Yeah, I have to resist telling my kids about the natural gas balloons we made for the 4th while unsupervised. As a parent, they're too dangerous.

Fill up a white kitchen trash bag from the stove, tie the end with kite string, unreel the string until the balloon is at least 30-40 feet in the air, then light the end of the string.

Big whump and fireball in the air later, fun was had by all.

hmmm. You're making me hungry, boy. I want to eat me some whale.

I wouldn't discount hiring a programmer without a degree. I've worked with several excellent--really, truly excellent--programmers that came to the industry without anything other than motivation. But don't tell me that just because out of my 18 years of being academically involved with computers, 4 of those were spent mostly in the classroom that I don't know how to fucking code.

Sure, there's going to be exceptional members of each class. But look at it this way:

Who am I, as a un-degreed programmer, more likely to run into when dealing with someone with a degree - you, or the guy who can't code and who is using his degree as a crutch to bully the people who actually know what they're doing?

Who are you, as a degreed programmer,more likely to run into when dealing with someone without a degree - me, or the guy who just knows how to cargo cult his way through a CRUD web form?

I've taken a strong interest in biology, biochemistry, physics, neuroanatomy, sociology, psychology, history, and abstract math; while I have no major or minor in any of these subjects, I can generally have an interesting discussion about the relative merits of Bohm vs. Everett-Wheeler or the cellular hormone signalling going on in butterfly metamorphosis or the peculiar sociopolitics that influenced the transition from the last Chinese emperor to the pseudo-communist regime. And not everyone who didn't go to college is like that, but generally speaking, neither is everyone who went to college. And I've found that being a college graduate is completely orthogonal to knowing what the hell you're talking about, whether it's within your major or outside it.

But the thing is, if you're coming in as a Lead Developer, and you have a degree, I can't discount the possibility that you got the job on the merit of your degree rather than your skill - so from my perspective, the likelihood that you know how to code is less likely if you have the degree, because it provides an alternate (and regrettably much more salient) hypothesis for how you got here.

Does that make sense?

Okay, so serious question:

how can someone who used to DREAM of jobs like that, who has become completely disillusioned and beaten down by having to code crappy CRUD work for 15+ years, break out into the kind of work you do?

It depends on your definition of experience, I had a CV sent to me just the start of this week - "Exceptional candidate, 23 years software development experience" and sure enough there was 23 years professional development employment on his CV. But here's the thing, he was only looking for £40k a year, that rings alarm bells with me, why would someone with such a vast amount of experience only be looking for a mid-level salary at best? after all that time I'd expect him to be looking for at least double that if he was actually any good (I don't buy the argument that maybe he wanted an easier life - I've found the higher you get up the career ladder, the easier it gets, not vice versa).

I've been exactly that guy. 20+ years experience, applying for a US$35K salary.

Because between mental health issues and just being tired of work-related drama, I didn't think I was worth the $120K I used to get.

And yeah, I get that self-confidence and salesmanship go a long way, but they're also really tiring for some people to emulate.

Absolutely. And usually early optimization leads to way more spaghetti code than properly describing the problem, coding a conceptually elegant solution, and then optimizing from there.

Because my parents couldn't afford to send me through college, and I was too busy coding in junior high and high school to keep my grades up or network with the right people.

As someone without a BS in anything, I've actually found the opposite.

Yes, people who are self-taught often have gaps in our knowledge, but we tend to be *much* faster at filling those gaps. Also, the fact that we acquired all the knowledge we did without a college degree indicates that we are motivated to fill those gaps ourselves.

It is very likely that there are things we have not been exposed to, even if we match your 15 years' experience as a software engineer. However, upon exposure, I am willing to bet that we will beat you soundly at rapid acquisition and assimilation of knowledge - especially since, if you've been in the field for 15 years, your degree is over 15 years old. Which means that plenty of things which are new to me will be new to you, too.

You're absolutely right that you'll never have to compete for a job with someone that does not have a bachelor's degree. I, on the other hand, have to compete with people like you for the right to do my damn job all the time, because you're absolutely convinced that four years in a university beat four years actually in the field working on real-world problems, while voraciously consuming papers and books, and while corresponding with experts in the field - because unlike you, my tools were not handed to me by a university; I had to build them myself.

None of which translates well to a bureaucracy-approved stamp I can stick on my resume, so you're right - good on you. You'll get fast-tracked to management, where you'll continue to pretend like you know what you're doing more than I do, where you continue to ignore my explanations of why your harebrained ideas won't work, and where you'll continue to get me fired when they fail in exactly the way I warned you they would. You've certainly got it all figured out.

Except how to fucking code.

Premature optimization is terrible.

Because it sure looks like you spawned a Stand Alone Complex, and that has to feel weird.

We still don't, actually. He's neither rich nor white.

Who'd want 3 different water/sewer systems connected to their house?

Ummm... me?

I'm currently forced to buy water from only the local government-granted monopoly water provider, who has decided not to provide one type of water I want to purchase (greywater) to residential customers. They sell it to commercial customers at1/10th the cost of their potable water lines, but despite the fact that the pipes and infrastructure supporting it are literally 2 feet from my property, I'm classified as residential, so no using greywater for landscaping for me.

There's another potential water provider less than a mile away in a different political jurisdiction who I could purchase from... if it was legally allowed for them to compete here, which it isn't.

The truth is that taking a government-created monopoly and saying that's proof that a market wouldn't support a non-monopoly setup is really saying that the legal framework creating the monopoly in the first place isn't really needed. So let's get rid of the government enforcing monopolies and see what's really a persistent natural monopoly vs what's actually a favor for buddies of the local politicians instead?

Computers?

http://www.motherjones.com/pol...

This argument doesn't make any sense, and certainly wouldn't to a strict-constructionist.

Either the Constitution was intended to cover any type of travel when originally written, or it wasn't.

If it was, then any type of travel is protected, because nothing in the Constitution authorizes the government to restrict travel.

If (as you argue) it wasn't intended to cover, say, flying, because it didn't exist at that time yet (silly, no one really argues that but let's go with it...), then still, nothing in the Constitution authorizes the government to restrict travel via flying.

The fallacy you seem to be falling into is thinking that the Constitution needs to explicitly permit or protect a particular freedom (like travel) or else the government can do what they want in regards to it. The Constitution doesn't grant people rights and doesn't protect only enumerated freedoms. It enumerates specific powers for the government and reserves everything not specifically granted to the States and the people.So if the Constitution doesn't apply to something, then the Federal government doesn't have any authority whatsoever in regards to that something.

In actual fact, the courts have ruled that any limitation on the fundamental right to travel must pass strict scrutiny. See a few hundred thousand links from Google.