Microsoft is way past the stage where techies are in control or driving the vision. Yeah, it would benefit Microsoft to have a very smart person in a top position, but current management, who probably have never held technical roles, would never allow that to happen. Rule number one in management is, if you are dumb, make sure everyone around you is dumber.

The programming community needs to attempt to not devolve into writing religious texts about how straight to sit up in your chair and what special underwear needs worn while programming. However, from a book writer's standpoint, a bible is certainly going to be a top seller if it catches on with enough adherents. So it's no suprise that this book pops up. The best advice to follow is to do what works best for you, but some people don't like that. So you get coders leaving on ships to go find places in the world where they can program as they see fit without the need fit someone's definition of 'clean.'

Unfortunately, managers will read this book and misinterpret it. Soon, we'll have more stupid fad rules like mandatory "stay out of the zone" breaks, mandatory walking around time, or mandatory whatever.

Stump the candidate type interviews often escalate into algorithms that would take an algorithms researcher weeks to develop and months to publish. No one can expect candidates to develop a non-trivial algorithm in just a few minutes. Most algorithms are developed over a period of months by people paid to work on very specific problems. It shows a complete lack of experience and intelligence on the interviewers part to expect something other than the reality. Really, for someone to think that smart means that they are going to invent something akin to quicksort in five minutes doesn't really understand how algorithms are developed or how intelligence factors into development.

And therein lies the popularity of this stupid rule. Anyone who denies it is immediately classified as inferior. Ergo, either you agree that your boss is elite, or you implicitly agreeing that you are incompetent.

These articles are popping up at a rate of one per week now. Usually, the author is trying to portray themselves as an expert in the field of software development by relentlessly bashing a strawman army. For instance this guy, John Evans, is complaining about developers, but it appears he is an author trying to do some self promotion.

Before someone starts attacking nameless developers, perhaps they should list their own qualifications. The author is trying to write a controversial piece to drive traffic. He writes "Certificates and degrees are not accomplishments" which is clearly meant to insult 99% of professional developers, 1/3 of whom have advanced degrees. Fellow bloggers need to start demanding credentials whenever one of these articles shows up from someone clearly not working in software. And by working in software, the gold standard is being paid by someone else to produce code over many years.

The misconception is that Google is different. However, Google still funds a "party" plane for their founders/execs. Every company reaches a point where its about serving the management. They have literally billions in cash to innovate with and produce instant search and what else? One billion dollars would fund 33 Space Ship One style projects, but they are just making things that already exist like browsers, office apps, email.

Google's innovation time is over. Now its about acquisitions, plundering, and empire building by management.

>From the article, it sounds like the flight data recorder has basically been smashed to pieces

Then why don't they make the whole FDR out of black box materi.... oh...

Google has little to do with innovation or technology. They have crossed the line into cult, and cults often have super secret inner circle things to make them more cult-y.

PhD programs pay below the poverty line around here, and anyone qualified to enter one who is not already wealthy will have too much student debt expense to work in one.

>1) The world doesn't owe you a living, no matter how many degrees you get. If you're so smart, create a job for yourself.

That was my first point, that yes it does. Just as citizens owe the world to act civil, not steal or murder, the world owes citizens fairness in employment and a share of the resources of civilization in accordance with the value of that person's abilities and actions. If we are going to believe in absolutes like 'the world doesn't owe you anything' then I guess everyone should just start taking whatever they need to survive by any means necessary, right? After all, the unemployed don't owe the world anything.

The obvious first problem is that American students, who have to pay tens of thousands of dollars to attend universities and stay in debt for most of their lives can't compete with students from other countries where education is subsidized or free. American students end their undergrad deeply in financial trouble and can't continue on to advanced degree programs which is why these programs are stacked with foreign nationals.

The second problem is the preference of US tech corporations for hiring foreign nationals over US citizens. Not having an accent can be a problem when trying to get a job at a firm that is trying to put on a diverse and multinational image.

Finally, someone came up with the idea that in the US, human beings are not supposed to expect to be able to survive. Survival is not a god-given right in American society we are told. Just because someone spent half their life learning an engineering or science discipline doesn't mean they deserve or should get an engineering or science job or any job for that matter. This is the current state of mind in the US, that employment and survival, forget about research and development, are only for the lucky.

>I can see why he left Oracle (or was forced out).

I think he made it clear that Oracle significantly cut his salary. Most employees would leave for greener pastures in that situation.

Rebooting is important for finding hardware that is about to fail, bad fans, etc. It's also important in identifying one-time configuration that wasn't set up properly to persist across reboots. Its also good to ensure that a server will come back up, especially if its a server no one typically monitors. And if rebooting renders a critical service unavailable, then the service needs to be redesigned so that it doesn't depend on a single machine.

Do you tell your insurer this? What does this do to your rates?

The idea that physical things all have minds seems more correct than the idea that only people have minds and nothing else does. But if one's only notion of a mind or soul is that it responds to inputs with peculiar output due to some hidden physical structure, then that doesn't signify something supernatural. To interpret "Everything that is is alive." you have to know what "alive" means. Does it mean a singular sensing consciousness that can't be described or measured in physical terms, or does it mean alive in the 'that thing has a mind of its own' sense?