My longest-lived PC? A home-built Windows 7/10 system built around a Q6600 CPU with 16 GB RAM. Still going strong more than a dozen years later.

The machine is finally starting to show its age after more than a decade of grad program work, "Starcraft II" and "Quicken".

This has been a pattern in industry for a few years. Pass over qualified internal candidates to hire "Senior" positions externally based on impressive backgrounds, and then when the new hires are incapable of producing at that level, make them the junior employees' burdens to mentor/train.

Management doesn't believe the junior employees will quit, but the salary discrepancies in a tech area are going to be too significant to ignore.

God forbid the full time staff members of the special interest conferences actually have to work their day jobs.

Mostly boredom. Money was a factor too.

Management was also horribly PA. That wasn't an immediate concern, but it would have been a problem at the end of the year when I got my first real review in the place. I definitely felt set up to fail so the manager, ex-Army/ex-Cop triple dipping his career, could get his gold star for identifying "a problem".

Apple didn't want business logic developed in C++11. That would have allowed sharing between Windows Phone and iOS.

When we lived in Vantucky (Vancouver, WA), the guy who worked the plumbing aisle at the local Home Depot was a journeyman plumber from CA. He was frozen out of the plumber job market in WA because the state is "closed shop" and he didn't want to start over at the apprentice level just to get a friggin' union card.

He gave great advice, though.

Adverts where the real goal is to hire H1B.

Sure, I can see that.

The younger Indians I've worked with lately talk about becoming a "full stack developer". I haven't encountered anyone else who uses the term.

Yes, Fresh doesn't expect little things like documentation and won't balk about being placed at a customer site for three months living out of a suitcase.

(Read that title again carefully before responding.)

Lots of Indians have this amount of experience on their resumes. Why not Americans? :)

Seriously, anyone with a solid foundation in STL and C++03 could pick up Boost or the latest features in C++0x, but HR and managers don't want to hear it.

I just graduated with a CS Masters from a mid-tier state school. The program was 95% Indian, mostly from the Hyderabad region.

The vast majority of the grad students were "box of rocks" dumb, incapable of writing basic C/C++/Java code, but the school received a $5000/semester/student tuition bonus from the foreign students.

Seattle is attempting to engineer implementation of income tax through a court challenge of WA State's laws forbidding such, arguing that the ban only applies at the state level. If the city succeeds, every county and state government in WA State will at least look at the possibity of levying an income tax.

HQ2 will either be in Texas, where Bezos owns a large rance, or Florida, where Bezos grew up. Both are staunchly anti income tax, with Florida's ban being part of the state constitution.

Working for a semi-well known mesh networking company in Seattle, I was hired for DevOps because, despite 20+ years experience with C/C++, the gasseous CTO didn't believe I was qualified to do development. About a month into the job, I got called into a code review for one of the senior developers, and I quickly caught several buffer overruns on the "rookie mistake" level with strncpy overflowing the allocated space.

Gotta wonder how many of those Mr. Senior Developer committed to the code base.

Nothing else currently available on Windows comes close.

Useless ... except they have some cool PHP VM tech that will outlive them.