I did 5 start ups and was part owner of a game company (10%) I've done everything you said not to do and you are right. You would be better off selling hats off the side of the road. On the other hand, I had one hell of a lot of fun.

TheGrumpyProgrammer

Do you happen to know who is in that picture? That is John McCarthy the inventor of Lisp. The joke is on you.

Well, not quite. Live your life like you are going to be fired TODAY. Be prepared for change.

Your first point is very very true and is exactly what I did. Kids are worth the cost. Sure, I would be a multimillionaire if we had not had kids, but what the hell. Not getting married may be a good idea but I have been married for 37 years to an ME and that is a wonderful way to spend your life.

TheGrumpyProgrammer

The "the" is there because I could not get .org .net, and .com of grumpyprogrammer,

Not very long ago... 20 years or so, all employers paid technical empolyees to take classes. The classes were even often taught at the companies location. Local colleges would send full professors to teach classes that started just after the close of business so that they were convenient for the workers. It was normal to give employees time off during the day to take day classes. The employees were oftern paid for time and the employer allways paid for the tuition, books, and lab fees.

Technical employess used to be considered a valuable asset. Now they are not.

Stonewolf

"Sputnik moment" I do not think it means what they think it means. I turned 5 years old just a few days before Sputnik was launched. My father, who was in the invasion fleet on the way to Japan when the only nuclear bombs used in war were dropped, was working at the Hanford plant in southeast Washinton making plutonium for more nuclear bombs. For a family outing we went out and watched a simulated nuclear explosion.... That is what my life was like when Sputnik showed up in the sky.

Sputnik meant that suddenly every point in the US was subject to nuclear destruction with no warning. The level of fear was so high you could walk on it. For the rest of his life my father kept a survival kit in the trunks of his cars because he knew that the only hope you had for surviving a nuclear war was to be far enough away from where the bombs come down Burrowing under ground was just a way to bury yourself.

A "Sputnik moment" is a moment when every little bit of security you thought you had disapears. I suspect the people of Boston had a minor "Sputnik moment" when the bombs went off. The fear and anger I saw after 911 as not 1% of what the US experienced when sputnik appeared in the sky. The fear and anger were backed by huge frustration because unlike 911 we could not invade the USSR because we did not want to try to survive a nuclear war. Instead of spending time and money destroying them we spent the time and money making sure that if they tried to destroy us, we WOULD destroy them.

Stonewolf

Back when I got my BSCS in the '70s CS and all other engineering students were allowed to take any upper division business classes they wanted to no matter if they had the prerequisites or the 3.5/4.0 GPA required for business majors to take the same classes. In other words, the business department comsidered a sophomore in engineering to be superior to a senior in their own department.

At that time a BSCS required work equivalent to a doctorate in buisness. Even with the dramatic reduction in the requirements for CS degrees since then a BSCS is still the equivalent of at least an MBA. Not to mention that most people consider a 50 year old MBA to be highly experience while a 40 year old code monkey is considerred to be over the hill and good only for checking reciepts at the door at Sam's Club.

So, yes, why would anyone bother to train to be a code monkey these days? I made sure my kids did not make the same mistake I made...

Stonewolf

P.S.

I would gladly take $15/hour to teach CS. I've even taken the courses and passed all the tests to be able to do just that. Guess what? Public schools do not want MEN to teach classes. They especially do not want MEN who expect to be treated like humans. But, if they would allow me to teach I would happily do it for $15/hour because that is better than the $0/hour I can make as a 61 year old software engineer.

Ruining it? You must be joking.... Or, merely naive? Forcing AT&T to increase performance while decreasing price might, must might, reduce their profit margin from nearly infinite to something you can compute with long double precision. Remember AT&T used to make over 1200% profit on caller-id. And that was computed using the special accounting rules that only AT&T and the baby bells get to use.

I live just out side of Austin (groan... there goes my property value...) and I've been watching this mess for a long time. Austin started to build a network like this one back in the '90s. Then the telcos used their pet politicos to get a law pass in Texas that makes it illegal for a City to build its own network. That was the end of high speed Internet hopes for cities in Texas. Then, AT&T. Verizon, Time Warner, and Comcast got pissed off because the cities were requiring them to build out what passed for high speed Internet through out entire cities if they wanted to build it at all. So..... they went to their pet politicos (the folks we refer as the people in the owners box at the legislature) and got the law changed so that only the state gets to tell them where they can or can't build their networks, so AT&T is putting in fiber to the curb in new developments with million dollar homes and in working class neighborhoods you are lucky to get minimal DSL.

Now Google is rolling out gigabit Internet to with in half a mile of my home, but not to my home. I could just cry. This is going to kill Round Rock. And, believe me, ever since Dell moved here Austin has been gunning for Round Rock.

Yep, I was working for SBC (now known as AT&T) during the time you are talking about. SBC used the money to buy AT&T after buying everything else they could find that was worth buying, and that was cheap enough to buy.

I tried to make that distinction with the term 'fanboy'. People who like what SpaceX are doing without putting them on a libertarian pedestal I wouldn't put in that category.

I'm glad I'm not the only one saying it.

Musk himself isn't NASA bashing; he is extremely grateful for their assistance. Its all the SpaceX fanboys who are the problem, trying to make Falcon 9 out as the harbinger of a libertarian conquest of space. It isn't, its just a well designed rocket which the US government isn't paying massively over the odds for.

Seriously? An announcer being surprised by the abort and not being able to follow what was happening for a second is the evidence you present for your idiotic, triumphalist neoliberal beliefs? Fuck right off.