How sad that people have to ask such questions. What is worth? Worth with respect to what? For what?

Are such measuring worth in terms of potential monetary ROI? Or do they ever consider the significant value of learning for the sake of learning, stimulation of the mind, exercises which "laterally" help in being mentally agile and adaptable?

I lean to the later value of worth. And it is true that for a busy professional, sometimes time is not available, but to have to ask such a question, that is sad.

Been doing this shit for 20 years, 10 (very) different companies, using different languages and technologies, for app and system level development, working shoulder to shoulder with a very diverse bunch of people. I've never heard of this myth till today.

If I were to be forced to pull guestimations out of my rear, my impression has always been the following:

1. that programming talent distribution with the X axis representing some quantifiable function of both talent and experience (two different things) closely resembles a normal distribution with near zero kurtosis and a slight, but measurable skeweness to the left. The skewness to the left results because, in my experience, lots of people leave the field or stop being active in development before getting to the next level of experience, engineering and craftsmanship. They leave because they suck or don't like what they do, or because they do a perceived beneficial lateral move into management or sales/sales engineering. Less and less people remain in the field honing their skills and making the transition into technical lead/more senior positions responsible for more complex problems.

2. The probability of introduce massive numbers of WTFs per code change sets (or introduce a single massive WTF in a single code change set) as a function of talent and experience resembles an exponential distribution. No matter how experienced you are, you can still fuck it up badly, but the probability of doing so is inversely proportional to your talent (or at least, it should be inversely proportional to your advertised talent.)

That is not self-correction. It is paying the price. Self-correction in a market, with respect to erroneous decisions, is when the rate of occurrence of that type of errors either diminish over time or the rate remains constant with the negative impact diminishing over time. Neither is the case.

Efficient with respect to what?

Self-correcting with respect to what? By replacing one badly performed CEO with another? Or by one company correcting itself while two, three more go down the same bad path despite the obvious, in-your-face, cautionary example?

When the phenomenon keeps occurring to the detriment of the entire national economy, that is not self-correcting.

Facts are never important when we look for reasons to hate ;)

In your view?

I don't defend non-compete agreements, but you are seriously mistaken if you think employees can leave (and worse, go after your clientele) because they do not get treated better. I've seen employees leaving with confidential information, and client information (in industries where that is/was illegal) despite getting a very good treatment, benefits, salaries and a decent work culture. These people not only damaged (or try to damage) the company, but by transitivity, they did so against their fellow (ex) co-workers who did nothing against them.

Oooooohhhhhhhhh evil companies bluhr durr durr.

Either it never occurred to you that this is possible, or your have never seen it, or you simply decide to ignore it. Either way, it doesn't help the position you are trying to present.

Avarice, malice and treachery runs on both sides of the fence. It is human nature, and to pretend employees do not act on it is simply stupid.

That people on /. mod you up without even considering the real examples in history of employees damaging companies that treated them well, that is not surprising.

I've never signed (nor being asked to sign) a non-compete in the 20+ years I've been working in the East coast (Florida, specifically). And even if you were asked to sign one, they are rarely enforceable. The one case I know well was completely obliterated in a county court because it would have forced the defendant to take unreasonable daily commute drives to work - meaning 20 miles one way.

And this is the crux of the matter, the focus of scoring big in quarterly reports. This is not hand-waving, purely ideological complaints. When MBA professors mentions *this* as the biggest problem in American corporate culture (can your sense of irony for a second), then this is not idle shit talking.

Business executives are graded per their deliveries at the next immediate quarter, not in their capacity to create long-term value. That is what a shareholder's economy is all about. And Fiorina is a great example of it.

As we get older, That we should accrue several skills that are hard to commoditize (sp?), such as:

1. veritable expertise in a domain (several domains preferably to act as fall-back plan A, plan B, plan C, etc.),
2. a reliable professional network,
3. a portfolio of work (something, anything),
4. increased business acumen,
5. leadership skills,
6. cross-domain troubleshooting abilities (software/hardware/network troubleshooting),
7. and an ability to do lateral moves, however painful they might be, to put food on the table without significantly sacrificing our current lifestyles.

All of that crap translates to the following: By the time we hit 40's we shouldn't not be directly competing for the same type of jobs with right-out-of-school kids. Or in more general terms, we should allow ourselves to fall into a situation of having to compete with people 15-20 years our junior.

If we are, then we didn't pay attention to our career development. I saw this in earnest because I spent (wasted) a good chunk of my mid-career years being happy as a "code warrior", disdainfully avoiding any opportunities to take greater responsibilities or broadening my professional and technical horizons. I wasn't being lazy as I would happily clock 60/70 hours "just coding". I was just being ignorant (and ignorance is bliss, right?)

It wasn't until I had people depending on me that I realize how stupid and dangerous that is. We do not get any younger, and we must have something to show from all those years of experience (show something other than coding abilities.)

I oppose age discrimination on principle (and any kind of discrimination unrelated to reasonable work requirements - working more for less is not a reasonable working requirement.)

But I see too many people resting on their laurels expecting to retire doing the same shit they have been doing for the last 20-30 years. That *dream* started to get shattered when the Japanese started beating the crap of American manufacturing 30-40 years ago.

Some people really hadn't gotten the memo yet.

Or it could be seen also as a spotlight of bitcoins as a tool to preserve wealth in a free-falling economy.

Stop trying to make sense to these sock puppets. It is like trying to teach math to a coconut.

By law, H1-Bs can only come for jobs that cannot be filled with the local work force. By law, they cannot replace working locals. But shit, guess what happens? Do you think H1-B visa holders are actually compensated fairly by Infosys and the like?

I have a bridge to sell, and a bottle of snake oil to boot. Let me know if you are interested.

Let me stop you right there from continuing with this stupid-as-shit line of thinking. Certain interest groups in the US preach free markets to the world. That doesn't imply "The US preaches free markets" or whatever shit else these interest groups try to peddle.

Like almost anywhere else. You don't see engineering in general (and IT in particular) being offshored en-mass in, say, Japan and Germany, do you? I've never been in Germany, but I have been in Japan. So I can claim with some certainty that what I'm saying here holds.

There is also the rule of the law. The law says that H1-B visas are for jobs where companies have a hard time filling in with local talent (be them US workers, or foreign workers with a permanent residence status.)

It is not a replacement of US citizens and legal residents with temporary visa workers to lower costs. That is a violation of the law. In any other country, that would warrant an immediate investigation by a department of labor. Not here, and that is stupid.

And people thinking that we should not investigate (when every other country would), those people are either stupid, obtuse or disingenuous.

And it is... within the definintion/demarcation of an economy. Any nation that does not treat its economy as a national asset of strategic value is an stupid nation that deserves whatever gets coming.

Look at China, India, Japan, Germany, and so on. They all have specific protections in place according to whatever they consider strategic or vital.

It is only in the US that private enterprises (and politicians in their pockets) who do not think that way. As long as profit is made, the nation as a whole can go screw itself.

Do you understand the meaning of "begging the question"?

There is no competition when locals are being replaced without even giving a chance to compete, being replaced completely and unilaterally with cheaper labor in contradiction of what the law says.

And this just doesn't affect US citizens. It also affects legal residences. I've seen with my own eyes India workers with permanent resident status getting replaced with H1-B visas. So it is not just a question of talent and competition. It is a disingenuous violation of the law.

Not only that, the H1-B abuse is heavily slanted towards India workers and consulting firms? Why?

If we are going to get inundated and replaced by H1-B workers, let them be more diverse, from Russia, China, Africa, and LATAM, not just India. This is the biggest problem I have with abuses of the H1-B program. It artificially skews one of most profitable segments of our economy towards a specific foreign nationality.

The country as it is has a history of racial segmentation. There is no need to make that problem even worse.