One of our better employees lives in Kansas City - rock on! I think you have brought up an important point - good talent is awesome, no matter where they live. Going forward it is critically important to find good talent wherever you can find it.

This sounds like a real situation, but I don't see it here in the Bay Area. Most companies list everything they want in a perfect candidate and take the best fit they can find, due to the large demand and lack of supply of qualified software engineers here. Companies that hire based exclusively on exact experience matches will end up paying for their narrowmindedness by hiring mediocre talent instead of looking at brighter candidates that could end up contributing more if given the opportunity to learn the specialized skills they lack.

I am reminded of what I heard about hiring at a state school though. It is not unusual to tailor the requirements to either match a desired prospect or exclude undesirable coworkers who are guaranteed a preferential opportunity to apply for the job. I guess these are the games that employers play when they have to play by arbitrary rules.

Isn't every IT "war" a fight between cupcakes?

Kudos for hitting virtually all of the important buzzwords! MVC is far too old for your usage, though; you should have used RESTful instead.

...Or they got an ISP email account before gmail even existed.

Yes, I read there is an impending Zombie Apocalypse to prepare for...

How does your company attract and retain talent with such draconian policies?

Ironically those are three things that were not true for Bilbo Baggins when he started his adventure. I'm not sure why I felt the need to point this out.

I had largely the same experience at UC Berkeley, but I wasn't paying tens of thousands of dollars a year in tuition. If I were going to an elite, spendy private school I would expect more in the classroom.

That said, teachers are only a part of the learning experience. I learned a lot of interesting things from the teaching assistants that helped with our large classes, and still more from random older students in our computer labs. One of the advantages of going to a ginormous research university is that there are a lot of really smart people that you can learn from outside of lectures.

Java developers aren't going to decide to switch to Objective-C to address 5% of the desktop market. Most of the Java developers I know prefer Mac hardware for its easy interoperability with Linux. If Apple kills the Mac OS JVM then we will be forced to switch to Windows. I don't see how this benefits Apple in any way.