I realize you're joking, but they actually are important problems to solve. If you have 10,000 solder points, and you need your equipment to solder as fast as possible, what route do you take?

So you can certainly learn to code, and probably just as well as someone right out of school (that whole "learning is easier when you're young" thing is a crock of shit). The problem is that you will be *perceived* as "over the hill", "set in your ways", "too expensive", or just plain "too old" when interviewing for jobs. Ageism is rampant in the software development world -- I got a taste or two of it before I had even turned 30. That said, you might as well go for it, as it doesn't sound like you have better options, and with enough effort you *can* succeed, despite the ageism you'll face.

Lock contention is just another algorithm problem. You can avoid it pretty well with producer/consumer queues or even something like an actor model. Young vs old is again irrelevant, though the young guy might have the upper hand if he took one of the parallel programming courses they teach nowadays.

If the new programmer paid attention in his algorithms class, he should know the answer to that one just as well as the old guy..

I had an old fart come in as a contractor after retiring as a manager in a government agency. One of the best coders we ever had. I had another kid come right out of school, another great coder. We also had a slew of good, bad, and mediocre programmers, all with varying ages. Age has nothing to do with it.

Are you really doing that much assembly coding at google? Maybe you are, but if I was going for a google interview I would brush up on things like time complexity, tree structures, and combinatorics, and would probably fail your test because I don't memorize the names of all the steps of "look at the register, increment the register and load the memory address in another register, execute the memory in that register, repeat".

Did you try increasing their pay to match their increased productivity from their increased skillset?

I think creativity,problem solving, and math are the most important aspects of a good SE. Everything else can be learned pretty quickly. The basics of time complexity and data structures can be learned in a weekend. OOP/Design Patterns/SD Processes are something a new grad would still be learning anyway, and aren't terribly difficult. Tons of other skills are easy to learn as well. I'd like to know specifically what skills you think would require so much learning that it would be unfeasible to make the transition from hard science with programming experience to software engineering.

Generally speaking, someone with a PhD in Astronomy has done a fair amount of coding to implement their ideas. It's not far to go from scientific computing to Software Engineering, and in fact such a person would likely have a better math background than most of his fellow SEs.

I'd be willing to bet that someone with a PhD in astronomy could become a software engineer in a relatively short time... Maybe we should retrain our existing workforce instead of importing indentured servants?

I would say we should only have this arrangement with countries that agree to the same conditions. It's worked out well for the Commonwealth nations, and I don't see why it wouldn't work for us.

Work on making it cost less for government to work. This means allowing greater discretion for pay raises, fewer government contractors, more government FTE's, incentives to spend less, rather than the current incentives to spend more (e.g. remove the system where your project loses funding next year if you don't spend your entire budget in the current year), and allowing government workers to be fired or laid off for incompetence. In addition, the red tape *really* needs to be addressed. There's some real talent in the government worker pool, but their work is often stifled by onerous approval processes and mandates from top-level executives that really should not be making ground-level decisions.

Granted there may be a sampling bias, but the social media age has made things much worse. my family, who were mostly apolitical when I was growing up, have mostly become conspiracy theorists since Obama took office. If you saw how mainstream this kind of shit is in places like Oklahoma, you might be concerned about it too.

No, they're called anarchists.. I've met a few of them, too. Jackasses like the ones in Seattle during the G8 (or 6, or whatever, can't remember what the number was) or in the ALF. They're out there, but they're not nearly as common as the right wingers. What freaks me out isn't that there are *some* right wingers that do this, it's that *most* right wingers are cavalier in their attitude about killing.

I'm just saying that if several million right wingers say it in jest, a few of them aren't going to get the joke, and think it's for real. I've been all over, and I've seen many kinds of people, but the only kind that scare me more than right wingers are meth addicts (there tends to be some overlap there, which leads to a very scary combination). Liberals might say some dumb shit from time to time, but they don't often go around proposing to kill everyone who doesn't agree with them the way right wingers tend to. As for the economics thing.. If you're really worried about the minimum wage, you're looking in the wrong place in terms of employment costs. Obamacare is going to roughly double the cost of hiring a minimum wage employee, compared to the 20% pay increase from a wage hike. If we went the sensible route and had a tax-based health care system like every other country in the first world employers wouldn't have to shoulder that burden. A basic income might be a better system than a minimum wage from an economics perspective, but that has exactly zero chance of ever happening in the US.