Right. In fact, everyone who starts a small business was rich before, and even if their business collapses while they're pumping their own savings back into it so they can keep paying their employees in a down period, they'll still have plenty of money left over to pay for health insurance and a good school for their kids.

If you really feel that starting a business is an easy choice and carries no real risk, go ahead and do it yourself. There's nothing magic about it, and nothing is stopping you but your own prejudice. Then you can make sure that when you do hire guys to do potentially dangerous manual work, they've got the best safety gear and working conditions and site supervision possible.

I'm guessing you're just trolling, but here are some obvious examples:

• http://office.microsoft.com/en-gb/
• http://www.apple.com/ipad/
• http://www.adobe.com/uk/products/photoshop.html

My mod points just ran out or you'd have had a (+1, Insightful) for that.

As you say, the major difference between most successful FOSS projects and most successful CCSS ones probably isn't the programming, it's everything else. It's the vision and creativity and market research. It's the willingness and ability to commit entire teams for weeks in a row to completely rewrite an area of the UI that wasn't working quite as well as it could. It's spending time and money to implement tedious file conversion code and license relevant technologies, because people in the real world need to use the de facto standard proprietary formats, even if they are patent-encumbered. It's hiring a team of technical writers and illustrators to produce a user-friendly help system that actually does help. It's spending a small fortune running observation tests with actual users to find the most important problems, and then fixing those first. In short, it's having leadership/management who are user-focussed and able to direct their resources objectively to where they will make the most difference to those users.

I guess my political views aren't quite as passionate as yours on some issues, but I agree that we seem to have forgotten how to be politically moderate and how to balance opposing views and look for the best in each of them. A lot of mainstream politicians talk about being in the centre, but actions speak louder than words, and we have seen a lot of very polarising policies advocated in recent years. I suspect this has a lot to do with 24 hour news cycles and sound-bite PR, but maybe it was always that way and I'm just getting old enough to be cynical about it now. ;-)

I think we probably agree on many of the fundamental points here, even if our experience of the effectiveness of the current system and how hard kids are working has been a little different. There's definitely an element of rose-tinted spectacles when we look back to our own time at school, to be sure. I also agree that people should stop thinking their own generation was somehow better academically than anyone else's; I just think that cuts both ways, and the people involved in the system today would do well to acknowledge what may have been lost as well as what may have been gained.

Anyway, thanks for an interesting discussion.

Well, I'm not sure that swapping three years of experience in their chosen vocation and the income and freedom that come with it for three years racking up debts that will burden them for many years afterwards, all on the promise that their degree in some artificial subject will somehow improve their long term prospects, is really doing anyone any favours. I'm all for supporting education for education's sake, and for everyone being educated to the highest standard they are willing and able to reach; I'm not talking about that here. What I'm talking about is pushing young people who could have been successful in another vocation down an academic track paved with false promises.

I think your claim about people going on to do PhDs is unrealistic, too, FWIW, but let's not get bogged down in that one.

Do they? Really? I don't know how old you are or what generation of exams you took yourself, but I was taking GCSEs a couple of decades ago. Looking at the way things have changed, sure, it's good to get past rote learning of facts or recitals of works that ten seconds on their smartphones could find for them. But a lot of the new material that has replaced that rote learning seems to be little more than vague waffle about ill-defined subjects.

I don't see any signs that kids are developing better mathematical aptitude, only that too many seem to need calculators to do basic arithmetic these days and don't notice obvious errors in results because they seem to have little intuition -- very much the opposite to the claimed changes. Do kids today really spend more time in labs conducting the basic experiments that formed the foundation of today's scientific understanding? Have they gained a better ability to construct a logical argument in maths or write persuasively in English? Do they speak foreign languages with basic conversational fluency and confidence when they go abroad on holiday? Are they aware of pivotal events in history, how they happened, and the lessons we can learn from them? To me, all of these things would be valuable alternatives to rote learning, but none of the school age kids I know give the impression that they're significantly better off in these respects than your or I would have been in our day.

So while we're in complete agreement about the value of teaching kids to think and research, it seems we might disagree on how effectively these things have been learned under the systems of the past few years, and perhaps I also feel that more textbook knowledge is still useful than you would argue, simply on the basis that without context and examples and a general knowledge of the field it's tough to know where to start. What use is Wikipedia, if you have no idea that a relevant topic exists or what to search for to find it?

With hindsight, that's very clear. If we had done so, we'd be in much the same position as Germany, except that with our economy based strongly (probably much too strongly) on the financial sector rather than robust manufacturing and service sectors, we might have found that position even more uncomfortable.

At this point, if anything I'd say the opposite is happening: public sentiment that has been questioning the whole EU deal for a long time in some political circles has now become overwhelmingly anti-Europe almost across the board. People see an economic disaster that they don't want any part of, and more than that, they see levels of corruption and governments flailing around unable to fix the problems in ways that make even the most controversial administrations we've had over here in living memory seem almost mild by comparison. Ironically, this might be the one issue that trumps the economy at our next general elections in 2015, which is why all of the major political parties are testing the waters and putting campaign feelers out even now.

We're drifting a bit off-topic here, but I just wanted to say that I think education actually was one of the other areas where any incoming government was going to be doomed before they even took office.

For years, our education system at secondary and tertiary levels has been based on fantasy. Standards haven't really risen dramatically for decades for secondary school leavers, but it's easier to appease parents and teachers by pretending they have than to pick the fight. You can't really put 50% of each generation through university and expect that the degrees they come out with will get all of them the kinds of graduate jobs that used to be available when only 5-10% of each generation continued on to university. You certainly can't do that, and then not only remove financial support but actively charge a small fortune for the privilege, leaving entire generations saddled with debts before they even start their first real job, and then expect that there will be no negative consequences.

Unfortunately, anything that would fix these problems requires acknowledging that the teaching profession has been covering its collective backside for years rather than confronting the small but significant fraction of professional teachers who simply aren't up to the job. It requires admitting (or at least understanding) that the quality of teaching at universities is often pathetic, and that being an illustrious institution with an international reputation to protect does not change this. It requires honestly confronting falling standards and recognising that the entire basis of our higher education system is unsustainable and economically crippling a generation. It will take big changes to fix these things one way or another, but it was a constant pressure for change and improvement that created many of the underlying problems in the first place, so what to do?

Gove himself is a slightly odd character to me, because half of the time I feel like he's the first Education Secretary we've had in years who actually has the guts to stand up and tell it as it is, but the other half of the time I wonder where he dreamt up this or that crazy idea and what he was smoking when he thought alienating this or that major part of the education profession would help.

I think in the UK context, "austerity" is mostly just a political/media buzzword of the moment. We're somewhat isolated from the Eurozone chaos here, and although people borrow the word, I don't think there's any real similarity between economic conditions in the UK (not great but mostly recovered from the worst of the credit crunch) and economic conditions in continental Europe (riots on the streets, ordinary people worrying about basic everyday needs, unelected governments taking power, mass cash grabs on bank accounts, fundamental destruction of trust in essential political and financial systems by the general population).

More generally, austerity seems to have been a moderately disastrous panic reaction to the unsustainable political and economic models used in many Eurozone countries and the doubtful future of the Eurozone as a whole while member states have such vast differences in their economic strengths. I'm not an economics expert, so maybe I'm just failing to appreciate some subtlety of what the governments in question were really hoping to achieve, but from a lay person's perspective it seems like they dived into a knee-jerk cost-cutting spree without having a plan for the end-game. As a result, while they have cut some costs (no bad thing in many of the countries in question), they also seem to have undermined everyday life and with it any prospect of economic growth in the near future. As far as I can tell, the entire economic foundation of the Eurozone now consists of one part underwriting by economic giants like Germany and a second part that is basically 100% funny money, mixed in debatable proportions and with a liberal measure of wishful thinking to top it off. I'm therefore expecting further spectacular collapses before we're done, unfortunately.

To be fair, the incoming government this time was going to inherit a poisoned chalice in so many ways that whoever won they would never have a fighting chance. The only strategic difference was that Labour basically knew they had no chance of winning outright before the election campaign even started, so they could safely poison the well knowing that even in their worst plausible outcome they would have someone to share the blame with in a coalition.

I'm not convinced that most European governments really have any idea what they're doing right now, but I'm also not convinced that anyone else who was running for election would have done much better from the same starting point, including either of the parties currently in coalition in the UK if they had won outright.

If we're going to debate this, we need to be careful to distinguish between the scope of government and the efficiency of government.

Personally, I'd be the first to agree that many western governments have far too broad a scope today and the public sector has become unsustainably large. That's a real economic problem, and sooner or later someone's going to have to deal with it.

But on the efficiency question, the evidence is not nearly so clear. It's easy to find spectacular examples of government inefficiency and horrendous waste, but it's also easy to find spectacular success stories where nationalised, government-run infrastructure dramatically outperforms private, commercial provision of the equivalent services in other places. And some functions really have to be reserved to some form of government at a basic level, unless you want to start outsourcing things like making laws and starting wars to private industry.

For this discussion, the key point to me is that as long as there is any area that government is responsible for operating, there needs to be some way to pay for it. It would be fascinating to see what would happen if we had some radically different mechanism for doing that instead of what we have today, but until we've discovered a way to try something else without undermining the basic fabric of our societies, taxation is the least worst option we've found so far. The amount of taxation that is justified is a quantitative question and relates to both the efficiency and the scope of government, and the division of that tax burden among taxpayers is again something to be debated, but the principle that people/businesses should make a contribution in return for valuable government services (whatever those might be) is a reasonable one.

Just to be clear, I'm looking at all of this from a UK perspective.

There are some professions that are very well-paid, if and when you make it to the higher levels. You mentioned doctors, so let's consider that. Those hospital consultants and GPs who are earning a tidy living at 40 were probably junior doctors at 25. Maybe it's different in the US, but in the UK that means working around twice as many hours as most of us do, severely limiting social life and relationships and several years, and getting paid a fairly feeble wage, certainly far less than anyone with the drive and aptitude to become a senior doctor later could be earning in another field. Even when they become senior doctors, these are people who may be charged with making decisions that are literally life and death, and a lot of them are still working pretty long hours with all the admin that comes with those jobs on top of their clinical work. I don't think paying those people a high wage is at all unreasonable in return for all they did earlier in their lives to get there and in recognition of the skill and experience that they possess as a result. If you want an insult, bundle people like that in the "rich" pile with movie stars, celebrity sportspeople, and old money inheritors who might never have put in an honest day's work in their lives.

As for the entrepreneurs, you're quite right that it's a big risk and many people lose even if they do nothing wrong, but I think it's laughable to pretend that "everyone" works as hard and takes the same level of risk and makes the same level of sacrifice in life. Anyone who is bootstrapping a new business is probably giving up a lot that they could have had and done in order to get that business going, and even if the business is successful it will be paying tax itself and probably contributing to the economy by employing further people before it pays out any big profits. Again, it seems crazy to me that we might look at someone who has maybe risked all their savings, delayed having a family, learned a multitude of useful skills, basically given up a few years of their lives to get a business going, and then if their business is successful still begrudge them earning even 2-3x what they could easily have made in a regular day job. And yet, that is where the top tax rate in the UK kicks in at the moment.

Because while taxation may be tantamount to theft and it may be inherently evil and it may be desirable to minimise it as much as possible, we haven't yet found a more effective way to fund government services, and at least some of the services governments provide are valuable, including to those people at Apple and Google.

Not everyone hates the government. The executives of big companies are actually so fond of them that they even take their government chums out to expensive restaurants and parties on their private yachts.

It's just the poor people who hate the government, because they're all nasty and poor and horrible.

And the middle classes, whose tax money is going on unpopular schemes like wars and helping poor people.

Oh, and the professionals/entrepreneurs, because after years of hard work, sacrifice and risk-taking that will stop many in their tracks, those who do succeed are then considered "rich" and taxed sharply, while the people who are actually rich have enough mobility to avoid those same high taxes, which is why the very high tax rates don't actually raise much money for the government anyway.

Whether an older developer has that kind of knowledge depends greatly on the developer, IME. You get people who coast along and never really made any effort to learn the fundamentals at any age, but if you've got someone with 20 years of experience (as opposed to the same year 20 times) then I'd say yes, there's a good chance they've picked up a lot of general programming knowledge over the course of their career.

In contrast, it would be a truly exceptional recent college graduate who did. A typical undergraduate CS curriculum, even at a reputable institution, is only going to have time to cover the basics in each area, and usually more as theoretical learning of textbook knowledge rather than instilling much insight into concrete practical applications. That's a fine start to a career, but now take someone who graduated from that course with the sound theoretical foundation and give them a few years of professional experience as well, applying their knowledge and exploring the areas that are most relevant to their work more deeply, and the result is probably a very capable developer indeed before they even hit 30 and a walking, talking software production machine by 40.

FWIW, I don't buy the arguments about not going to conferences or having kids implying a slow-down as developers get older. If you're managing technical employees and relying entirely on them to spend their own time outside of work keeping up to date, if you're the guy who gets asked by an interview candidate what sort of training you offer and all you can say is something vague about "on the job training", then IMHO you're just setting your organisation up for problems later.

On the other hand, suppose you hire people who are competent and have a genuine interest in improving -- not necessarily 24/7 geeks or rockstar types, just professionals with decent skills and a sincere desire to do a good job -- and you give them actual support. My experience has been that it pays off big-time almost every time. All it takes is simple things like setting aside a credible budget for training and buying reference materials, allowing a useful amount of time each week/month to be dedicated to professional development rather than cranking out code, or organising informal talks by new guys or people with side projects to share their ideas and experience of software development, whether or not the tools or techniques they're using are immediately applicable to what you're doing professionally right now.