Except for you end up spending it all on blow.

Not to mention that if you're scouring for this kind of stuff you often end up paying in the hundreds for a piece of 50 year old vinyl. A lot of this stuff exists in that nebulous zone of someone owning copyright and forgetting about it and there being people that are looking for it but not enough for the holder to remake it or make it available. And of course if you start reproducing it yourself you get a lawsuit.

Prison isn't nearly as bad.

Save money, get married and buy a house? Some of us live in NYC where buying and saving don't exist (my rent costs more than your mortgage I bet) and people don't get married until their mid-30's generally. Not to mention it's bad advice since when you have a house and a wife you're tied down. I'd recommend moving to a new, large city where you meet more people who are interesting and trying to start something with them.

100% accurate. I don't get raises and promotions because I put together a long presentation on how secure my work is. I get them because I can churn out code fast, on budget and on time. I of course take measures that are easy to do, etc, but I'm usually off to the next thing some PM has been bugging me about and just say "Screw it" and get my other stuff into testing so QA can do some general functional testing.

Also, the domain I'm in isn't dealing with anything a PCI system would need. But still, I've learned the game is production, regardless of what is inside the blackbox is ultra secure or not. Getting things out on time and on budget, as you said, are really the only things that count.

You forgot to read the "hire real programmers" part. Any programmer who is hired to write code and SQL should be able to avoid disaster queries and use a query analyzer if needed. But, a DBA shouldn't touch a line of code. If anything, they should be involved in a code review. Another system at a company I worked at is our DB guy would review ALL queries that were submitted. But this creates overhead. Every company is different, if your system works for you then good for you. But I'd agree, you should hire competent programmers if their queries are that bad. One of the questions we give to prospective programmers is "what is wrong with this?" SQL. We've had some baddies come through and have had some system destroying SQL we've weeded out, and most the mistakes are simple things.

This has more to do with Javascript than anything. the Javascript interpreter in IE6 is pretty awful. I've spent many hours coding little jscript workarounds for IE6. It doesn't fail gracefully and in complex jscript environments, it can be entirely painful to have to change a bit of script because IE6 can't handle what every other browser can.

If anyone knows what I'm putting on my pizza, I'm FUCKED.

High school kids and anyone who spends two years at a technical school can 'program' nowadays, but coming up with a proper design is something people are still willing to pay for.

Good companies, perhaps. But in general it seems design doesn't really matter, ultimately. Business wants a blackbox that works. If it takes more time to design it and test it well, that will be deemed unnecessary at many companies. I worked at a company and the most cherished developer there was a guy who wrote terrible code, didn't communicate well, was oblivious to good design but wrote a ton of code and got it out. Every developer knew his stuff sucked, especially to maintain (of course he didn't maintain his own, he was off to a new project like the cowboy he is), but the suits don't know or don't care about that.

These nano-bots are just going to get us in trouble.

+1, totally awesome!

Never blow yourself up!