Have you ever worked for a big software company? That's not the job of management at all. It's the essence of engineering: improving the performance of a complex system (a system of made of programmers), or alternatively, to invent the stuff that really matters. That's why the tech track exists, and that's how you get paid the same as those senior managers.

The whole point is: your productivity as a coder is just nice, but there are more important skills for senior developers to focus on: skills that scale with team size.

I've work with multiple people like that throughout my career. I've done fun tricks myself like fixing a bug in a production system that couldn't be rebooted by just editing the contents of memory, quickly debugged software we didn't have the source code for by stepping through the object, debugged complex systems from hex dumps of memory (just a print-out and a mark-1 eyeball for tools). None of that really holds a candle to not having the bugs in production in the first place, which in turn is far less important than building the product the customer actually wants, instead of what they ask for.

The better you are, the more likely it is someone less good will have to maintain your code, debug your clever multi-threaded tricks without your insight, answer customer calls asking "why is it doing this" and so on. You can only do so much yourself - how good are you at making your team more productive? How much can you teach? How well do you test and document? How good are you at working with that team 12 timezones away that your whole project depends on? How good are you at spotting the 3 candidates in a sea of dozens of interviews that are as good as you, and making sure they get hired?

Banging out code is an important part of the job, to be sure, and is probably all that matters for a junior dev. But the more senior you are, the more it matters how well your skills scale with team size.

I suspect you're a self-proclaimed "rock star" who's convinced he's God's gift to programming, but hasn't worked on a team of equally-smart people, or who doesn't understand the reality of large projects.

Ability to bang out lots of code is the right way to measure a junior developer, but is not the essence of productivity. Two guys drive from NYC to LA - one at 10 MPH, one at 100 MPH. Who get there first? Well, it's important to know which one is headed in the right direction, and which one drives into the ocean, and is either of them so careless they're unlikely to make it there alive in the first place.

If your job skill is "given a clear design with unambiguous requirements and success criteria, I can bang out that code very fast," well, that's great for a junior dev. If you write well-tested, debugable, supportable, maintainable, secure, scalable code given ambiguous requirements, great, that's a successful mid-career dev. If you can fix everything wrong process-wise with your 100-dev organization so that everyone can work twice as fast, well, you're 10x as productive as the guy who sits in a corner and bangs out 10x the code, aren't you? If you can invent a product that solves a problem that everyone has, but no one else thought there was a solution to, well, the guy banging out code isn't even on the same scale.

Soot, CO, CO2, and nitric oxides, besides the water vapor. Just like burning diesel fuel, except the proportions are different and the soot is finer.

Was about to post the same: worked with a programmer once who was in a reasonably successful second-tier rock band (they were big enough in Japan to tour there each year with their vacation time).

It's a network effect - you hire where you can find lots of skilled workers, and the worker move to where companies are hiring. Silly Valley is the largest hub, but on the West Coast there a fair pool of jobs in LA associated with Hollywood, and a large and fast-growing pool in Seattle where MS and Amazon are headquartered, and many other large companies have offices to mine that talent pool.

No, I really won't. Cheapskate organizations don't hire senior devs in the first place: only managers are paid well. Mature software shops, on the other hand, value devs on the technical track highly - they're harder to hire than managers. Especially once you get past the equivalent of first-level managers: Principle Engineers (or whatever you call the equivalent to a second-level manager) are golden. Middle management comes and goes with every re-org, but those few guys who work as engineers at that level certainly don't need agents - I know my company has an entire team of recruiters that do nothing but look for those guys.

Check out this map for an idea of minimum safe frost depths across the country, plenty of populated places are well below 4', and even those that are close to 4' probably have competing uses for that space just below the frost line. Then again with a horizontal bore cable layer it doesn't really matter whether it's 2' or 8' deep, the impact at the surface is all in the weight of the machine and the footprint of its treads.

The "10x productivity" idea is somewhat silly anyhow - sure, some people are quite productive, but mostly if one guy is 10x another, the other guy just sucks.

I'm not valued because I can bang out more code than the next guy - I'm valued because I can lead a team of people and make them more productive: through design review, best practices, experience doing agile right, and so on. Sure, all those things make me more productive to, but it's much more valuable as a force multiplier for a large team.

That's what the job is, as a senior dev. That and doing all the horrible wrangling with project management systems, clarifying user requirements coming from PMs and translating them into sanity, and so on. The more senior I become, the less time I spend coding, because there's only so much value I add working by myself.

There are also no flying spaghetti monsters, talking flying unicorns, mice that turn into princesses when the clock hits 12. I don't have to prove any of it, I can come up with a million things that don't exist and are only a figment of my imagination, exactly in the same way that people that believe in 'souls' have done.

I claim knowledge that there is no pink flying spider octopus macaque with a huge diamond for a brain. I just invented that fantasy, it exists in my imagination but not outside of it. I don't have to prove that it doesn't exist, I can claim that it doesn't exist and the probability of my claim being wrong is in such low numbers as to being absolutely insignificant.

You can carry on with your fallacies now.

Bridesmaids, The Heat, Mean Girls ...

Not sure if they qualify or not, but they are likely candidates.

Ironically, the MPAA you cite possesses no power that the public doesn't give it voluntarily. The MPAA puts ratings on its movies. Movie theaters show these movies to the public. These theaters are under no obligation to ban unrated movies. That they have collectively decided to do so is a social phenomenon, not a regulatory one.

In this sense, the MPAA has no more power than, say, Consumer Reports Magazine. If I decide to open a theater chain showing any movie, regardless of rating, nobody can stop me. But my success will depend upon the public's willingness to ignore that lack of rating. Honestly, it might make a fun social experiment to see what would happen, but I lack the funds and time to do it. I suspect the results would surprise the MPAA, as social and moral attitudes have changed markedly in the last several decades. I don't think many people really care all that much about ratings anymore. It should be enough to note if a movie contains "adult content" or is "suitable for children" and that's about it.

Clearly I am dealing with an attempt at trolling here, because there is no way somebody is this dense. So give it up already, ad hominem, appeal to authority, burden of proof fallacy, etc.etc.

I am certain that you believe you are having a ton of fun, it's nice to see somebody who has nothing better to do than to go through an alphabet list of fallacies while pretending they have an argument.

There are no souls any more than there are flying fire-breathing dragons and if you want to prove that there are fire-breathing that's fine, but you can't demand that everybody proves that there are no dragons, you have to prove their existence. Same applies to your 'soul' fantasies.

Consider that any successful experience in cloning anything adds to our knowledge base about cloning. By perfecting cloning, we can do a lot more than just bring back extinct species. We could, for example, grow entirely new organs cloned from your body to replace damaged or failing ones, organs that could be transplanted into you without fear of tissue rejection. Further, the practice of being able to reliably modify cells at the genetic level can lead to all sorts of other benefits in medicine, biology, and even far-flung fields as nanotechnology when you consider the scale you have to work in.

The whole "can't you spend your time/money better" argument is pretty short-sighted when you consider the enormous ancillary benefits. It's like saying why bother going to the moon when you can spend money on Earth. But without that impetus, we might not have the very computers and Internet you're currently using to read this post, or lasers to correct your vision, or lightweight, strong materials used to make the planes you fly on, or the fuel cells used to power zero-emission vehicles, or...you get the idea.

Stop thinking in checkers. Think chess. It's not the current move that matters; it's the move you make three moves from now that wins the game.

- hmm, I never said that, why are you putting words into my mouth that I never said?

Infants have rights because their parents want them to have rights and so their parents ensure their rights. You are a very strange individual.