Sure, that works for some companies. In the specific case that I was describing, the vast majority of employees live in the city (many within walking distance of the office) and I think they'd be unwilling to leave. I personally live in the suburbs and commute in, but I'm the exception. Looking at the companies around where I live, there are very few I'd be interested in working for.

The banks paid back all their TARP loans years ago, along with $30BN in interest.

The car companies did not.

We use JIRA & Confluence. I'd say they were pretty stable normally, but upgrades seem to have problems more often than I'd expect, particularly when you have a bunch of plugins installed.

I certainly get the appeal of everyone having a nice office, but in a lot of cities that's simply not going to happen - the space is just far too expensive. So you end up with the choice between a more compact layout, firing a bunch of people, or moving to the burbs.

I work at a tech company in Manhattan, we have open plan offices because there's really no other option here. But there are things we do which I think help alleviate some of the common complaints I hear:

• Everyone gets an assigned desk, and it's a nice sit/stand which you can put whatever you want on (no stupid "tidyness" rules). Some people have fish tanks, huge monitor collections, libraries, whatever. The "no assigned desk" insanity is, well, insane.
• No offices, period. What's good for the developers is good for the CEO. He's often seen hanging out on the engineering floors.
• Lots of phone booths and meeting rooms if you need privacy.
• Lots of alternative working areas - there's couches everywhere if you want to chill out, a bar area, outside space. There's going to be a dedicated quiet area for people who like silence.
• Totally flexible hours/working schedules - if you're distracted and just want to head out for an hour to clear your head no one's gonna care. If you work better on a table in the park - go for it.
• No desk phones - encourages people to go away from the work area to make phone calls, which keeps noise and distractions down.

I think there are advantages to the open layout over an all office setup - I do like being able to hear what people are talking about because many, many times I've been able to get involved in something I can help with, or learn about something useful. Overall I'm pretty sure if offered the alternative (moving out of the city) pretty much everyone there would vote to stick with what we have.

Key for my car, key for my wife's car, RFID tag for access to work. All my doors at home are keyless, and I have no need for multitools, knives, flashlights etc. On the weekends the only other things I usually carry are wallet & phone - during the week I usually have my laptop and a pair of earphones. KISS :)

They're still rolling out in NYC as of at least last year (link) but they're certainly not expanding to new areas. It's sad, great service despite the company providing it!

Huh? U-Verse is AT&T, not Verizon. I'm a Fios customer and I'm....still a Fios customer?

Open Sourcing != reassigning ownership. The OP wants to _own_ the code and resell it later.

Open sourced code still (usually) has a copyright owner. The OP is asking to be assigned the copyright to work he produces as part of his job. At my job we open source as much as we can because it has many benefits to both us and the wider community - but we (the company) keep ownership of it.

I'd say he's smoking crack but maybe if he asks nicely his company will sign it over. If it were me I'd laugh him out of the room.

The test Google is doing is not looking for a "mobile version" of a site, it's looking for whether the site renders well on mobile. They're looking for basic things - are the fonts big enough to read, are the links clickable, etc. The BBC site (at least BBC News) passes their tests fine. They have a tool you can use to test for compliance.

It certainly varies by location. In most of mainland Europe cabs are fine and comfortable but extremely expensive. I will say they can be a little pushy in the larger cities (Paris, AMS in particular in my experience). London cabbies are great as long as you can find one, mini cabs (which you're often forced into on a Friday night) are basically taking your life in your hands. I live in NYC and the difference with Uber is night and day from either the yellow cabs (uncomfortable, dirty, badly driven) or the black cars (sketchy, expensive, unmetered). If nothing else having the car coming to me instead of having to guess which corner to stand on to try and flag someone down is worth the cost of admission.

You need multiple copies. Stick a BD is the safe, another at a local bank and upload to an offsite backup company like crashplan or even plain S3. All of these have failure modes, but the likelihood of them all failing at the same time is miniscule.

A degree (in literally anything) has benefits. A degree in a CS field has more benefits, regardless of when it was obtained.

I consider myself "self taught" - in that I taught myself to program when I was 6 and was already being paid to code by the time I was 16. That was over 20 years ago so I have a fair amount of experience under my belt too. But I still consider my formal education an essential part of the engineer I am today, and make use of it every single day.

Hiring is a tricky business. I have one document and maybe a couple of hours of conversation to figure out how good you are, how well you'd fit in my organization, how much you have lied about your skills, how much you'd benefit from & enjoy the role (strangely enough I don't want to hire someone who'd be miserable) and a bunch of other stuff. An appropriate degree from a decent school tells me a lot about you, along with your past work experience. The lack of a degree isn't a dealbreaker but you better be damn impressive everywhere else.

I'm going to presume someone with 5 or 6 years experience knows a handful of scripting languages, knows what version control is, can do basic database stuff, can use a bug tracker, etc.

You'd be amazed.

I just loaded yahoo mail on a clean browser and it took just under 2 seconds. Not ideal, but perfectly usable (and about the same as gmail).