...a CSI:Cyber episode soon.

Subliminal advertising is complete bollox http://www.snopes.com/business...

A determined fellow did (well nearly, it's a PC emulator in JS - that runs Linux)

Back in the 90s, with my name being Stuart McSomethingOrOther and the CFO of the company I worked at being Stewart McSomethingElse our company email addresses were StuartMcG@companyName and StewartMcG@companyName. Guess who regularly received the most interesting and juicy financial details about the company from the Lawyers ? Sadly Stewart didn't find the occasional mis-directed discussion on software devt anywhere near as interesting.

Hallelujah and Amen brother!!! As a Solution Architect "within spitting distance of 50" You've just described why I get out of bed in the morning. Last week some of the 24yo college newbies finally worked out that they weren't even born when I started my first programming job; and that they were still mewling and puking in nurses arms, when I was making the stupid mistakes that I'm trying to prevent them from making.

More learnt to recognise what made a good engineer, than learn to be a good engineer. Her standard intro to new staff who asked what her tech experience was went something like this: "I was a trainee programmer once....I totally sucked at it."

The only guy who tried the "If you've never been a programmer how will you understand the skill and quality of our work?" BS got the following answer: "I press the buttons and it works, you're a genius, I press the buttons and it doesn't work you're an arsehole - there's nothing in between." He lasted 3 months.

Now let's talk about this fabled review of performance: You're the newly promoted manager, and unfortunately you're crap at your new job. I'm the manager that promoted you into that new job - so by definition I'm crap at my job - and I'm doing the performance review.

The great conspiracy of mediocrity means that the unspoken sub-text of the performance review is: "We both know in our heart of hearts that we're crap at our jobs and if we could have our druthers, we would both like to go back to what we were really good at. But we're both trapped, we can't publicly admit we're crap, so we'll just continue to mosey along being mediocre at our respective jobs. Be a good chap and don't rock the boat, and who knows, hopefully there's another mediocre uber-manager who will promote both of us one last time"

Gosh the box of dangerous generalisations must have been on special this week in your part of the world. While many non-technical managers "will have no idea what their people are doing" that doesn't have to be so.

In my 25 year career I've had the pleasure of having two non-technical managers who were far and away the best managers I've ever seen in action. They used their non-techiness to their advantage and built high performing teams that would walk over coals for them. It's called trust.... "I know you are all supremely clever, and know stuff that I don't.... that's why you're the engineers. My job is to trust you all to do your jobs well, make sure nothing gets in the way of you doing your job well, and by the way you lot being a bunch of arrogant techie dicks, and ignoring me as a "non-techie girl" counts as "getting in the way of you doing your jobs well" "

And to the point of the original article - Two of the absolutely worst managers I've had were promoted engineers who weren't good enough to make it into the ranks of "chief engineer / consulting architect / great poo bah of technicality" and felt their only scope for promotion was to take on management. To the credit of one of them, he realised he was totally crap at this management lark, and re-trained. Over time he actually became quite a good manager - not great but pretty good.

The other doofus left in a hail of "thank god he's gone" and continued to wreck havoc wherever he went.

....don't forget the mumbo jumbo. :-)

and its speedo is calibrated in MegaFurlongs per KiloFortnight?

Not all people with diabetes have Type 2 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diabetes_mellitus_type_1

No! No! No!

We the management don't want critical thinking in our employees. We want skilled coders who will shut up and do as they're told.

No critical thinking. No analysis of the content of the latest bunch of lies (ulp, I mean management team talk to the staff). and certainly no telling us we're full of shit when we are.

...and as we testified to an adjudicator in a wrongful dismissal case a few years ago:

Jack's argument is that we didn't offer him enough of the right training to become a better programmer.

Our argument is that we gave the same training that 80 other programmers got...programming is like Opera Singing, if you don't have the talent no amount of training is going to make you good at it. Unfortuntely Jack made a mistake when he thought he'd go into programming as a career.

On the other hand teaching all kids to at least write a little programme, may help identify those with the talent early enough to get them trained into great programmers.