The inherent assumption is that programming is a solitary endeavor, and for many this is true. But, in highly collaborative teams the tendency to neglect so-called soft skills eventually hurts badly. It leads to the widespread sexism that has been called out in various quarters of tech, as well as to the racial disparities that are likewise reflected in most tech teams. The study is valid if all you need are the best code monkeys money can buy. I've only worked on one team that was like that, and it was ethically deficient in several other areas as well.

This comes across as a bit of a “No True Scotsman” argument to me — of course the term is aspirational, but that doesn’t make it incorrect. This perennial argument seems like a naive impulse to narrow the semantic domain for the word “engineering” because the stakes aren’t as high in some cases.

https://yourlogicalfallacyis.c...

After a couple days of near constant use I've not noticed any problems with iOS 8 on an iPhone 6 (128GB). I did use iOS 8 on an iPhone 5S (64GB) for a day and change and it seemed fine. I do believe my iPhone 6 has been using power a bit faster than I'd expected, but its battery life if well beyond the 5S under my use cases.

My company has released a handful of open source projects that are mostly used by us. But we just release them as open source from the start. Part of the rationale behind that is that each of the libraries are meant to implement some kind of protocol or perform some specific, but generic, functionality that we wouldn't mind feedback on early in the development process. So, we just do them as open source from the first line of code that is committed. No legal review, just the developers that will be working on the project and one manager signing off on doing it this way. We're not a huge company, but we're a couple hundred employees strong and the development team basically makes the call, since they are the experts.

If you really want to automate this sort of thing you should have redundant systems with working and routinely tested automatic fail-over and fallback behavior. With that in place you can more safely setup scheduled maintenance windows for routine stuff and/or pre-written maintenance scripts. But, if you are dealing with individual servers that aren't part of a redundancy plan then you should babysit your maintenance. Now, I say babysit because you should test and automate the actual maintenance with a script to prevent typos and other human errors when you are doing the maintenance on production machines. The human is just there in case something goes haywire with your well-tested script.

Fully automating these sorts of things is out of reach more many small to medium sized firms because they don't want, or can't, invest in the added hardware to build out redundant setups that can continue operating when one participant is offline for maintenance. So, depending on the size of your operation and how much your company is willing to invest to "do it the right way" is the limiting factor in how much you are going to be able to effectively automate this sort of task.

If you want to read, or nap or do anything other than pay attention to driving just use public transit. It's not always an option, but if you really just don't want to worry about driving it's the best choice. And it adds efficiency that even a self-driving car can't bring to commuting.

The answer depends on where you want your career to go. But, regardless I would say that all programmers should invest the time to understand the business they work for so that they can best serve the interests of their employer. This is different from getting an MBA or studying business in the general sense. Programmers need to understand the problems that their company deals with, otherwise they're not going to see the best solutions.

As an example I currently work for a company that manufactures packaged food products. As the lead developer it is part of my job to understand how the business operates; from how our inventory is managed, to how our customers pay us, to how our shipping personnel process incoming and outgoing items. Understanding this and talking to people in all these areas allows me to spot inefficiencies and address problems, sometimes before others realize they are a big deal. That means I can help put technology to work in a way that makes our business more efficient, which leads to better profits and happy bosses and better compensation for myself and those I work with.

Unless all you ever want to be is a low-rung developer, or if you don't have any desire to stay with the company you're with long-term; then it always makes sense to get to know your business, and it will make you a more valuable employee.

That question would indicate to me that they're doing Agile wrong. Agile development ought to include a short feedback loop that includes not only the client, but automated tests. So, if this question is legitimate, then something is very wrong with how this project has been run.

FOSS ain't exactly a love fest, and they lack to direct profit motive of large corporations. Richard Stallman and Linus Torvalds aren't consistently known for being just the nicest guys you've ever met. The only open source community that overtly talks about being nice and polite is the Ruby community with it's "Matz is nice, so we are nice" mantra that falls down just as often as it shows through. Competition and even brutal competition are part of life, for good and ill.

At least the court has asked it it's even technically feasible; good luck with that.

Maybe not, but I have a BB10 phone already. It's a pretty decent device, re-written from the ground up, natively supports ActiveSync, etc. Don't judge it based on old BlackBerrys.

I've been doing BB development for a few years and they've never required business plans, don't know what happened there. Registering for App World requires a scan of government photo ID, most people use their driver's license or passport. It's human reviewed so it takes a couple days but it's pretty painless. All the notarized form requirements are gone. The signing keys are free now and just require an email. The entire process has actually become quite painless, and BB10 is actually a nice platform to develop for. All BBOS development has left me wanting to smash my phone, but BB10 development I'll do for fun.

Lawyers presenting evidence in a way that is beneficial to their clients? Outrageous!

Wait...Isn't that their job? And isn't the job of the other party's lawyer to do the same and, if possible, poke holes in their opponents line of argument?

You are aware they have zero debt and are sitting on over a billion in cash and growing? Yes, growing their cash, even this quarter with all the doom and gloom. You have a very interesting definition of "bleeding money out their assholes". They're also adding subscribers, total number of people with active BlackBerrys is at an all time high. They have their issues but they're not going to be filing for bankruptcy tomorrow, despite common perception.