But you, sir, are criticizing one who is opposed to religious extremists, and in so doing are aiding and comforting such extremists. That is indefensible.

The GP is right: worshiping a murdering, psychopathic deity is stupid.

Then again, I would call any religious worship (of belief or non-belief in a deity) an act of psychopathy. The world would be a better place without religion of any kind; without Christianity, without Buddhism, without Islam, without Jainism, without (even) Atheism, and so forth. The dissolution of belief and non-belief in the existence of the unprovable would do us all incalculable good.

Seriously. The insanity of working late to meet some artificial, wholly-arbitrary deadline has to stop.

Unless people *actually* die if you miss your deadline -- i.e., unless you work for the CIA or maybe work directly with patients in a hospital -- go home. Your wife, kids, dog, and personal mental health will sincerely thank you.

Your boss likely won't do that, and even if he does, he won't compensate you for your extra time. Unless you believe in communism, stop working for free.

And yes, I am completely serious...

Wrong; cultural distinctions exist. The "V sign" is a common symbol of "peace" in the U.S., and formerly of "victory" during the World Wars. But in Australia? It's offensive, as George Bush Sr. found the hard way in 1992.

Unfortunately, most people possessing a PhD *are* so arrogant as to believe that lacking a PhD means lacking the ability to contribute unique insights to their body of knowledge.

But see, that's the difference between you and most computer geeks -- you have a life! Meeting friends for beers after work? Not something most geeks do, even the relatively-social ones. Exercise? How many geeks are overweight? And showering?

FWIW, I'm with you 100%. I'd never work again either, and I have habits like those you described. :) But I'm also somewhat unusual (read: social, well-adjusted) as computer geeks go.

And it's because of people like you (and me) that we have stories like these, where people are demanded to work not only 40 hours/week -- a number that arose not out of thin-air, but because it is actually a reasonable average for a variety of workloads -- but also unpaid overtime, including nights, weekends, and holidays.

(Disclaimer: I am also a software consultant. I often work long hours of unpaid overtime - and I think the practice ought to be criminalized.)

Is the lack of testing the reason you see those boxes coming back to you 2 weeks later?

Very true. But disasters of Vista's sort (and that of so many other software projects) take months or years to create.

Meanwhile, Joe Manager has a quarterly revenue and/or budget target to meet, or an uber-aggressive deadline imposed by the client (if a consulting firm), and so doesn't have time to make things right. He has only time... to create a barely-functional app that is ultimately a disaster.

Short-termist thinking is the biggest problem American business faces today, even bigger than the financial crisis, because it drives nearly every bad behavior (both those that are illegal, and those that are legal and merely idiotic) we so-frequently find in businesses.

Can you give an idea of what labor laws as relating to IT people (particularly developers) are like in Canada (or at least in your province), specifically regarding overtime? e.g. how it works if you're salaried vs. hourly? (Or point me towards good resources? I've googled for hours before, and come up with relatively little.)

My understanding is that there are U.S.-like laws surrounding hourly employment, and enforced via employee reporting at the provincial level. But they are nonetheless stricter: my understanding is that - for hourly employees - anything above 40h/week requires the job falling into a certain classification, and even then, only 48h/week is considered acceptable. Beyond that OT must be paid, up to some maximum level -- and while the employer can have somebody work long hours, the hours worked must average-out to some level per 2 week period (e.g. if you work 12h one day, then you might only work 4h the next day, and then 8h/day for the remaining days).

But IT people are rarely hourly; most of us are salaried (certainly all my jobs have been, anyway). How does OT work for salaried employees in Canada?

It can't be any worse than America, where you can be worked 8 hours/day or 16 hours/day, every day of the week (theoretically) - and expect exactly the same pay no matter how much you work... (Hence why I would be overjoyed if salaried employment were outlawed. But that will never happen here, so my next best option is to move to a sane, reasonable, better-balanced country.)

True, so let me clarify: the rate must be either project (or case, or other unit of work)-based, or based on a rate with no granularity than an hour. The denominator unit must be small enough to capture the time and misery costs of working e.g. 12 hours (or more) per day instead of some lesser amount.

The "per day" point is key, as the human body has daily limits of its performance - everyone needs food, sleep, and (for any more than a short period) love and recreation.

There is NO justification for uncompensated -- i.e. free -- labor. Especially when one is working for a for-profit enterprise.

I support outlawing all non-rate-based employment, including salaried employment. All work should be paid on the basis of a rate: dollars/hour, dollars/project, or some other rate.

A flat 40 hours/week with no OT compensation and no cost to the employer to work the employee longer than that is fucking criminal... and only a communist -- one who believes in the free labor for the benefit of a larger collective (like a corporation?) -- would support it.

Yet, we have quite a few commies running businesses. Funny thing, that...

IT people have for far too long been working too many free hours. And for what? The opportunity to work more? Why? That's the most irrational thing we can do... ...except we do it, quite rationally, out of individual self-interest because we know that the pressure of competition means if we complain about it or leave, some other poor sucker will take our place (the squeaky wheel gets replaced) -- and our next job will simply be a repeat of the previous one, with similar responsibilities.

The only escape is a non-IT job.

Seriously, it's time we stood-up for *sane*, sensible labor regulations in America. You'd think a leftie like Obama would push this, but no...

I doubt people will be so quick to forget the reasons they moved away from the Republicans the last go around and so I think third parties will really make an emergence in the NEXT election cycle.

What U.S. historical evidence do you have that:

1) 3rd parties "will really make an emergence in the NEXT election cycle"?
2) That if a 3rd party emergence actually occurs, it will be significant enough to result in a 3rd party candidate winning the election? (Because if they do not win, then it doesn't matter that their presence was made - results, i.e. winning, is the only thing that matters.)

The Libertarian Party has never achieved higher than a 1% popular vote (in 1980) for President. I believe the Green Party once garnered 2%. Ross Perot took 19% in 1996 -- the best of any 3rd party in U.S. history, AFAIK -- but Clinton of course still won (around 45% popular vote, IIRC). Eugene Debs in 1916 took 16% of the popular vote, but he too, lost (and was later imprisoned for holding socialist political views).

That's my knowledge of 3rd party performance in U.S. Presidential elections; those facts suggest the odds for 3rd parties in 2012 are grim - as they always have been.

So in the space of just 50 years we've gone from "The buck stops here" to "I can't possibly be expected to know about EVERYTHING that my appointee's are up to"

Is this such a bad thing, long-term? "The buck stops here" is a confident-sounding statement of authority. It's also been demonstrated as too confident -- typical of people making confident statements that are difficult to disprove.

By contrast, it is far more realistic to expect that there are too many things to keep track of in a bureaucracy of 1.5 million (or more) people, like the U.S. Federal Government. It's true: that is *far* too much information for 1 man to process. That is a fact, and no confident-sounding 20th-century bullshit like "the buck stops here" will change that.

The more people realize this, the more hope will be lost in the notion that a large, socialist bureaucracy like our current national government can be competently and knowledgeably managed. For all the flaws demonstrated by the financial crisis, decentralization is the only serious answer to the problem of accountably coordinating action.

The Waterfall Model stressed rigid functional and design specification of the program(s) to be constructed in advance of any code development. While the this methodology and other early formal tools for Software Engineering were infinitely preferable to the chaos and ad-hoc programming-without-design practices of early systems,

The author of this /. post erroneously completed that last sentence. Appended above should be "it was replaced by a return to those same engineering failures of chaos and ad-hoc programming-without-design practices wrought under the name of Agile".

Pig, meet lipstick. In practice, Agile = cowboy coding; I've never seen it done any other way, even though yes, in theory it *shouldn't* be that way...

Running. Lead pipe. Both ways. :-)