Maybe in Corporate America, where you have to slave 60 hours a week just to keep your job, and where you're expected to feel guilty for wanting to have a social life. In Europe (at least developing software in the Netherlands), this is simply not true. The reason: employers realise that a high turnover costs a huge amount of money and worse, delays projects. The latter costs time to market, which can be even more expensive and in extreme cases can kill the company.

This is true. It is also the reason why your education, even if paid by your employer, is done in your personal time (usually partially for mandated courses). This way both you and your employer invest, which is only fair.

Being a software engineer instead of a hacker is all about predictability:

• Predictable planning: have it done when you say it will be.
• Software quality: use Test Driven Design to ensure your code behaves as it should.
• Predictable deployments: practice and simplify deploying your code for systems.
• Document the structure of your code, so the next guy knows what he's looking at.

There's more to each of these items, of course, but it's all about making it simple (KISS) and predictable. This sets a software engineer apart from a mere hacker.

You mean http://thedailywtf.com/ ?

Of these two items, the data portability is (luckily) moot: the more knowledgeable users (about genealogy, not software) of this kind of software are actually familiar with its problems, even in the paper world.

The second item, paying for upgrades, still exists though. And sometimes even more than average.

For basic usage, any program that supports GEDCOM (the de facto file format all good genealogy software support) will do, and your choice should be on your personal preference. So try them out first, of find your local genealogy association and ask around. Personally, I have good experience with Gramps (you already found that one) and ProGen (a dutch commercial program). The latter not being open source, it'll probably not be interesting to you.

For more advanced usage, you should know that some programs assigns a different meaning to some standard fields, and most programs have their own way of filling in custom fields. If you find yourself using such features, please consider who you'd be sharing your GEDCOM files with, and use the same. Note though, that it'll likely not be open source.

Which is the law here in the Netherlands.

Say I buy an object from a seller. Then anything that's wrong with the object (and under warranty, whether by choice or by law) is a matter between me and the seller. The manufacturer has nothing to do with it directly. If they're going to be involved (which is likely), that's a matter between the seller and the manufacturer -- I have nothing to do with that.

Maybe I'm an ergonomics nut (I always insist on a proper chair and desk, plus a good monitor height), but do these younger workers expect to make it until their retirement?
Working just anywhere is very destructive to your body, unless you pay sufficient attention to ergonomics.

A good point. Sadly, I've yet to come across an easy to understand development process that doesn't pin down way too much. We're doing Agile for a reason.

Yes it does. The difficult part is knowing the balance, as indicated by the summary: "programming may in fact be transforming into an art, one that requires a skilled hand and a creative mind [...]"

Exactly. They're testing only part of the features. The IE9 team 'just happened' to have implemented these features before other features, and the other major browsers 'just happened' to have prioritized other features before these.

This is an unfair, rigged test result by any standard.