They really humiliated all the traditional supercar brands out there.

Uh, what?

I’m in the awkward position of being a long time proponent of “hire experts and retain them, software isn’t a one and done it is a lifecycle and having someone with deep knowledge is a competitatave advantage”, and yet also after a lay-off at the big G a software consultant.

Which makes my opinion of this maybe a bit self serving, but it is appropriate to hire outside help for “OMG we have to fix this right away, no time to get approval for a permanent staffing increase, or to find someone who works for just the right amount of money to not upset all the employees who would want a raise if the new guy gets more...and we can put up with someone outside the normal corp culture for a few months as long as they aren’t too far outside of it...but never take a permian hire that doesn’t wear just the right tie and use the perfect tone to suck up”.

So: need a security fix before billions leak out of your company? Hire a contractor that can get the job done, unless you luck into a new employee that can.

Need to copy another companies feature before you lose all the market share? Hire a contractor, but keep “contract to employee” conversion in your back pocket.

Have an idea for a killer new feature nobody else has: develop that in house. If you really can’t get the resources allocated long term for that, a contractor is better then nothing, but you really want in house knowledge of how the feature works, and how many other departments it touches and all the technical and interdepartmental entanglements. So doing that with a outside expert makes it hard to support long term.

Plus the except from the article already says:

It is unclear if the 1000 contractors “remain here today” because they were hired on year long contracts for four months of work, or if they are now a roving hit squad for tough bugs and the contract is “long term”. Also it doens’t say if the 3000 people already “in that area” are employees or other contractors. So I’m not really sure if we are seeing a company not willing to invest in operations, or if they are investing money rather then time (contractors are fast to hire but tend to cost more over time then internal hires -- even if you retain them).

Sure, go far back enough (and yes, I was on computers at that time) but surely he's not saying, "Man, computers were better when you could only run one process at a time, and the operating system let you do literally anything" etc etc and if so, the answer to that is, you can still do that if you want .. you just can't do it *inside* somebody else's software architecture. You still own the hardware, do whatever you want.

huh? it's trivial to write any code you want and run it on your phone

But with respect to your "dawn of the PC era", unless you wrote the operating system, you couldn't write and run code that could do anything and everything your computer was capable of - only code that could do what the operating system would permit you to do.

That's no different today.

Here's a little sticker for knowing what Firefox is tho. You must be good at computers.

There have been numerous articles about it recently. You have the internet. No need to stop the class just because you're the only lazy ignoramus around here.

you're an old and bitter man, and you've only yourself to blame

and I'm old too and a loooong time c++ professional dev (and still am) and somehow the idea of change or the word 'Rust' doesn't make me shit my pants

I feel bad for you

Patents, buddy. Developers know things better than you do. Plus other reasons, but I suspect you'll just handwave them all away because you're very very smart. It's definitely not vastly better than JPEG XL.

There's no possible way you're a programmer.

Its reply to me:

"Yes, in large part."

But that is mostly caused by NVidia's lackluster driver support in Linux.

Uh, sure.

Governments are people.

"These fuckers are why you are seeing less physical switch games as an example"

Buwhaha

Yeah, I know what you mean. I just did it the easy way - dropped out of university, eventually move to Montreal where it was almost *difficult* to be a programmer and not end up at a game studio. Thankfully the industry grew in Toronto as well and I was able to move back after some lovely years there.

I'm an oldhead programmer (still) in the games industry. You're thinking of DigiPen. (I didn't go there.)