I'm on Verizon, and the unlimited data probably doesn't help me. I'm not a big mobile user. Oddly, the minutes for our two iPhones are shared with my wife, but they didn't share the texts per month, so I have some and she doesn't.

In the software world, older has benefits too (from my perspective as a dev who's worked with both old and new devs). After 10 years in the industry I can foresee dozens of problems that newly minted college grads can't. Foresight means early prevention. My former colleagues at IBM with 25 years in the industry saw even further than I.

Send me your resume, or just go to the careers part of our site. EMC/Isilon is hiring; we have an office in Campbell though the main one is in Seattle. I'm 36, but there are people older than me doing dev work.

Now if by "no one wants older guys" you mean "won't pay what I demand", well, that is a part of economics. I'm paid significantly more than a starting employee. Maybe not quite as much as I could get elsewhere, but it seems comparable with industry pay for my level.

Hmm, so a baby at 36 weeks but still in the womb isn't alive? Even though, were the child to be outside the womb, it would survive on its own without any medical intervention?

See, it's not an easy question. With neonatal incubators babies as young as 23 weeks have survived.

I seem to remember a young man named Osama bin Laden committed terrorist acts in Afghanistan to get the Soviet Union out of it. So the Soviet Union did suffer terrorism.

Well, I can't speak t your experience, but at the formerly-small company I work for (we were acquired a year ago and have grown headcount by at least 50% in the last year, and have budget for 60% more growth on the team I'm on) not only is it not a race to the bottom, but there's lots of jobs.

It's true that when I started, at 33, I was one of the older devs. As the company grows, we're hiring more college kids than older people, still. That has nothing to do with anything but the people who are applying -- I haven't seen a lot of resumes from older workers. But we don't look at age at all, we look at talent. Definitely there's been some age 50+ hired for our east-coast branch.

The "pointy-hairs" in the company I work for are former engineers, who in some cases realized they're not great at writing software and moved into management. The first line managers are expected to be technical contributors. The company founder / CEO was an engineer.

And to the point of outsourcing: it's a temporary thing. The problem is quality -- if you are a foreigner who can write software as well as anyone else, you will not continue accepting less money for the same work for long. The only people who cost less are the ones who don't do as good of a job.

I've also been writing software professionally for a little over 10 years. I've worked on multiple projects with IBM, and now I work for a small division of EMC (the start-up was acquired). In my experience there's lots to do and learn still. The world of systems programming is never-ending -- there's more restrictions on how and what you can do, and that increases the challenge. Coding in user-space has some challenges, but when a language will do a lot of things for you; when you can rely on the OS to clean up after your mistakes, memory leaks, leaked file descriptors, etc., it's just a little boring to me. No one needs a perfectionist writing their user-space code.

Don't forget to vote in the primary as well. Knocking a candidate out in the primary can mean that you can play party politics as usual in the general. In Washington state now, the general isn't even a two-party election, it's a runoff from the top two vote getters in the primary.

Agreed -- I left in 2008 because it was painfully clear that despite good performance reviews and two promotions, my raises over 7 years amounted to inflation, plus the two bumps at promotion (a total of 15%). IBM wants to pay everyone below upper management an average salary, no matter how much better than an average job they do. It's entrenched in their compensation model and no first-line manager can do anything about it for his/her best employees. Every time someone is paid above the average for their band it's a constant battle to get them even cost-of-living adjustments, since they're above average.

I had to google Theory X, but I don't see what it has to do with annual performance reviews, which have existed at all 5 places I've worked as a professional software engineer. What's wrong with an annual performance review?