On point 2: I've had mostly the same experience, but I'm not sure why that is. Perhaps it's a cliché, but in my experience, men are often more dominant and less concensus-seeking, women tend to listen more and better. Also, if you screw up (in a minor way), a man will give you an earful but they'll forget about it soon after. Women however tend to forgive but not forget.

Men and women seem to have different management styles, to be sure, each with their strengths and faults, and perhaps my own perception of bad female managers being extra-horrible simply comes from the fact that I am less "in tune" with that style of management. As a guy, it'll always be easier to relate to other guys I guess.

That nest-egg is important in more ways than one. Once you have a reasonable reserve, that nest-egg becomes your "fuck you fund" as someone here once called it. It enables you to make a promise to yourself to never work for asshole bosses, and it'll enable you to tell your boss to go fuck himself if he is making your life miserable (figuratively speaking, of course: always stay polite). From personal experience I can tell you that having made yourself such a promise and having the funds to back it up makes a world of difference in how you view your work, even if you never actually make use of it.

From what I have seen posted here so far, this one gets my vote. Also, spend time and keep spending time on thinking what kind of career you actually want, then plan and act accordingly. Make yourself invaluable to your company if you are happy to stay where you are for a while (and there's nothing wrong with that!). Being invaluable to your boss is a good way to keep from getting fired... or transfered / promoted. If you want to keep moving however, starting looking for and training your replacement from day one. Of course, start training and lobbying for your next position at the same time. Think about what you want your next assignment to be, and when you'd want it.

Another piece of advice: work on your social skills from the get-go. Network. Network! Even if you start out as the resident basement dwelling nerd, get to know everyone you get to meet. If you're helping a VP with a tricky spreadsheet, chat with him while you fix his issue. Make a point of remembering names, and be sociable (but without being an obnoxious kiss-up). Especially in larger corporations, a good network is invaluable in any job, and good social skills are always well regarded. Some people are better at this stuff than others, but anyone can learn and improve themselves.

This. A device isn't mine unless I can run it offline. Why does it even need to be in constant touch with the mothership; the website fails to adequately explain that. As a hobbyist I'd *love* to have one of these, but it needs to be able to run on its own.

It's not hard to see who gets to live longer. The rich, for one. If "we" decide to select candidates on merit, there will most certainly be other places where the selection criteria are different or where the deciders can be bought, and those who can afford it will simply move there (or import the stuff from there).

And if this is done by lottery, a lucky winner might well sell his ticket if the price is right... and would we even want to try and stop such transactions, like we prohibit people from selling their own organs now? If you (at, say, age 35) win the lottery and get to choose between a normal lifespan in sufficient wealth, or an extended lifespan that will be spent either working or worrying over money (or both)? Because your state or private pension scheme is most certainly not going to cover you for 300 years.

GP makes a good point though, and actually both IT and the business often perceive the IT department as "plumbing". Something that just has to work: the plumber keeps the toilets from getting clogged, and IT keeps the servers from being owned. If that is how IT sees themselves, they'll become a "no" department with no added value.

If a business guy tells you: "I need an FTP server", your answer shouldn't be "no way in hell", but "what is it you really need?". Understand what their business need is, then offer your expertise to set up the right technology for the job to meet that need. And it goes further: if you understand their business, you can take the initiative and bring new tech to their attention and show them how it will help them to do things better, faster or cheaper. Many IT departments don't do that often enough or well enough.

That's a very good observation, and I suppose that in some cases the strict and deliberate split of Business and IT was done to keep departments from going off and setting up all manner of rogue IT projects. I have seen other specific measures being taken to prevent just that sort of thing. However, I see the exact same organisational trends in companies that profess to continuously improve their ways of doing business through innovative IT. In those cases, the downside is very real, and as far as I can see not very well understood or even recognized. Big IT-driven change projects and pilots of innovative technology are enthusiastically started, but fail to deliver the potential business benefits because of a lack of IT knowledge of management on the steering committee, and because of a lack of intimacy between business and IT.

I'd argue that there are still big gains being made with new IT; the need for continued innovation is still there. For starters, replacing traditional inventory and accounting with computer based solutions hasn't been a big bang where all the benefits were realized in a short time. These things evolved from basic isolated solutions, adding bar codes and inventory tracking, automated warehouses, JIT logistics, ERP, standardisation in integration tech that allows easy outsourcing of payroll and other business processes, etc. And this process continues. My current client suffers from the stuff I described above, but that doesn't mean that all their projects fail, and we've seen some significant tangible benefits coming out of the use of mobile devices, new ways of learning and providing support, a shift to SAAS, virtualisation, web-based solutions (thin client), and they even still develop some bespoke software that gives them a real competitive edge. They go for "commodity tools" in the sense that their strategy is to "buy not build" where possible, but the stuff they buy is being improved upon all the time, and even SAAS solutions do not free you from having to have at least some knowledge of IT when rolling them out into the organisation.

Keep in mind that innovation doesn't mean operating on the bleeding edge of tech or inventing your own stuff, in most cases it means adjusting your organisation and the way you do business to take advantage of advances being made in tech that is already available as "boring" commodity software or services.

This. Also, here's a telltale quote:

When I first started working, IT was more closely interwoven with the business functions. Gradually, IT was separated into its own department, parts of it were outsourced, and the work was more compartimentalized (moving from individual generalists to fully interchangable specialists). To be sure this has had positive effects: in my own experience the level of professionalism has gone way up and there are far fewer ninja projects and hobby departments. But the downside has been that IT has lost touch with the business almost completely, and the amount of red tape is staggering.

It is in Paris; drivers there sometimes nudge other cars to widen a tight parking spot.

So the lawyers win again...

Extra points for this remark. I suppose many of us (myself included) at first had a somewhat romantic picture when thinking about the first Mars settlement, even harebrained ones like Mars One. A garden dome with some cylindrical habitats around it, with a bespacesuited pioneer standing outside next to the rover he takes out on his daily drives around the planet. The submarine analogy is much more realistic... It'll be cramped, with only very limited time outdoors, with zero privacy, zero opportunity to escape your fellow colonists, and probably limited opportunity to escape into work (as people in such conditions often do). Big Brother in Hell. Probably exiting for the first month, still pretty good a few months in, but after a year (after you're still around) it's going to suck.

Don't dry your poodle in this microwave oven. Do not look into laser with remaining eye. Objects in mirror may be closer than they appear. Not to be used as a flotation device. This packet of nuts may contain traces of nuts. Look out for pedestrians when engaging the auto-park feature.

There's always a better idiot to beat your safety system. Also, wasn't this caused simply by the driver stepping on the accelerator? This did not look like the kind of driving any self-parking car would do, pedestrians or no.

The hard part is indeed establishing what the right level of security is and how to evaluate companies against that. At least over here, the exclusions for burglary are pretty clear cut: leaving your door or a window open, and for insuring more valuable stuff there are often extra provisions like requiring "x" star locks and bolt, or a class "y" safe or class "z" alarm system and so on. With IT security, it's not just about what stuff you have installed and what systems you have left open or not; IT security is about people and process, as much or more than it is about systems.

An A.I. expert may know a lot about A.I., but you need a broader perspective to judge the impact of A.I. on humanity. A bit of economics, sociology, psychology... and in that light, I'd value the opinion of certain Science-Fiction writers higher than that of any of those 3 as they've already done some considerable philosophizing about the subject.

So we already stopped singling out winners for scholastic performance (or performance at sports, or whatever), with this "everyone's a winner" crap. And now we can't even give kids points for effort?!

Competition (meaning a race between two or more people, although this also applies to the economic meaning of the word) is healthy and good, and it is a powerful way to push people to excel. And recognizing effort helps disadvantaged children, they get bonus points for persevering where the advantaged kids "got everything handed to them on a silver platter" without having to try very hard, as one critic in that article puts it.