"But it may make code more maintainable." -- in my experience this is usually the primary motivation for refactoring.

Does this include Chrome's incognito mode?

College computer science programs are doing the right thing. There's no point in college if all you want is "practical" programming skills.

Finally, Microsoft does something right.

Most, if not all, of the open-source technologies mentioned are portable across multiple platforms, not just Red Hat, but also the hated Windows. So what's the big deal that Red Hat is not producing them?

The message I got was: either become a brain-dead manager (technologically speaking, of course :) ) by the time you reach your 40s or work for the government if you want to stay employed in the field. I managed to make it to 61 without becoming a manager, so I guess that's not too bad. And he's right about allowing yourself to be attached to your code: don't. As hard as it may seem to be able to do that, don't forget it's just code.

What's he going to teach? How to f--k up a company that had a good thing going? How to steer your company into market niches that other companies already own? How to pay so little attention to the quality of your product while pursuing market niches that other companies already own that you can't maintain the market share with what you had? These are classes I could skip.

Mr. Jackson apparently has run out of other things to crab about, so he is going to start crabbing about the lack of diversity in high-tech. U.S. affirmative action has been around for over 50 years and during that time there has been enormous opportunity for blacks and other minorities to get an edge on education, often at the disadvantage of more qualified whites, and improve their ability to get better paying jobs whether it is in high-tech or elsewhere. By and large, for whatever the reasons, with relatively rare exceptions, the black/non-white community, in general, has failed to avail themselves of this. To claim racial discrimination at this point is ludicrous.

Good luck with that. Been down that road several times. Management does not seem to understand that software 'unification' is just as elusive as the GUT in physics.

My sentiments, exactly: just LET ME CODE!

Maybe the American programmers should go to court and have their names changed to sound Indian-like.

What you say I believe to be true. Speaking from my own experience, covering the most recent 20 years or so, the vast majority of the so-called "computer science" people outsourced from overseas are "ordinary" software developers and the most practiced skill is Java and Java-related technologies. There is very little "theoretical" knowledge here.

Sounds like a weak excuse for a research project.

That's a dumb remark. That's like calling people "dumb" because they can call themselves "programmers" because they use a compiler like C or C++ or Clojure or Lisp, etc. instead of coding in an assembly language!!

"Turnabout's fair play" as the saying goes...