Ok, maybe my comment about the ADHD was off-base, but it does seem there's a trend for extroverted talkers to get into coding these days, and they love the open-plan work environment. It's probably more of an introversion vs. extroversion thing.

No one wants to work in an open environment.

That's not what I see. Go read the article, or other articles about them. There's tons of comments from people saying how much they love working in open environments, how they love the "camaraderie", being able to ask people questions quickly, being able to overhear conversations and know what's going on, etc. Yes, there's also lots of comments from people like you and me who hate these environments, but don't make the mistake of thinking everyone is like us; clearly there's lots of people who aren't, and apparently a lot of those people have infiltrated the programming profession.

Yes, cost savings is also a factor, but it's not the only factor. There really are a lot of people who like working that way.

Better yet, these people get to be super rich AND immune from any consequences for their mistakes and misdeeds, however the engineers working for them, who make middle-class salaries at best (and far less than doctors), are somehow expected to have "ethical standards" and are the first to be blamed when something goes wrong that was really because of a management decision.

It was either that or just don't do the change at all, so that even more people would die. This is the problem with engineering: grandstanding fools like you sit in armchairs and say that engineers should "act ethically", but they're not allowed to by management, because they have zero power in the company, and are really nothing more than interchangeable cogs that management can replace at a whim. Management makes all the engineering decisions, but when something goes wrong, people want to blame the engineers.

Ask the author of this article, who says, "The switch to such floor plans in offices is partly a generational thing. Younger workers, especially in their 20s and 30s, like being social and working in groups, and companies are doing what they can to attract them. That includes revamping office layouts to be more flexible and let in more natural light -- a perk for sustainable-minded Millennials, says Chris Corrado, president of Environments, a 30-year-old office furnishings supplier in Portland, Ore."

Given the size of transmission-line towers, the guy in the van would need a rather large bomb to actually make the tower collapse. Multiply by the number of towers he'd need to destroy, and I think that one van might not be large enough. Also, getting your hands on that quantity of explosives isn't easy or cheap.

Met many taxi drivers? Painters? Plumbers? Electricians? A/C repair guys? The guy you talk to to arrange and schedule the work needs to be somewhat personable. The guy who does the work, not so much.

Taxi drivers are going away thanks to driverless cars. Probably painters too. The other ones are skilled workers; they're not the people we're talking about here. This conversation is about semi-skilled or unskilled people, who pretty soon aren't going to have any (or much) work available. Yes, unpersonable guys who are smart enough can become HVAC technicians, (driverless-)car repair technicians, etc. What about the guys who didn't make the cut for trade school? What are they going to do for work?

And a world where all the assholes starve to death? Not the worst possible world.

Sounds like a world without very many men.

Then there's those of us who can code in an almost-trancelike state, but rarely get the opportunity because companies these days have all embraced the "open plan work environment" that the ADHD Under-30 crowd loves so much, and which makes it completely impossible to get into a proper mental state to do any serious coding because every time some person walks by our desk or has a loud conversation directly behind us we lose our concentration.

The problem is, in this economy, everyone DOES need to do something to make a living, or else they'll be either living under a bridge and starving, or maybe on the dole and living in a rat-infested apartment and sleeping in their bathtub to protect from stray bullets.

Building a house, piloting a plane, etc. are nice skills, but in the near future we won't need many people to do those things, thanks to increased automation. So what are all these people going to do for a living?

There are two answers obvious to me: 1) we need to eliminate a large portion of the population. Obviously this smacks of genocide and isn't going to go over well. 2) we need to move quickly to a Star Trek-like post-scarcity society where everyone has a basic income (largely funded by aggressively taxing people like Michael Bloomberg) that's enough to live decently (not in a ghetto) without having to work, but which allows people to pick up extra work if they choose to increase their income.

There's a big problem with this idea of everyone going into the service industry: not everyone is cut out for being a service worker, working with the general public, etc. Would you go to a spa and get a pedicure from a coal miner type of guy? Would you hire one as a personal shopper? With their personality, I wouldn't even want them doing home theater installation in my house, or serving me food in a restaurant.

Service jobs are great for younger women with pleasant personalities, because everyone wants to be around them, male and female. Men like being around pretty women for obvious reasons, and women like being around them because they don't have to worry much about getting hit on by them or having them leer at them. There's a reason female waiters get better tips.

Your typical male factory workers, construction workers, truck drivers, etc. are not at all suited for interpersonal service jobs. So what are we going to do with them?

As stated by others here, the days of being able to do serious fundamental scientific experiments with some relatively inexpensive instruments on a table are long since over, so those scientists rely on funding from the fox news viewers, which is drying up fast. Worse, scientists are dying out and not many young people are entering the field. In the long term, this will result in collapse.

That's an optimistic view. I think a more reasonable view is that we WILL run out of things to discover, because we're going to stop looking. When you spend all your time watching mindless entertainment like The Kardashians or Honey Boo Boo, and don't bother to do any science because "it's too hard", then you're not going to discover anything. The future, as I see it, is that science will stop being done, climate change coupled with economic collapse will lead to collapse of our civilization, and shortly thereafter, the human race will be extinct. The author is correct: no one will discover anything new, because there won't be any people left.

No, I'm not really lumping you together. You wouldn't say that all Americans are NASCAR fans, but there's definitely many who are, and they tend to be located in certain regions of the country. There's lots of them in North Carolina, but probably almost none in New York or Massachusetts. But that doesn't mean that any of those groups aren't "true Americans".

Similarly, not all Christians are fundamentalists, or fans of Joel Osteen, or gay-haters, etc. But some definitely are, and that's why there's so many different sects. Those sects can be extremely different from one another. And if you look at Christians outside the US, especially ones in northern Europe, things are even more different. It's a very large and diverse group, and it just isn't valid for some Christians to accuse others of not being "true Christians" (though they could certainly accuse them of being "bad Christians", "completely misguided", "lunatics", etc.).

Yep. Not only that, but the surrounding counties don't have these restrictions either, so it's not hard for them to drive a little bit to get to businesses or a mall that's open on Sunday.

What I don't understand, however, is why any businesses actually bother to locate there, especially the mall that's in that county. If I were running Macy's or Nordstrom or whatever, why would I bother locating a big, expensive store in a place where I'm not allowed to have it open on Sundays, one of the bigger shopping days? Are the Bergen county residents really buying enough stuff on the other days to make it worth it? Yeah, they have a bunch of money there, but as you said, they work in NYC, so that probably doesn't exactly leave them a lot of time to go shopping on weekdays when you factor in their work schedule plus the commuting time.

Seriously, if IT isn't serving the needs of your business, your IT is staffed with idiots and whiny bitches like the above poster.
In the real world, people like you get sacked.

Sorry, but no. In the real world, IT pushes out Windows installs laden with all kinds of crapware (such as McAfee), resulting in systems that run dog-slow and crash and freeze all the time. These IT departments are rewarded for this incompetence with continued employment, bonuses, etc.

Also in the real world, HR departments are staffed with idiots who cause all kinds of problems with the company, yet again these people are rewarded with continued employment and bonuses.

In the real world, incompetent people are NOT sacked, they're given more power.

I don't know what "real world" you live in, but it's definitely not the one I live in. Maybe you live in the parallel universe that Star Trek: TNG is set in, where everyone is hyper-competent.