Prince hasn't been selling his music that way for well over a decade. He sells much smaller runs of CDs with the exact music he wants (self-produced) through his fan club. Apparently, he's actually making way more money now than he ever did in the million-selling-record days.

I broke the screen on my iPhone over a year ago. It looks hideous, with spider-web cracks all up and down it now.

It still works. Hasn't failed at all. I have the required repair kit to fix it, just been too lazy to do so ($79 to buy the kit myself, by the way -- Apple wanted $200, and most online fixers are about $100). At this point, it's almost a badge of pride, because no one who sees the phone believes it still works.

However, I can certify that putting an LG NV3 through the washing machine and dryer will break it.

You need to give up caring. Seriously, if they, as the owner(s), want to be idiots... well, so be it. Realize that (as with many business owners) they aren't really all that sharp, don't commit to this company any further than the short term, and keep your resume up to date for the time when they finally screw up really bad.

I've seen it all at this point. The small business owners that are smart, honest, and have reasonable common sense are few and far between. Your complaints don't surprise me at all; while I admire your dedication and desire to do the right thing, I think this is an exercise in frustration. Let them make their own mistakes, and maybe they'll wise up eventually. If they don't, don't let it be your problem.

> "There are so many development houses where this is not allowed that you just have to deal with it unless you are going to spend your entire life at one company under one boss (not realistic). I suppose you could always ask the question at the end of an interview but that might come across as a little bit petty."

Or, you know, honest.

I would never work in an environment where I couldn't at least occasionally be putting on the headphones and getting into the zone. I know it works for me, I know I produce kickass results that way, and I know some days absolutely nothing else is going to work. It's not my sole means of work; I do plenty of interactions and sometimes me leaving the headphones off and kibitzing when I hear someone get stuck over the cube walls helps others get into the zone. However, any boss that was going to ban my headphones... well, he honestly wouldn't be my boss for long. That's not arrogance speaking, it's confidence that he's simply wrong in his assumptions and I'd be glad to show him entire subsystems of our architecture written to the Essential Mix broadcast. If he still doesn't like it, then I'm going to just be the arrogant dickhead creative type that leaves his employ -- I'd see that as a sign of deeper issues that are inevitably going to manifest as bigger problems. That sort of boss doesn't "get it" in a way that is conducive to managing creative people efficiently. In fact, the OP suggests a boss desperate to assign some blame, and grasping at straws -- hardly someone you want in charge of your work.

So, it sounds petty, but I think it matters a lot. Your work environment and the attitudes you deal with are absolutely going to influence the results of your work. I'm going to argue that the bottom line for the company really does want me to wear my headphones, and if you can't at least ponder the possibility that I might be right... you're not really understanding your technical business.

Sorry, dude, but you look like a total weed hookup even to my suburban white-boy self. The hair says "this dude probably has some weed". Do you carry a hemp bag? I see a lot of vegans with hemp bags.

Just saying... maybe you should carry some bags of oregano with you and make some money from those seeking your assistance.

Yes, I've been reading about all that. Unfortunately, it's a hard lesson in the real world where logic and reason fail utterly. I've contributed to the DNA Lounge fund, hope they can squeak out a win over the bastards.

Well, yes. No doubt that JWZ is a wizard programmer. I mean, the guy earned his bones writing LISP, he knows the theory and the basis for what he is doing. He also knows when to throw elegance out the window and just get the job done as best you can in pressing circumstances. The ability to choose the right course and not get bogged down at either end between cruft and elegance is what makes for a good "duct tape" programmer. You can only throw out the bits you already understand well; otherwise you are operating out of ignorance.

Do fewer unit tests. Stick to the absolute minimum, well-known, easy to test scenarios. Write a bunch of comments noting all the stuff I'm not testing, and why I didn't have time to test it (something like "cannot test this functionality, the logic is too deeply embedded in private code"). I'd at least do something so I have a tiny bit of reassurances that I didn't miss obvious stuff (asserts inside the code can do this too, if you don't want to write dedicated, separate tests) and so I have a basic structure to add better tests in later.

At this point, I wouldn't ever skip some sort of testing in my code. I've just seen too many things caught early enough in the release cycle for me not to believe it's a reasonable investment. I'm leery of getting overly navel-gazing and searching for some perfect testing Nirvana where no production bugs ever occur, but double-checking yourself and making some effort to test early just makes sense in terms of risk reduction.

I hope this professor wasn't any sort of philosophy professor, because that is a classic example of (actually) begging the question. You can win any argument when you choose the definitions and basic assumptions.