I find Metro to be counter productive, distracting, and unfriendly. Why are they doing anything with Metro?

I was listening to recorded music way before people even knew about it.... It just hasn't been the same since the phonograph.

This will come in handy when I need to slay a dragon in Seattle.

Dude, this is Slashdot. It's okay to let one rip occasionally.

I've had interviews where I'm asked all of those questions, and then some. I've been propositioned on interviews. Asked to give up bodily fluids and hair. I've had interviewers slander me for no good reason. Or worst of all of them, I can't tell you how many times I've showed up for an interview and the person who I was supposed to talk to was "too busy." Or simply not there. Hasn't been so bad over the last ten years or so, but during the .com boom, it really made me feel unimportant. Once, I was sent to an abandoned warehouse in San Francisco, where I met a crazy Indian woman who wanted me to work for "equity only." Once, in Indiana, I was sent to an address that didn't even exist.

On the other hand, I've also had some pretty decent interviews, and I like to think that when I interview people, that my process is fair, legal, and honest.

I find all mention of the word water offensive, as I am a witch from Oz, which means that water is very dangerous to me. I'm sure there are enough witches from the Land of Oz, that feel the same way. I just hate how the city administrators are so indifferent to our cause. We are a totally viable minority, and we do contribute to the community. Sure, we occasionally go on a rampage and destroy a city here and there, but we're people too. I'm very disappointed that they're not censoring their tests, and other public documents with us in mind.

There hasn't been a slashdot poll this good since 2004!

Razor is a great little technology. It reminds me a lot of the old asp classic style of coding.
So you get all the awful practice, and a much deeper level of system access. On the up side, it does make .net much easier to work with.

Good stuff.

I've been working in the cloud since July. The company I work for really likes the idea of it. But I'll tell you something. As a programmer and systems administrator responsible for something that lives in the cloud, I'm just not seeing the value of it. At least the way it's implemented at Rackspace. We've had problems that are absolutely bizarre, that seemingly have no explanation, that take weeks to resolve, that don't originate on our side. We've had issues with data integrity that don't happen on regular servers, and while we're able to "scale," we're very limited in the ways we're allowed to do it. Maybe this kind of set up works for other companies and groups, but I can't see myself choosing a cloud provider over traditional collocation and the standard three tier server model for 99% of what I need to do.

Honestly, it depends on what sized company you're working with, and what their philosophy about outsourcing is. Some companies do outsource everything, but they have been finding that the quality of work hasn't been as high, and that they're not really saving enough money for it to make a difference. H1b visas are in short supply these days, and only the big players have a lot of sponsored workers. Meanwhile, ICE has been cracking down on companies that are hiring foreign workers for common skillsets. Most companies still have a few guys, but the overall percentage is less than 20% of the total workforce.

Then there's all this talk about the 2009 bust. You knew, 2009 was just the most recent. We had one in 1999, another in 2001, one after that in 2003, another in 2005, and then that one. That said, it looks like the market has been stabilizing for awhile now, and the experts are saying we're expanding at a rate faster than the national average for the other sectors of the economy. So that's a good thing. I wouldn't tell anyone to avoid the field, just to make sure that they join it at a time when they're sharp and prepared for challenging work.

Only thing about OSS is that it's brutal. You're probably going to go through more rejection on your way up through OSS than any other method. But it's worth it.

I would advise that even more important than developing your ability to do whatever job it is that you want to do, that you might be just as well served by learning to talk about the job you're looking to do. Every industry and skill set has it's own shop talk. If you can pull it off, or even the shop talk for one skillset up, you're going to make an interviewer feel better about hiring you for it.

Have you seen the people American universities have been churning out in recent years? It's awful. It's almost like they come into the workforce with negative experience, and have to make it up. It started with the for profit schools like Devry that passed pretty much everyone into a "degree." But of late, this trend has spread to the public universities as well. Maybe in your time, a degree was a viable record of some useful accomplishment. I would argue that as of the last decade (at least in North America) you get a piece of paper that's not worth much. Take it from someone who trains fresh grads on a regular basis. I would rather deal with someone who doesn't have a degree with just two year of experience, than a degreed kid I need to teach to unlearn the awful practices he picked up in school.

Or not. Working for yourself is great, rewarding, and challenging. It's just not the most stable thing you can do.

I don't even use the degree when considering someone for a role at my company anymore. There's no difference between schooled/unschooled candidates that have been doing this for awhile, and a huge difference in the ones out of school. If you're fresh out of school with an Information Technology degree, it's going to scare me a little. Some of these fresh grads know less after four years of school than the guy who spent six weeks in his basement obsessing about a new programming language. A lot of them don't have the skill or the experience, and they all feel like they should be able to command top salaries while they "learn the ropes." There's a difference between learning the ropes, and building a skill set which they should have been able to develop in school.

Also, I wish people would stop using the terms "self taught" as though you could magically just know something. There's no such thing.