The trick to managing technical people is knowing what you don't know and allowing technical experts do their job without infuriating them with stupid questions.
-- ask some technical questions, make sure at least a few the candidate will not know the answer to. If they fake it rather than saying "I don't know" PASS
-- give a situation to deal with (the server is down) and ask "what do you want me to do?" if it is anything other than "fix it and let me know the details only after you are done" PASS

amen brother

Minutely, as soon as the feature compiles.

We are hoping to go to real-time and have developers update Ruby scripts directly on the production server as this will save us the expense of a test environment, but that is going to require porting all our Java code to Ruby. We tried to use jRuby but that is going the wrong direction, so we are starting a new open source project for JOR (java on ruby).

Kudos, and a friendly reminder: a black hoodie is not a ninja costume.

Excellent, a universal cross compatible standard for everyone!
http://xkcd.com/927/

Even better: use octopress http://octopress.org/ and do commenting with disqus. And then run the smallest webserver you can find and turn everything else off. The best security is the simplest security.

I agree, I have an iPhone and my wife has a WP7
I love my iphone, but it is expensive and slow (granted it is an iphone 3g)
The WP7 phone was less than half the price of iPhone, has snappy performance, and the social integration is the best out there.
There are lots of things that it does not do, the app marketplace is years behind, and it is locked down as tight as iPhone.
This phone is very good at what it set out to do and is in no rational perspective a failure.

you just blew my mind
best troll ever

hell I would be happy if software developers could write maintainable code!
(ducks)

Yes and you will be the only human on earth that knows what it does.

I started at 30 during dot-com, am well into my 40's now and feel like my opportunities are only beginning. My salary is 4x what I made 10 years ago and I am seeing tsunamis of opportunity. This is a great industry, and a great industry to grow and to work in over the long haul. Don't let anybody tell you different. Put this FUD in your FUD-bucket with all the FUD that Bloomberg spews day after day.

If they want a newbie that knows a lot of abstract book-learnin and bangs his head against the wall for a week on a problem that I can solve in 10 minutes let them continue the illusion that they are saving money.
I will be over here doing great work, advocating the high value practices of the industry, and getting higher and higher salaries from smart employers.
For that matter, forget even thinking about those longer hours and just pay your coders by the line. That will get you ahead.

PHP, Ajax, Java, apps? You are on the subjects that are hot hot hot in most tech segments. Your experience with customers and the business side of things is a real asset and will be considered a major plus for any reasonable employer. You will not be suited for all possible coding jobs, but nobody is. Age is only considered a determent because people think that you will be stuck up and set in your ways. Show that you are flexible and hungry for new challenges. If you are looking in Seattle, SF, New York or other comparable market you will find a home. Maybe not tomorrow, but soon enough. Concentrate on your strengths, be awesome, be passionate and the world is your oyster.

Buy a whiteboard and google for interview questions and write code in dry-erase every day. Once you get in the interview chair you will be ready.
And best of luck to you.

Ugh, the level to which this has been mis-quoted shows a lack of understanding by the TPM authors bordering on idiocy.

The previously made sheet of graphene was cited to be 76 centimeters square. but the original article http://www.rsc.org/chemistryworld/News/2010/June/20061001.asp notes that the sheet was 76 Centimeters on the diagonal which would be 54 centimeters on a side if it was a perfect square: 2916 square centimeters.

So if we were to use their own retarded logic system, the claim of attempting a sheet that was one kilometer square, that would actually mean one kilometer on the diagonal. so a centimeter wide and just under a kilometer long would suffice to satisfy the claim.

I know we all get it. A hacker is not a criminal, a hacker is one who likes to tinker and break new ground by using tools for things other than they were intended. Kevin Mitnick was not a hacker, Nikola Tesla was a hacker. I agree the distinction is important. But guess what, we lost that fight.

The best thing we can do today is to come up with another word that means what hacker used to mean.

How about bit wrangler? Or just come up with something yourself and start using it and let the best jargon win. But hacker has been lost to us, it is no longer our word. You dig?