Not to defend inept management... but there ARE scenarios that necessitate late nights (or early mornings -- I've gotten several 3AM wakeup calls!) without having a schedule slide or a developer not pulling his weight.

The most common example at my work is a sudden critical-situation customer issue. Hardware fails or your product crashes (or is misconfigured, or a user error causes something vital to get deleted, or... there are a million ways things can go bad quickly). The customer is losing money every minute the system is down. In critsit cases like this, we stay until they're fixed - whether that takes 20 minutes or 20 hours. In cases like that, there's NOTHING the manager did wrong. There may be nothing ANY of us (including the customer) did wrong - but that doesn't matter to the customer. He's losing money & desperate to get it fixed. Therefore, it doesn't matter to us either. We're desperate to get it fixed to and do everything possible to make that happen.

It still may make sense for a manager to stay, especially in cases like this where it's vital that we get the proper expertise on the job in the quickest time possible. Sometimes the proper person is in a totally different department - we as developers may not even know who the right person is! In those cases, the manager can very quickly contact that department's manager and determine who the expert is.

I would go further than that. It's not a case of "smart people avoid it" so much as "the people who run for office (especially at the national level) are running due to a desire for power -- and most likely will do anything to get it." Running for national-level office is HARD and PAINFUL. Skeletons are exposed, people lie about each other in order to win, any slight misstep or poorly-pronounced word will be magnified and repeated over and over. NOBODY goes through that without some underlying motivating factor: the power you get if you win the position. Power corrupts (and absolute power corrupts absolutely).

Anybody who wants to go through that kind pain is so power-hungry that they should be the LAST person to actually hold that office.

Why do I keep thinking of the "hoverchairs" from Wall-E ... and the resulting balloons of blubber everybody turned into whenever I see articles like this???

Let's compare the ISS to a car, for a moment.

Think about your 20 year old vehicle and the shape it's in. It's got, what? 150,000 miles on it? It's starting to rust out, the trunk leaks when it rains, the radio only works out of 2 speakers, the air conditioner works great in the winter time, the right-front door won't lock and the left-rear window won't roll down any more. Not to mention the big ole dent in the front fender where you misjudged a turn coming out of that parking ramp...

Now, compare it to the ISS. by 2016 it'll be 18 years old, and have traveled approximately 2.7 BILLION MILES! What would your old beater look like after 2,700,000,000 miles?????

Yeah, but Australia got their criminals and the US got their religious nuts. Australia got the better deal!

Our naming convention allows 3 chars for personalization. I went with doctor seuss names:

My development servers are GRN, EGS, HAM, SAM (I wanted IAM too but ran out of systems)
My product support servers are FOX, SOX, CLX, BLX

It makes it easy to remember which systems are mine, but it gets confusing when they're clustered together. "Now, was I working on CLX or BLX?")