Reddit's upvote / downvote system on posts and comments allowing the better ones to bubble the top is huge. Yes it rewards group-think, but the alternative of trolls and uninteresting activity bubbling to the top simply because they were first or last to post is much much worse. And that's Usenet.

When I browse the visible user comments on Slashdot they are generally much more infantile than those visible on Reddit. Yours and the parent comment are the two most insightful comments I've seen on here for a while. I am a daily Reddit and Slashdot user. Give me Reddit's commenting system and community over Slashdot's any day.

Project managers are unnecessary. Tech teams and business teams should be communicating directly. No need for a middle-man who costs money. Project managers will not understand either the technology nor the business as well as the other two groups. Projects need to be tracked but that can be done by the business and tech teams together with the right tools. Middle managers are a burden on an organization and project managers are just that.

These buzzwords, some years ago "SOA" and "EBS", and more recently " devops", are press invented jargon to try keep historically paper-based IT weeklies and more recently their web-based equivalents (infoq, the serverside, ... etc) and their advertisers afloat. More recently it's "microservices". Keep an eye out for that one now "devops" is "dead".

Bitter much? I'm also like you, a bit of everything. More positions are open to me (and presumably you) than the average narrowly-focused techie. That glass is half full dude.

The Financial Industry gobbles up techies. In New York you'll have no problems finding a job if you have Java or C++ & maybe Python, and you'll be paid much more than other parts of the country (but you'll be living in less space). The Financial Industry won't frown on PHDs either.

If you aren't strong in any of those languages you need to become strong in at least one. Learn RDBMS (SQL) too if you don't have it. NoSQL DBs can help too but it is still less widely used/needed than traditional RDBMS. I suggest you build something to both increase your knowledge and show to employers in your downtime.

In my current job I have four 20 inch monitors in a 2x2 square. Active apps (Eclipse and browser) go in the bottom two. Less active apps (email and SQL client) up the top. It will be very hard for me to go back to one or two monitors. If an employer isn't willing to provide your most productive set up then it's a sign to keep away from them.

No, he's not. Poor character development, no shades of gray, and very forgetable. A lame novel that reminds me, with a few great exceptions, that sci-fi is a good place to for second rate writers to gain adulation and a living.

What CmdrTaco failed to mention is that when you remove all the duplicate articles they're only at 75,654.

hmmmm, if only we could figure out who makes the Atom ....

I also suspected he meant Pres4242, but agree with you. He wasn't a troll, just lived in a strange reality. Tom Lord? I don't know how you can even suspect he was trolling.

I generally agree with bhima's well-written post though. The number of "Armageddon's coming, everyone grab their canned-food & guns" & general conspiracy theory stories was alarming. Reddit's the same way. Why is the Internets so delusional?

I also participated in the conversation regularly. Who do you think were the two trolls?