Honestly, I'd rather have cash on me. Someone robbing me is acting antisocially and violently, and that makes them inherently unpredictable. What do they want? Not a bit of plastic that I can cancel the minute they walk away. Are they sophisticated enough to want my ID to use for identity theft? Nope. Identity thieves pull that crap all the time without having to carry the risk of getting violent with a stranger in public. They steal it electronically.

So ... they might want cash. I'm not sure, but it's a real chance. And if there isn't any cash, how are they gonna react? Are they gonna stab me?

Unless they have X-ray vision, by the time they know whether I'm carrying a bunch of cash or not, we're already way outside my comfort zone - and you know what? I'd rather be able to give them some cash - pull out a good handful of bills and toss them in the wind. Even if they weren't after cash at first, hopefully they'll be more interested in picking up the cash than in chasing me.

Of course, if you're unaware enough to be flashing around all the cash you're carrying for everyone to see - if you just can't stop yourself pulling out your wad of 50s and fanning it around every time you pay for something - then, maybe stop carrying cash around.

Finding good engineers is hard. Growing teams is hard. Growing a company in order to support old software comes with all sorts of extra costs: more admin/HR staff, more office space. It's not just a case of "hey we have an extra hundred million bucks, look, we can support an old version for longer now!"

Companies make a call about balancing supporting old versions with what else they can do - and at some point, older versions are gonna get dumped no matter what.

I've seen so many security disasters caused by "IT professionals" who are just focused on enforcing security policies. My favourite example was a major client who spent months trying to get their IT security division to play ball on a project, but every effort proved fruitless - the firewalls and network security policies were there for a good reason, dammit, and they weren't prepared to compromise on security.

Faced with pressure to get the project completed, the project team ended up plugging in heaps of 3g modems all over the site, to allow network connectivity to the systems they needed external access to. This access went in with no network-level access controls or firewall, and to the best of my knowledge they're still there, years later.

Would I have done that? No. I would have resigned first. But these people had jobs and liked keeping them, and faced with the certainty of a failed project, or the possibility of someone (probably not them) taking a fall over breaching security policy, they went with whatever got the job done. The project manager met his KPI, the team got to move on to other projects, and security got to feel smug because they kept their network security policies intact.

I saw the whole debacle happen (and I've seen plenty of similar situations over the years), and in my opinion it's been a failure of the security team just about every time. Facing a choice between:
a) Enabling engineers to solve business requirements while ensuring there are effective and well-managed security controls, or
b) Enforcing security as a top priority, with little regard for the requirements of other business divisions,
security teams often just go with option b. They pretend the inevitable workarounds aren't their fault.

Every time they say "yes" to something which increases security risk, the security team risks something going wrong - but every time they say "no" they risk people coming up with their own work-around instead. Security teams should be enablers - finding ways to secure what needs to be done. Once they become known as deniers, they'll just end up fighting an adversarial battle with their own colleagues. That doesn't result in effective security.

If you have Absolutely Critical code that's sitting on a developer's machine with no other copies or backups, you kinda deserve to lose it.

I once started at a company which was in the middle of a tabs-vs-spaces pissing match. Their staff turn-over was huge - they had the entrenched long-termers (who got involved in things like pissing matches over white-space) who hung around, and it was a revolving door for everyone else: nobody wanted to hang around that environment. I lasted eight months, and should have left much sooner - lesson learned. I promised myself that if I ever walk into a company which is genuinely having these sorts of in-fights again, I'll turn around and leave on the spot. There are too many good opportunities to stay at companies that hire middle-aged teenagers.

The flip-side is that I've been doing team-lead roles for quite a while now, so I guess it's my job to fix that kind of thing. We're not being paid to have fights over rubbish like that - we're being paid to develop high-quality, well-tested, maintainable software. Anyone who wants to waste time and harm morale in drawn-out fights over white-space can get out.

> Am I just going there to network, or am I learning new cutting-edge techniques and getting enlightened by awesome training sessions? Or is it just a fun way to get a free trip to Las Vegas?

Yes. You're going there to network - not just with companies who might hire you away, but with potential future colleagues you might help to recruit. You're going to talk to other attendees about what they're doing, compare notes on what works and what doesn't, and meet subject-matter experts who you can tweet if you get stuck. You're going to get invited to the local tech community Slack, where you can do all of the above (and more) even after the conference is over.

You might well be enlightened by the sessions - you'll probably run into at least a few things you didn't know about before. You're unlikely to learn all the details, but you'll at least find out that the thing exists, and probably enough information to decide whether it's worth investigating further at work (or away from work). Speaking of away from work, it's likely to pique your interest about things which aren't relevant at work (yet), possibly enough that you'll investigate them on your own time.

The free trip to Vegas (/ wherever) shouldn't be ignored. Having a good time, and associating that good time with work having paid for it, shouldn't be under-valued - it's likely to be reflected in your productivity and loyalty.

Many of these things are great for your employer as well as for you. What manager doesn't want a team filled with well-connected, loyal, enthusiastic developers who are interested in the latest developments in tech and may well do some learning on their own time as well?

Could a major research-focused company like Samsung have state-of-the-art innovations which they're keeping secret and hoping even the best research teams in competing companies don't know about, much less college professors, until they can get a product out? Absolutely.

Are they significant enough to actually produce a contact-lens-based display?

Well, patents only last 20 years, and there's no point having a patent for only the last year or two of an invention going main-stream - you want it for as long as possible. The more premature the patent, the less time you'll have to exploit it when products finally come to market.

So either this is a pure marketing stunt (possible) or, as seems much more likely, the current state-of-the-art at high-tech research institutes is making them worried that they need to get this patent in now, before someone else does, because this is happening in the next 10 years or so.

I can't give you installed-by-default, but download MobaXterm. It's about a trillion times quicker than installing Cygwin on every Windows machine you use, especially because you can just put it in Dropbox or similar and have it follow you around.

I wasn't aware that smart people weren't allowed to engage in non-productive recreation. When was this rule brought in?

Oh, to actually address the parent:

You're right. So, if you want a bulk job counting beans and keeping records, don't learn math. If you want a cool career with lots of interesting stuff, get good at math.

In my field, good math skills mean the difference between running a million iterations at the cost of many hours of computing time, or doing some stochastic calculus and producing a (better) result in seconds. In a past job, it meant the difference between designing a naive algorithm to spot simple patterns in usage data, or doing some fancy math and coming up with actually useful metrics. In another job, it meant the difference between not understanding what the accountant client was trying to explain and having numerous testing iterations before coming up with something that (hopefully) met requirements, and actually following the math and ensuring my algorithms matched the scenarios we were modelling.

In my experience, good math skills have been the difference between being a relatively unproductive base-wage coder and being an innovator with a reputation for really great work - and it also means that someone else gets stuck with shuffling data while I get to work on interesting problems and learn lots about different subject domains. I've gotten to work on anti-money-laundering systems and on weather and pollution modelling - gotten company time to do my own research, and been sent to training programs and conferences (often at swanky hotels!)

In summary, learn math.

The fact is, once most of my group of friends made it onto Facebook, that's where the event organising started happening. There's one girl in my main circle of friends who often misses invites because she only checks Facebook once every few weeks. We try to remember to call her, but our event-organising is so stream-lined and otherwise effective using Facebook that we often forget there's an extra step - and our group isn't organised enough to make sure someone has done it, so often everyone assumes that someone else will have called her.

We don't really deal with smaller enterprise, so I'm not sure how well my experience will relate. We tend to find that our clients treat "our software won't work with your PC" types of problems as OUR problem, not theirs, and something we should address, not them. I'm yet to see a client bring it up - we have to be pretty pro-active, and we've been caught in situations once or twice where we've had to scramble to support older browsers at very short notice, because they were running very old versions and gave us the choice between making it work on their systems or them considering us in breach.

The specific situation that seems to cause it is that site managers are responsible for budget for purchasing IT infrastructure, but central IT manages the infrastructure. You get a few site officers refusing to retire PCs that are well past their expected lifetimes, and central IT says "sure you can keep using it, but forget updates: the latest OS we've tested on that hardware is XP without SPs, and the latest browser we've tested on XP without SPs is IE6, so that's what you stay with." I think central IT are trying to force the site managers to spend budget on IT gear, but IT is often not involved in our proposals (they just manage the infrastructure,) so all that happens is whichever higher-up decided to go with our solution tells us, basically, "I don't care if there's a fight between a site officer and our IT dep't over budget, or if MS have deprecated that technology, or whatever other excuses you have - we've bought your solution for our EXISTING infrastructure, and you need to make it work on that."

I'm a programmer, and I find that far too many of my colleagues assume that any and all meetings are inherently worthless. I've worked in teams who got great value out of well-directed meetings. We avoid double-handling problems, we get better use out of the various experience our team members have... It can just work so well.

It's such a shame that so many places get it so wrong, and so much IT talent has never experienced the increased productivity you can get out of meetings done right.

Anyone who gets that UI overhauls/rewrites happen frequently, but DOESN'T use a layered architecture to keep the UI layer really thin, is an idiot.