The patents are only good for 18 years. That's a good enough tradeoff in my opinion. Expecting a government run organization to be effective at inventing things is like expecting a professional athlete to be faithful to his wife.

That said. I'm not complaining about government handouts until every citizen receives the equivalent of what Wall Street executives got when they were bailed out.

I don't know. It would work for ex-wives so I'm not sure there is anything it couldn't handle.

Pretty much right. If there were absolute standards of what pleases us musically, why are there different types of music? Chinese, Japanese, Indian, European, African and Middle Eastern music are all radically different. Well, the answer is, "Those people have an awful aesthetic sense, and there's no accounting for terrible taste". That stuffs sounds about as musical as throwing a bunch of pots and pans down a stairwell to me. And vice versa, those people would have though Mozart sucked.

One easy way to utterly destroy new programmers is to simply "tell" them that such a thing called "multithreading" exists. They'll get real excited and start using it in their next project which will take 3x longer than expected and have to be re-written from scratch. The bugs in such a system go on, and on, and on until the project is dead or rewritten by someone who knows what they are doing.

Another funny thing is, when you start hearing Java programmers talking about "layers" and "timers" and "message queues" and "beans" you need to put some distance between that project and yourself as that sucker is DOOMED. I worked on a system like this that took a year just to read and write from a database using a terrible Frankenstein thing called "Hibernate". Hibernate is what those programmers did while they were on unemployment after the project failed. Another one at my current company flopped horribly after a year of development and the equivalent was written using Perl and Catalyst in a few weeks.

This is mostly true. "Protecting" American jobs is an entitlement mindset: "I was born an American so I deserve a job". Is that wrong? I don't know, but it essentially means you are whining that you can't compete with your foreign counterpart. Oh sure, they compete by working for less, but why are Americans competing for 20th and 19th century jobs? We have lost our technological lead so we are now fighting over the scraps left over from the inertia of the last 50 years of American dominance.

Running companies has become so onerous here in the U.S., with just a lawsuit or two over "sexual harrassment" enough to bankrupt any small, innovative company (why is the company responsible for that anyway?) that it's better to ship your production overseas. For some reason the "Don't worry, be happy" generation thinks we have the luxury to save the rest of the world.

Health Insurance, Government taxes and requirements, City, County codes make many people just say to hell with it. Millions of small business owners are tired of paying taxes so thousands of Federal bureaucrats can "earn" $170,000 a year (and pile up benefits the private sector can only dream about) and make sure Goldman Sachs employees (the "doing God's work" CEO is only worth $250 million, poor guy) can divvy up $16 billion in ill-gotten gains. And you wonder why companies are willing to put up with the hassle of outsourcing.

When you ship your production to China or India guess what? You are also losing your Intellectual Property because those guys will learn it, mutate it into their own technology and come right back with product produced more cheaply without your patent.

I vouch for that Indian caste system thing. We have a guy who even told us you can tell which caste Indians are in by their last name.

One man's production, is another man's consumption.

My advice to you is to start drinking heavily.

A lot of good advice above, but there's a political aspect to this which is very important.

How you do will very much depend on the expectations that management has. They very often assume maintaining code is much easier than writing it in the first place which is of course the exact opposite of the reality. Make sure you talk with them about expectations up front, about how soon they expect you to be competent in the code.

In all honesty, I worked somewhere that had inherited about 800,000 lines of code, with 5 very sharp guys, and no one understood the code even remotely close to the original authors after 2 years of supporting it.

Companies need to understand that unless they pair program, when they lose the programmer, and he didn't have a partner, they lose the code. You might as well just rewrite it because it will take a new person as long to understand the old stuff, longer perhaps because he is not learning it in the orderly progression that was there when it was written.

There's a maxim, "He whose work is the most incomprehensible gets the most respect". The suits and pin heads who run software companies fall for this 100% so the worst programmers, who by luck of the draw got to write the first spaghetti mess, are glorified while the maintenance programmers are seen as little more than janitors.

I make it a rule to go on unemployment before accepting a job as a maintenance programmer. Avoid it at almost any cost! It's a thankless job that usually ends in frustration and tears unless you have a VERY understanding manager or circumstances have granted you a very successful product that needs few fixes or enhancements.

Often companies hire programmers when they are behind or they lose people because they overworked them. Thus you are coming into a bad situation, already behind with everyone expecting miracles.