Nerds Without Grilfriends

a skunk by any other name ...

s/pandering to idiots/responding to market incentives/

It is right and proper to extort money from parties with deep pockets.
This is just one facet of good old American Capitalism.

You didn't say anything about this explicitly, so I'll add it.
The people who study balance sheets, and decide whether tr not to risk their money on your company (either in the form of equity or loans), have apparently all decided that cheap labor is a universal good, and profits that come at the expense of squeezing them out of your labor employees, rather than from increased sales, are also markers of good management.

The effects of hiring the cheap labor (and the overall lesser skill levels that come with it) are not felt for several quarters, and since everything is all about this quarter, hiring twice the labor for two thirds the cost looks good on the current balance sheet. Plus they get to inflate their work force numbers. Since the goal of every manager is to grow head count and budget, and since nobody can objectively judge how efficiently you ran your department, more head count is better. Especially when you can't grow your budget, and especially when you can shrink you budget at the same time.

The a couple of years later, when your company starts to implode, you get your golden parachute, and the company becomes somebody else's short term problem.

It is not surprising that a group with an existing legislative advantage in the marketplace is returning to the legislature to bolster their advantage against a new threat. That's how the market works.

The primary job of an elected official is to get reelected. If you want a legislator's attention,donate to their election fund. They'll notice the money, and then when you talk about your legislative needs, they'll listen carefully, and often act in your interest. Just keep those checks coming.

> But we are too quick to blame Oracle and the developer of healthcare.gov for problems that come down to what is simply, a bad and incomplete spec that is impossible to build a good system against.

No. All specs are incomplete or bad.

The Waterfall model that everybody seems to still love,in which you assume a spec is complete before you begin work, was discredited in the very paper that named it. Fifty years of waterfall model system develop has borne that out time and time again.

Part of delivering a working figuring out where the specs are flawed, and changing them so that the delivered system works for the users. otherwise it only works for the contracting officers and the lawyers who handle the ensuing lawsuits.

You have no idea how badly amazon doesn't wan't this burden, or the one passed a couple of years ago that forces them to send 1099s to anybody how they pay more than $600 in a year. No business wants to pay to implement these processes. Especially since they are not revenue stream, they are very real cost drivers.

Annoying systems, with no business value, with lots of human intervention, and compliance costs. It's a bit like the cost of implementing Sabannes-Oxley, but on a smaller scale.

The specter of being a dead witness is what compels people to NOT testify.

I lost an entire box of cigars to fire that way.

I'm not so certain that the market is as rational as you give it credit for being.

Ten yard penalty for gratuitous Perl bashing.

Second down and 20.

Guido is the guy with the car.
Where I grew up, most of the Guidos were Irish kids anyway.

> The majority's view of Perl seems to be stuck back in the 90s.

The majority generally do not pay attention, and also hate it when their view of the universe is threatened by facts.

Perl will continue to have it's place, as do Fortran, COBOL, etc. It wasn't my first language, and isn't my last, but it's still my bread and butter.
Despite using it for 20 years, there are still some things that are idiomatic AWK for me. I'm sure it will be the same way with Perl, even after I've used Ruby or Python for a long time.