I'm sorry about your bitterness with your career, but your sarcasm misses the point. I do not presume that $55,385 per student per year makes its way into a professor's pocket. Probably only a minuscule fraction of it does (although the amount is no doubt higher for publishing professors at the elite level than it is for those who "merely" teach at the common level). If you're looking for additional cynicism, though... I'm sure the professor is partially motivated by book sales. He wrote the textbook, it costs $100+ a pop, and it will now sell thousands of additional copies since it's required for this class.

Anyway, putting aside the expense of the textbook (which many will pirate anyway)... the cost of the class for the online student is indeed zero dollars. And zero cents. Please don't interpret that as ignorance about the broader economics, or as a self-manufactured slight to your esteem.

If the content of this class is exactly the same as the "real" version, and at the end you are evaluated on the grading curve right alongside "real" students... then you have to question why the cost of "really" being a Stanford student is $55,385 per year, while the cost of receiving the same product without the formal diploma is $0.

How much of the expense of modern university education today is actually tied to the core product, and how much is simple sociology? That is, only a certain percentage of society can be in the "elite" ranks by definition... and so elite institutions must price themselves accordingly to maintain the appropriate exclusion.

I'm a 12+ year Java developer, who recently completed a JD at a T2 law school. I was basically bored and unsatisfied in my career. I still love to code, but I've seen pretty much everything there is to see... and I spend 95% of my time in meetings or wrestling with environmental dependencies rather than coding.

However, I've stayed in I.T. regardless, because the grass is NOT greener on the other side. As with anything else in society, the top-5% of lawyers are doing great... but things are miserable for the bottom-95%. It's the worst legal job market in almost a hundred years. It can take a year or two of searching to find a legal job, and the only legal jobs available consist of soul-crushing drudgery (even by I.T. standards). Finally, the average salary for non-top-5% lawyer is about 50% below that of an experienced Java developer (who can always land a new job on a few weeks notice).

I know that the parent comment was played for sarcasm, but don't believe the hype. The legal field sucks much worse than I.T.

Eh, I'm posting on Slashdot... what do I know? :)

Just release it. Once public, it become prior art and cannot be patented by someone else. After a period of time (~ one year), you can't patent it yourself anymore either.

You know, for a website that loves to pontificate about patent law every 10 minutes, Slashdot and its editors sure don't seem to know jack shit about the subject..."

(DISCLAIMER: If one of the various "patent reform" bills makes it through Congress and becomes law, and the U.S. moves from a "first to invent" system to a "first to file" system, then all this will probably change. But that's not the state of things right now.

Ultimately, you can either be a PM or a developer. I agree with other comments, that trying to be both simultaneously invites failure. That said, it seems like most careers in I.T. involve "stepping sideways" into something along the way.

I'm more accustomed to seeing this flow in the opposite direction... people who start off as developers, yet later in their careers step into management, hands-off architecture, pre-sales support, etc. However, there's no reason why you can't flow the other way. You would have a hard time being taken seriously at something truly hardcore, like development of compilers, kernels, or large enterprise back-end systems. However, who are we kidding... **most** of the JavaScript coders I've ever met were HTML designers who gradually stepped into development, and a ton of PHP or Ruby guys just kinda stumbled into it with no Computer Science background at all.

However, if you want that career path... you ARE going to have to "shit or get off the pot", and say farewell to being a PM (at least in the sense that most people use that job title). A true PM stays the hell out of the codebase, although you can pitch yourself as having "team lead" experience if you want to leverage that background. As far as making the transition, do the same thing any other entry-level programmer would do. Pick up a degree in the evenings, or maybe some certifications (they can matter a little bit at the entry-level). Dive into an open source project, so you have some resume code floating out there. Make your company aware that you want this transition, and be prepared for the fact that you likely will need to change companies for it to really stick.

Also be aware that you may be talking about a pay cut at first, because you're going from being an experienced PM to an entry-level coder. However, senior coders make more money than PM's... so you can be better off in the long run as far as that goes.

Good luck.

There's a Bitcoins joke in here somewhere...

Hmm... it's been a few years since I last threw Mint in a VM, and at that time it looked even more newbie-oriented than Ubuntu itself. Maybe I'll grab the latest LiveCD and tinker around a bit to see where things stand today.

It's interesting to read the responses to this post... the consensus of which seems to be, "Who cares? You can always install it".

In the past, I've seen Slashdot go ape-shit because the window controls were moved from the right to the left. People are incensed about an auto-hide launcher bar on the left side of the screen. Then Canonical basically replaces their decent apt wrapper with a dumbed-down version of the Apple App Store... and people barely shrug.

I just don't get it anymore. I'm in my mid-30's, and feel like an old man. I simply don't understand OS or UI design best practices in the year 2011, or how people today come about the preferences that they have. Personally, I'm the opposite from the majority here. Bring on the appley-googley imitation crap if you must... I adjust pretty quickly to minor cosmetic changes intended to keep things fresh. However, I get frustrated by rapid changes to the defaults of actual system management.

If there were a distribution which leveraged Ubuntu's excellent apt repository, yet was intended for power users (rather than dumbed-down even further like Mint), then I would jump ship in 5 minutes. Yeah, I can change all this stuff manually in Ubuntu... but defaults matter. Why would I want to spend a freaking hour trying to make every new install act like Hardy Heron?

THIS IS THE GREATEST EXAMPLE OF HYPERBOLE ON SLASHDOT EVER!!!!!

But seriously... customs officials at any of the world's borders make bigger busts than this all the time, for trafficking actual physical goods. For that matter, taking out a single Somali rowboat would be a bigger "piracy bust" than this.

Lame, editors.

I agree that 60 hours of WORK per week is probably hyperbole... but the spirit rings true. When I was in my 20's, all I had was work and leisure. Period. As I shifted into my 30's, I now have wife and family. I'm active in church, and a couple of civic organizations. I have more home maintenance chores, because I now own rather than rent. I started learning a musical instrument, because when you get older you want to tackle some of those "one of these days..." life goals. Etc.

So, yeah... I may work just a hair over 40 hours a week, but I feel like I have 80-100 hours per week of stuff going on. Life's just different from what it was in my 20's.

On the other hand, I just noticed that he titled his post "Paradigm shift". Actually, you can mod *down* for that.

This sums it up. Everyone else can stop now.

This summary reminds me of every dumb phone I've ever received from incompetent I.T. recruiters, as they mindlessly read off buzzwords...

Recruiter: Do you have "JEE"?
Me: Yeah.

Recruiter: Do you have "Java"?
Me: That's included in the previou... oh, nevermind. Yeah.

Recruiter: Do you have "Oracle"?
Me: Yeah.

Recruiter: Do you have "SQL"?
Me: That's part of...... yeah.

Recruiter: Do you have "agile"?
Me: Oh fuck my life...

Nothing personal, but this is exactly what I was talking about in terms of "Hello World" mindshare.

High memory usage (7) and slow startup times (3) are legitimate complaints about large-scale Java applications. However, compilers (4), build scripts (1), and some sort of container system (6) are simply par for the course in any large-scale enterprise environment. To make the Gee-Wiz-Webby-2.0-Hello-World stuff scale to industrial-strength levels... companies have to either break off the most intensive operations to be handled by a JRE (e.g. Twitter), or write their own traditional compiler for the language (e.g. Facebook).

Config files are a hassle (2), but frameworks like Spring and Hibernate have been moving toward annotations and config-by-convention for years. No matter how you slice it, if you're using dependency-injection or any sort of modern design practices, then that wiring information has to be maintained SOMEWHERE. If you're not used to maintaining that information, then that just says you haven't worked on any large-scale applications. Speaking of which, frameworks (10) are bad?!? Even the Hello World stuff is all based on frameworks, e.g. Rails for Ruby, Symfony or Cake for PHP, Django for Python, Grails for Groovy, etc. People stopped throwing their homegrown Perl scripts into "/cgi-bin" back in 1997!

I don't know what to say about "wordy" (9) or "curly brace" (8) complaints. That stuff is subjective... these traits were simply adopted from C, the primary language for doing real work prior to Java becoming the primary language for real work. However, the final item (5) is by far the dumbest on this list. I don't mind a manager who "loves a language they don't have to use". I hate managers who see the shiny graphics on the Ruby or Rails websites, spend 15-minutes walking through the hello world Rails tutorial, and then start pushing it because they magically feel like a programmer too! All things considered, "disrespecting your job" is a hell of a lot better than "thinking they could do your job".