Damned right I'd watch that. "Snakes on a TARDIS".

...and not the trivial.

Presumably you are developing something to make money. You need to learn where the balance between purity and practicality lies. In the real world there are always tradeoffs and experience helps you learn which which ones to make.

My guess is that your senior co-worker is probably closer to the correct balance than you are.

"It's a product he believes could help solve future global food crises resulting from shrinking amounts of land available"

Hello? Time to wake up and face the real problem... we have waaaaay too many people. Pretty much every problem we face as a species has its roots in overpopulation. Humans are not nearly cool enough that we need 6 billion of them. Probably a couple hundred million is plenty.

We better do something about the problem, before the problem takes care of itself in the form of pandemics, famine, etc.

Are you sure you are hitting a limitation of the RDBMS or a limitation in the way your services are built? I'm just a little skeptical that a SaaS startup is already hitting limits with what you "can do with relational databases". How many hundred terabytes are you talking about here?

Usually when I hear this I see a PHP application which hits the database synchronously for every request. Or worse, a Java/Python/Ruby/.NET/whatever application built like it was a PHP app.

Educated Indian immigrants are generally much better at English than educated North Americans.... probably becuase they actually learn the language in school, including the grammar. Also, almost all Indian post-secondary education is done in English. It doesn't surprise me that they insist that their kids speak - pronunciation aside - and write English to the same standard they do.

It is pitiful how many North Americans (Americans and Anglo Canadians, that is) have a degree but cannot write or speak their language to a standard that would pass overseas English language competency tests.

"Skorks contends that if you want to do truly interesting work in the software development field, math skills are essential"

"Interesting" is very subjective. I contend that truly interesting work in the software development field requires as few math skills as possible. Frankly, math isn't all that interesting to me.