he suggests that "better" coders might need less. In practice, that is probably true, but his implication goes farther than "let's hold the hand of the junior guy a bit more."

So... how to architects, civil engineers, electrical engineers, graphic designers, technical writers, project managers, and, I dunno... just about every white (and blue, for that matter) collar employee stay "passionate" in the face of some level of process and bureaucracy? How would you like to go on a bridge (or a plane, as others have mentioned) built by folks who are so smart they don't need any process to validate their genius?

This sounds more like "I'm so good I don't need to do these dumb things that slow me down" and less "perhaps we should keep the process just at the point it is beneficial".

I just spent two years with a team of 6 refactoring a critical legacy application built and maintained by people who were "smarter" and "better" than code reviews, TDD, planning, documenting, or hell, breaking that 8K header file into header/class and maybe even into a couple of objects. And truth be told: they were ALL really, really smart.... and really, really willing to cut corners just to "get something done", resulting in an unmaintainable mess that cost us somewhere in the neighborhood of 1.8MM to clean up.

To all you guys who are WAAAAAY too smart to have processes: that's awesome. Please just go work somewhere else, preferably someplace I'll never work.

You utterly, totally hit it out of the park. It's good to plan for contingencies, but you can be paralyzed by what-ifs. Rarely does one course of action ever define itself as singularly best with no risks or downsides.

Funny - I will have to add the Martian lizard baby bit to my list of what-ifs that I use to talk to customers who start worrying about edge conditions. I work in traffic, and when they start going down the lines of "...and then, if a semi jack-knifes while a motorcycle with a side car is going through the zone, and swerves into the should to avoid it, and ..." I usually pull out the "...and a flying saucer swoops down low enough to go through the laser scanners but doesn't touch the sensors embedded in the road..."

You are so correct. Where are my mod points? Their articles are actually really, really good. They're varied, too - not always the same thing. Most actually had some depth to them (unlike most mens' magazines, like Details or Maxim, that give you a paragraph and two pages of pictures). Obviously, Playboy had dual-appeal - which is part of what made it sophisticated. The whole joke - "I read it for the articles" - came about BECAUSE of the quality of articles. That joke didn't start around Penthouse or Hustler for a reason.

Extremely true. As a once almost-rich-and-famous musician, I can attest that's all *really* true... It's also why I'm writing software and posting to /. It was fun, but boy you really get screwed even if you do well.

Agree. The whole "OMG you're telling CRIMINALS you're not home" is BS, and also sounds remarkably like the same argument used when answering machines came out... and when people put announcements of weddings and funerals in newspapers... and ... Oh wait, someone wrote a better article about it than I can: http://waxy.org/2010/02/regarding_foursquare_and_please_rob_me/

Too late, it's all over everything. I spent a fair amount of time in recording studios, and used Auto-Tune from it's first release onward. It has a very distinctive sound, even when used subtly. Trust me when I say the overwhelming majority of recordings made nowadays use it to one extent or another - enough that you can hear it. And I'm not talking about just the obvious cases. At least in modern music, it is more pervasive than the "rock guitar" sound.

All really good advice.

It is easy to be angry at near-nameless, near-faceless entities who understand the mumbo-jumbo of computers and electronics... who do "things" that make "other things" not work, or who seem to take 1 second to actually fix a problem that has been going on for a week. Whether all that is *true* or not is immaterial. Perception is reality.

When your co-workers see you as a part of the company, the team, and a friendly person, their attitude will change. It's just harder to assume the worst about someone you're friendly with and know, unless they prove useless. Since you're self-described as doing a good job, this shouldn't be the case.

Much to my co-workers' dismay, I have a Model M. To be specific, I have *3* of them (one at work, one at home, one spare). My home one is a rare black one.

I love the clicky, tactile feel. I, too, learned to type on an electric-but-old (IBM Selectric) typewriter, which may have something to do with it.

The downside is that my co-workers can definitely tell when I'm *not* working...

Hear hear! Right on. You just forgot to mention that the sky is falling, and the world will end Tuesday.