I think your biggest problem is that most /. readers are either old farts or desperately wish they were (naturally, I include myself in that). Most people here seem to adhere to fairly conservative (whatever that means) technical views, i.e. Microsoft is evil, JavaScript programmers are script kiddies, the 'real world' should just go away and leave the Internet alone etc.

Unfortunately for you, that means you have a readership that has no interest in video or other 'modern' formats (just look at the arguments over ASCII art) and prides itself on holding somewhat contrarian views. On top of that, /. culture was born when everything on the internet was free; now it isn't any more, but you're scrambling to monetize a website based on the idea that a bunch of curmudgeons are entitled to bitch about whatever they like for nothing. Hence the endless debates over advertising, in its various forms. Good luck with that.

I'm not saying I have a solution (it's not clear if there's even a problem) but I think you have to accept that /. is now Fox News for Nerds. Like most news sources, it's used primarily by those who conform to its culture, and by those who want to be part of it. This is not a dynamic, cool site any more (if it ever was); it's for people who are tech conservatives and want to stay that way and regrettably for you, that position includes a rejection of 'commercial' culture.

Atheism certainly is a religion, in the (very broad) sense that it's a belief system based on scientifically unproven or unprovable claims. Atheism is unprovable because atheists believe that there are no supernatural deities; you can't prove a negative therefore it's purely a question of belief, not of logic or science. Religion on the other hand is provable, but in thousands of years of human history, not one person has succeeded in proving the existence of any deity. Or in hundreds of years of the scientific method, if you prefer, since apparently proving the existence of God/gods to other people was a lot easier until the scientific method came along: no major world religion has been founded in the scientific age.

There is nothing rational about being an atheist, so if you want to talk about a sceptical view of religion (and atheism) you would be better off describing yourself or others as agnostics.

So apparently you want to be taken more seriously, but you decide to drop "windoze" into your question? Do you really think that the people who hand out jobs - and titles - care about your personal prejudices? As a professional, if the best solution for your company is "Microsoft`s platform" then you deliver it, you don't spend time complaining about how no one respects you because your proposal to migrate Visual Studio to vi isn't taken seriously. If it makes sense, make a business case for it and argue for it, but if the guys upstairs decide against it then either shut up or get out. This is what happens every day in Sales, Marketing, Production, Finance etc., but you seem to believe that IT is different.

If you're so obsessed about a job title then insist on it your contract. As some people say, that may make sense if you're concerned about your next job, but how bad is this job if you're already thinking about the next one?

What about Rule 0:

Rule 0: the following rules apply only to techies, who are the only people capable of understanding even the basic issues involved

Seriously, if you provide a consumer service of any kind, and you expect the consumers to do anything more than just use the service, you are seriously deluded. People - including, I suspect, many techies - will never do anything more than chat/download/email/surf/whatever.

My bank doesn't tell me to back up my account details in case their internet service goes down, why should anything else be different? Yes, that's a rhetorical question, and of course you and I understand the difference, but why should anyone else?

Anyway, the point is that this is not even a technical issue: it's a business one. How do you persuade people to start paying not only for "free" services (Facebook) but "worthless" invisible ones (a backup of your Facebook data)?

If you can solve that, let us know. Until then, going on about backups is only preaching to the choir. Most of whom have probably had a nasty experience with things going wrong already... :-)

As someone who got into IT from (natural) languages, I agree with most of your comments, except that one. From what I can determine, based on reading a lot of books about software development as an activity (not about specific languages, or platforms, or tools, or whatever), very little has changed in the last 30 years. A lot of what people really need to know in IT are softer skills like time estimation, requirements management, change management, customer communication, effective documentation, issue resolution and so on. As much as some people would love to believe it, cranking out code for a solid 8 hours a day rarely happens and when it does the results often aren't pretty.

Realistically, standards in IT are terrible, precisely because we focus on the things that change all the time and deliberately disregard the lessons of the past. We tell ourselves that the IT world is so different from just a few years ago that we can't learn anything useful from what's gone before. And of course that's all part of the 'romance' of IT; every coder wants to feel that he's breaking new ground and doing something totally new. In reality, most people are writing code for fairly mundane purposes and doing it rather badly: just look at the Daily WTF, Coding Horror, or ask a 'senior' developer for a few stories about interview candidates - or worse, colleagues - who couldn't write even a basic function.

Computer Science is exactly that, science, but in most fields the world needs a lot more engineers who can build working solutions out of what the scientists invent, not more scientists. Out of every 1000 CS graduates, how many end up writing compilers, hacking kernels, or doing other 'deep magic'? And how many more end up writing web-based data-processing applications with some simple business logic behind that still somehow never quite work correctly? Yes, there will always be a Google pushing the boundaries and they will always need PhD types to do it, but an awful lot more people just need developers who understand their needs and can build simple, reliable business applications.

My personal opinion is that IT has a higher opinion of itself than it deserves. In the end, we're still a young profession (as you said), but yet we flatter ourselves with job titles like 'engineer' when any real engineer (mechanical, electrical, whatever) would be horrified at the amount of guesswork and imprecision we seem to be happy working with every day.

If we really want to get to the next level as an industry, then we have to stop fixating on the details of languages and technologies and look at the processes and practices. Unfortunately, that's precisely what many techies least want to do, because it's knocking on the door of PHB territory. A professional association would have some problems, because the whole IT industry is so diverse, but it could do a couple of useful things. First, persuade universities to cut back on CS and ramp up "Computer Engineering"; think of CS as "Materials Science" and CE as "Construction Engineering" to see the difference. Make sure the CE course covers effective source control, issue tracking and change management, basic economics and project management, cost calculations, oral and written communication etc., all of which are skills that CS graduates just don't seem to have, but which are clearly needed in the real world.

Second, persuade insurance companies to underwrite large IT projects, just as they do for large construction projects, and use that as a more or less neutral/independent means of raising the industry's performance. They could also offer professional liability insurance for individuals and companies. If large projects could be underwritten against failure, companies would jump on it a risk mitigation measure: the project fails, at least they get some money back. In turn, the insurance companies would push developers to improve standards, because if their standards weren't high enough, they simply wouldn't get insured. This is how many other 'real world' professions already operate; good software vendors would be insured, bad ones wouldn't.

There's a host of obvious problems with that approach, but the insurance industry is very good at assessing risk, and it currently seems to be the only market-driven, technology-independent means of improving standards. Schneier has preached something similar for a while: let insurance companies assess the risk associated with poor software and demand higher premiums from clients who don't implement appropriate security measures.