If you never found somebody who loved their blackberry, you just weren't looking very hard. For instance, frickin' Barack Obama.

I've found the majority of those people didn't love the BB, they loved email on the go. They loved being fully connected all the time, and for a long time the BB was only device that did corporate email at all.

I agree with you. Comments should be reserved for when something is especially tricky or some non-obvious solution was picked for some other non-obvious reason. Code littered with comments simply explaining what the next line of code does is hard to read and harder to follow. Even worse is when there are required comment templates that make fitting more than 1/10 of a function on the screen impossible to do.

Finally, incorrect comments are worse than pretty much anything else. As soon as trivial comments are added that also adds another point of change for maintenance when code changes.

My experience matches yours. The key is GOOD people. Finding good people is hard.

I know someone who has been trying to hire a few good people for awhile now. In between interview 1 and 2 he sends them home with a coding problem. IMHO, it's too basic, but it's just a simple "implement a few design patterns" so that the company doing the hiring can see the programmers style and if they know what they are doing. The goal is to have something to talk about in the second interview. Many of the responses he gets back do not even compile (think about that for a second...the candidate has the full internet at their disposal). The ones that do compile look horrible (editors have auto-format - use it!) and/or don't meet the very simple requirements.

And offshoring really is broken. It can work for a very particular set of project types (basically ones with strictly defined requirements), but even then it's hit or miss. India is really too expensive now, especially if the cost of communication, time zones, culture, and remote management is factored in. Philippines is big now, but with good people there pulling $30k+ and being poached from company to company it's impossible to build any tenure into your people. It seems everyday I talk to a CTO or director who has a story of throwing away lots of money on offshoring with nothing to show for it.

The problem, and you touched on it, is that every company needs software people that not only know software but also know and learn the company. Only then can the real value add company software be created. This requires good people and is very hard to do with outsourcing.

I've been wondering the same thing. My current company has recently lost people to other companies poaching our engineers. My friend manages a software dev group in Tampa and is having a hard time filling his team. He told me a couple weeks ago that he's thinking about getting out of management and back into coding because the market there is going crazy right now ($120k+ for senior software engineers).

I'm about to start a new job after being heavily recruited by a local company. The interviews (if I could call them that) were them selling me on working for them and not the other way around. They are a small company and just put together a very generous bonus program because they were losing software people to other local companies.

So yeah, where are all these senior engineers who know what they are doing and are also out of work?

India is too expensive now. Try the Philippines, though they are also getting expensive.

Get together with a million other geeks to throw money at this problem

This is the problem with allowing money to act as a form of 'free speech'. It's an arms race with more and more money trying to buy the 'right' laws and the people (corporations) that financially benefit from those laws will always have more money to buy more laws.

That's all fine and good, as long as authoritarian regimes remember that Santa Claus is watching them .

They keep making safer toys we keep making more dangerous children.

I'm guessing if they gave them a room full of a million typewriters they'd actually just scream and hurl feces.

That's probably what I'd do too.

"with Amazon prime or a $25 order, shipping is free"

So you're saying for a little more money I can buy 'free' shipping?

"although it sputters, they admit."

Isn't that exactly what a steam engine is supposed to do?

Could this hack be used to protect your ebook purchases so they can't be revoked after the fact 1984 style?

I laughed so hard I got sunflower seed fragments in my nasal cavities!

I hope you were eating sunflower seeds at the time, otherwise you should consult a doctor or somebody who knows about sunflower seeds.

Maybe they just realized that Santa Claus is watching

I'm with you here. Some store brand stuff isn't very good, but at least try it to find out. It's usually so inexpensive it doesn't matter. And those shopper cards. It's a whole new game for me. Nothing even gets in the cart that isn't on sale. Not on sale means I find an equivalent and is on sale or I skip it that week. I don't have the time or desire to extreme coupon, but it is a fun game to see how much I can save on a single $100 grocery store trip. So far my best has been $42 + the 2% cash back from the AMEX :)