Yep, the simple fact that their entire command and control apparatus is located in a small metal house perched on top of the flat deck is probably a pretty big weakness all by itself.

They were probably also the first to have a navy at all.

Exactly. This is why Snowden is such a traitor: he violated American Rules of Acquisition 9, 62, 74, and 98.

One comment I heard way back was that men are no smarter on average than women, but that women tend to be clustered in the middle more, whereas with men there's a lot more outliers, in both directions, so there's a bunch of male geniuses and idiots, and not so many female ones of either.

Good points. So we're basically victims of our own success? We should have thrown a wrench into things earlier on to keep the rest of society from getting so interested in this stuff...

Two big reasons:
1) Companies like Intel pay people to work on Linux because they're in the business of selling hardware, not software (usually), and want people to use their products for running Linux.
2) Companies like Red Hat contribute to the open-source software, and then make a business out of selling support contracts and services. If there's no software, there's nothing to sell expensive enterprise service contracts for.

If you complain about the interface You're told you aren't the target audience. [gimpusers.com]

I could be wrong, but the Alexandre guy there telling the other guy he's not the target audience does not appear to be a GIMP developer himself, just a user.

Exactly. People keep trying to use the disaster that is Gnome3, and then bitch about all the changes, even though the Gnome devs have been going in this direction for over a decade now, ever since they conducted their vaunted "usability tests".

If you don't like Gnome3, don't use it! Switch to KDE instead. It hasn't had a significant UI change in many years (and they just add more stuff anyway, which you can disable and/or ignore, they're basically the opposite mindset as the minimalism-loving Gnome devs).

I don't get it either, it's just people bitching about minor UI changes as far as I can tell. There's two "big" things that changed: the tabs are on top of the URL bar now (which they copied from Chrome), and the menu is hidden, and appears when you press Alt (which is partially copied from Chome, which eliminated the menu altogether, so FF's design is really a compromise, and a decent one IMO as vertical screen real estate is important in a browser). That's really it. That's nothing at all like the changes seen in, for instance, Gnome.

The hipsters can't stand for usable software, of course. It needed to be "improved"!
This is what gedit looks like more recently

This isn't "open source hipsters", this is the GNOME team. They are infamous for this shit. Just look at the whole Gnome3 UI, it's the same shit.

Switch to KDE, and try out the kate editor. You won't see that kind of silliness with KDE projects. Not all open source projects are run by the same kind of people, the Gnome devs are really exceptional.

I disagree. When you're CEO, you now have a big golden parachute. So you can quit at any time and live an extremely comfortable lifestyle in your mansion and/or on your megayacht, and not have a care in the world about having to go without. That's not a dead end, that's a pot at the end of the rainbow.

Everyone else has to worry about saving enough for retirement so they aren't eating cat food when they're old.

Also if you have any interest in moving into more of a leadership type roll, even if you want to stay mostly technical (i.e. technical lead, software architect) social skills become even more important.

Apparently spelling and grammar skills aren't that important.

Please read my other posts - not only did I not complain about a shortage, I went so far as to say that I don't really think there is a shortage.

Sorry, I was only responding to your one post, and assuming that like so many other managers that you might buy into the whole tech-worker shortage idea.

Regardless, I think you're missing my point: my position is that some people, no matter how good their skills are, are a *net negative*,

I agree, at least the way modern companies do their management. I think it's entirely possible to get such people to be productive assets to the company, but almost no companies want to bother actually developing the people-management skills necessary to do so. It can't be done the way companies currently manage employees, and would probably require hiring a bunch of psychologists and developing the appropriate management methods, instead of what companies do now, which is basically take technically-skilled people, and simply promote them into management without any regard for actual skill at dealing with people.

But is it putting an emphasis on people who are easy to manage? Absolutely. Anything else is insanity. I run a business, not some volunteer organization where you work with whatever you've got.

Well it just depends on how much you want to invest in people, and how much you think you'll get out of them with that investment. With some brilliant people who are really, really hard to manage (requiring developing all-new management skills as I outlined above), you'll have to invest a lot of time and money and energy, but who knows, maybe you'll get some really brilliant new products that make your company a fortune. Of course, that's a big gamble. Maybe you'll get less out than other companies that take a safe route, or worse maybe your reinvented-management initiative will be a giant failure. But so many companies keep repeating this "tech worker shortage" mantra, so if there really were such a shortage, they should be doing just as I said, regardless of the risk, because a hard-to-manage employee is better than no employee at all.

It's generational IMO. I never ran into this stuff when I was in college in the early/mid 90s.

That's fine, but then you have zero right to complain about a tech labor "shortage". If there's a shortage, then you should be hiring anyone who's qualified, no matter how bad their interpersonal skills are. It's your job as management to help them succeed as part of the team, and if you can't do that, then you are incompetent.

If you want to take the easy route and only hire people who are easy to manage, that's your prerogative, but you can't complain about any kind of shortage if you do this.