You can live without coffee. For example, stimulants are not allowed in the Paleo nutrition plan, so adherents have given up the morning cup. But, Global Warming is on the march. What's next?

I learned to punch in machine instructions on a Honeywell DDP-516 on the console. Coding was difficult as I was performing FA&T on them at their Framingham plant and we had to skip certain instructions that didn't work yet. Also, often, certain bits were either stuck on or off, so you had to figure those in as well. I lament the old days, as programmers today can barely run a GUI/Desktop and are confused by concepts such as memory leaks.

In Europe, when a phone is reported stolen, it is deactivated. Their 'mobile' crime wave stopped when they did this. If such a scheme were adopted in the US, our 'crime wave' would stop too.

I was contracted in to a sysadmin position once. The position opened up as the previous worker had a massive coronary. As I walked to my 'cube', I noted that the rest of workers seemed haggard, overweight, and overstressed. The work itself was incessant. You kept getting these 'work orders' from a computer system that tracked your every move. The manager kept coming by reminding us of our lagging productivity, and that we'd be fired if we didn't pick up the pace. One time, I left the laptop unattended on the desk. Security grabbed it. When I went over there to retrieve it, they threatened my physically with a veiled threat. When asked if I wanted to go 'perm', I said no thanks. My body said 'Thank God' to me. At the end of the six months, I was out of there.

Sometimes you can't train someone. For example, they've used M$.net but now in this embedded environment, they have no idea what a memory leak is. Or they want to know where the 'embedded' desktop is. Or what command line arguments are. They probably don't know 'C' that well either. I had a guy once who got wound up trying to trace unsigned int (*myfct)(int arg1, int arg2); as he couldn't find where myfct was defined in the code - or why C++ should use virtual destructors, on and on, yikes, you'll go nuts. Furthermore, you have sold your expertise as a designer/developer and not as a trainer. You probably don't have the skills necessary for this so you have no right to charge a premium rate.

I've 30 years in the software consulting business. Every once in a while, a client will ask me to 'clone' myself so that some college graduate could 'take over'. I tell the client 'cloning' doesn't work, but that if the college graduate has any specific questions, I'll answer them. And, at the same time, I give them two weeks notice. When the contract is done, it's done. Never overstay your welcome. The site/job environment will turn quickly hostile and you don't want to be there when it does. Many times, I'll get a callback from the client, saying they are stuck, and could I come back for a day to unstick the college graduate. I typically decline, as my business model makes its money from long term contracts. Ok, they say, how about two weeks? I say ok but give them a rate that's double as there's an opportunity cost associated with not being available when the next client calls.

Don't start on a 200k spaghetti code base until you have satisfactory answers to these questions: #1 - Is the code under code management such as svn, git, or cvs? #2 - Do you have a proper bug and new feature reporting system?. #3 - Does anyone know how are changes/deliverables managed? Is the sales force out there just selling willy nilly? (Don't laugh, please, I've seen it.) #4 - Does anyone do Q/A? #5 - Are you being given a raise for this new responsibility? #6 - What possible career advancing goal do you meet by picking this up? Most likely its working with dead code, on a dead ship on a dead sea. #7 - Does your manager want you to deliver at the same rate as your predecessor? #8 - You talk to your boss about hiring someone and restructuring the code base, but he says there's no money or head count. He just wants you to 'fix' it up. #9 - Do you have to meet once a week with some marketing fool and explain why you haven't met their unrealistic milestones? #10 - Did the last guy go because he had a heart attack? If so, do you want one?