This comment is spot on. There are so many advantages to working with people, as opposed to along side them. - Rarely does anything really significant get done in isolation. You will be part of many teams over your career, - If you get stuck on something, they will be more likely to help. You want them to want to help, not have to help because they are told to do so. - You may find someone with whom you can discuss design alternatives. - You'll get better feedback from your peers if they know you. - You should also be able to go to them for feedback, suggestions and so on through the course of your review period. You want to know what they think with a frequency greater than once a year. - If you get to know them, you will learn better who can be trusted. When it is time to leave your current job, you'll find the best place to start networking is with current and former co-workers. They will give you the best leads and insights into other companies.

Many of these comments do not take into account that the US does not seem to want to spend anything on infrastructure, Our roads and bridges are deteriorating, there is no real national railroad spending, our iconic national parks are struggling for funds and so on, Also, historically, we have never spent money on telecommunications. Ma Bell build much of the telecom infrastructure we use today, the baby bells have built on top of that and so have the cable ISPs. We (businesses) build when there is a profit incentive. There is too much complacency on the part of consumers to demand better internet capabilities. Until there is and the corresponding demand appears, Verizon, Comcast and their ilk will not spend on this

There are many good ideas here, but I did not see anything about logging failures. If you can trap and log errors, that can help a great deal. Include things like the Java stack trace. Ideally, that log/error data can go back to your, such as in the Android/iOS worlds via Google Play or Apple app store. This is part of a solution, along with much of the other suggestions in this topic.

The reason the PDP-11 will outlive it's progeny is because it just works. In a time when we hyper-focus on the new and shiny, the PDP-11 harkens back to when engineers designed things to work well. Now, too often, they settle for good enough. But don't blame them, blame their bosses, blame the market and ultimately, blame ourselves.