You may want to take a seat, this may be a bit of a shock to you; this is a website about technology. Perhaps surprisingly, the desktop many of us have to support counts as "technology". Therefore, the company behind the OS on these desktops gets attention. More so when they make as many boneheaded moves as MS has over the past several years.

For a while there, MS was doing "OK". Windows 7 was decent ( even though they moved shit around on me and broke some functionality that was useful to admins in xp...but I digress ), security was 1000% better than it used to be. They were really picking up steam, especially after vista.

I was worried about BTC crashing, but thankfully they're looking to outlaw it.

Investment secured!

I have always felt that "Ask Slashdot" is the haven for the "simplified answers".

I'm not going to try to break down the variety of scenarios where he should or shouldn't make the leap. Rather, my focus is on the "big picture"; if he has a family, it's not about his selfish needs anymore. If he doesn't, he can be as selfish as he wants.

If you have a family to support, stay put. You have a good, stable job. Your "boredom" is immaterial to providing for your family. In short, get over yourself. You are working for more than just yourself now.

If you don't have a family to support: Take it. Now's the time to make your mistakes. The worst thing that happens is that the company goes bust, you have some peanut butter and ramen days as you find another job. If it's just you, then it's no big deal, right?

Don't misunderstand me; I'm not saying that rote memorization is worthless. As you rightly pointed out, repeated exposure leads to memorization. A good programmer has strengths in many different areas.

My overall point being that an IDE won't lead to degraded quality of programmer. You aren't atrophying skills by using an IDE, you are simply making your life easier ( which is critical when we're talking about more than personal projects ).

Look, it's nice when you are well versed enough in a language to not have to lookup method/function names, nor their arguments. But let's face it, it's hardly the mark of an amazing programmer to have a photographic memory.

Programmers solve problems. Being able to understand the problem well enough to develop a solution for it is far more important a skill. Writing well documented code using a uniform style further boosts the quality of the output by helping make it maintainable.

An IDE is, at worst, neutral in this regard, if not beneficial for assisting in the last point.

Not that I don't believe it, necessarily. Merely that it can't be trusted. At all.

At least this one admits to working for MS.

I swear, I have seen more shills flood the internet advocating Windows8 than for any other product in history.

And trust the free market for once. If there's a worker shortage, then wages will rise until demand and supply equalize and there is no more shortage.

Ah...I think I now see his motivation.

You have to admit, it's clever.

Opinions are like assholes, everyone's got 'em. However, they are *just* opinions and thus should not be incorporated into your decision making process. Even the grossly ignorant have opinions after all, should we start incorporating those in to the equation too?

Snowden's status is remarkably simple; The US government is violating the 4th amendment. Snowden exposed this at great risk to himself. ie; Hero.

Of course with Snowden being the hero and patriot in this little tale, what does that make our government?

Actually, done right, firing squad is probably quite painless for the executed. A couple shots to the head, and I'm pretty sure the prisoner won't be feeling anything any longer. Hell, they won't even have time to hear the shot from the gun.

It's messy, sure, but it's largely painless done right.

Maybe by other senior managers.

It hurts how relevant this cynicism is to corporate america. Having had the...um..."pleasure", of working for several stores ( grocery, retail and a few specialty. Best not to ask ), large and small, IT is treated with, at best, neglect. Usually, however, it's more along the lines of resentment. Like they feel pressured to allocate budget money to IT that they feel might be better put towards anything else, but since everyone else is doing it they feel like they should too.

And it shows.

Correction: Anything that doesn't move fast enough!