"If you don't laugh, you didn't get it, but if you ONLY laugh, you didn't get it." [Book of the SubGenius]

Not a bad résumé tactic though, however you look at it. If I had an interviewee who ported a game for kicks in 36 hours, I'd certainly file that in the "pros" column..

Yes and no. Bear in mind there's a difference between "dirty" code with bad indentation or inconsistent bracket styles, versus "dirty" code which doesn't follow best practices in actual code design. The former can be tolerated (albeit reluctantly), while the latter poses a real threat.

Often dirty code won't clearly demonstrate the problems it causes -- in which case noting the dirty code and moving on may save an hour up front, but can easily cost half a day once you stumble onto one of its side-effects and follow the breadcrumbs back to the source. Or after the dirty code is copied / inherited / extended into more locations, and fixing the same code now includes exponentially more use-case scenarios.

It's easy to paint the good devs as being "too" anal-retentive, "too" focused on clean code... yet this obsession leads to far more maintainable code, and to "version 2.0" releases going orders of magnitude more smoothly. Not to mention avoiding the loss of time every time the production code tips over, or the customer rants about bugs in the market and devs are forced to investigate, causing unscheduled time impact. But even when fixing dirty code takes days, and fixing comparable clean code takes minutes or hours, the payoff is often dismissed because the time was saved after the initial release date, and the client's money is no longer on the line.

In the best of worlds, the good devs are able to fix the code behind the scenes as much as possible, knowing that one evening of working in front of the TV tonight, can guard against multiple stressful days of cleaning up a mess later, losing time on their own schedule in the process. For better or for worse, "good developers" are considered "good" for a reason.

"Never gonna give you up, never gonna let you down, never gonna run around and desert you..."

I'm admittedly a Johnny-come-lately Linux user, a mid-ish 20's (three cubed!) developer who switched to Linux (openSuSE) last spring. Loved it. Then a month ago, I (re)stumbled upon Slackware, which the online distro choosers (I know, I know) said was a match for me -- great performance mixed with not-quite-crazy learning curve, and even the learning curve would give me oh-so-adaptable "purity of Unix" skills. While downloading this new toy, I met Bob, who truly changed my life -- I became a fledgling member of the Church of the SubGenius. Later, while installing, upon seeing that one of the options was "Newbie: Use verbose prompting (the X series takes one year)"... that, my friends, is when I knew I was truly home.

But Facebook -is- a product, specifically one for easily sharing personal info. And when it comes to personal data and privacy, "out there on the internet" includes telling Facebook's databases and giving suggestions regarding which of your friends to share with. That's hardly a legal contract of confidentiality, and treating it as such is disingenious. We've rubbed our own bottles and let our own genies out, and are now complaining when the genies chat amongst themselves without our approval.