It warms my heart to see so many Slashdot friends from the old days commenting on this article. I first heard of Barlow and the EFF via Slashdot, back during the 1998 COPA protests. He helped open my eyes to the idea that the old laws for old technology were going to have unintended consequences when applied to new technology. He made me interested in activism, and his accomplishments still inspire me.

The internet has changed a lot since the late 90's, but the struggle between freedom and safety continues. May we never stop thinking about the consequences of going too far in either direction.

I go through recruiters. With X years of programming experience, they come to me. But HR are the ones who gave them the job requirements, usually.

I've been around long enough, though, that I can interpret what HR says into what's actually needed. 5 years of jQuery experience? How about 15 years of object-oriented javascript programming, that oughta be good. I can familiarize myself with a specific library as needed.

Reading through the job requirements from a recruiter is like being at the end of a game of telephone - you have to guess what the actual intent is, see if it's a job you really want, and if it's something you think you're qualified for.

They ought to know the basics of how a network is put together. Understand vocabulary like router, server, LAN, WAN, ethernet, packet. Not saying they're all going to be future sysadmins, but people who understand how data gets from one place to another definitely have an advantage in today's world.

How often does your PM (also the SM?) re-estimate the stories? I could understand doing that at the end of a sprint, but not in the middle of development, other than "How's that widget coming? I should be done tomorrow."

I work on one of several teams adding features to huge, complex software suite. I don't know how well Agile would work when creating a new application from scratch, but for adding features to an existing program it works really well. The methodology helps us keep a rein on our scope and has greatly improved our interoperability with the other teams. With the goal that a given feature has to be releasable by the end of sprint 4, we're releasing small, working features more often instead of massive, buggy features a couple times a year.

Yes. The recruiters who troll LinkedIn must just search for one specific skill and spam everyone who has it. I always get offers for jobs I'm either not qualified for or would never willingly do.

Last year I realized that I'd never changed my LinkedIn job profile info to "not interested" after starting my new job a year earlier. I'd been getting a lot of pings from recruiters, and I thought that might discourage them. Nope. Saying I wasn't interested made the recruiters even more interested in me!

Which would be great if any of them had a job better than my current one, but they never do. Everything is more boring work I'm less qualified for, for less pay.

Our local Rotary Club gives free dictionaries to all the 3rd graders every year. I checked, but it's not the OED Junior, it's a special edition "Dictionary & Gazetteer" compiled by The Dictionary Project (https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.dictionaryproject.org%2F).

I think we're going to see a lot of disruption in enterprise software. A lot of companies are currently resting on past success, counting on the fact that it's really hard for companies to completely replace critical business software.

At the same time, innovations in development frameworks, team management, and a better understanding of UX are allowing upstarts to create better enterprise applications.

I'm guessing Salesforce might not be around 10 years from now.

Even the government is culpable. The national lab where I live has frozen wages so many times that the PhD's working there are on the bottom end of the pay scale for people with their degrees.

Mind you, I have to wonder where those people on the top end are. Really, who *is* hiring PhD chemists and physicists and paying them so well?

I recently updated my LinkedIn settings to say "don't contact me about job opportunities." I like my current job and don't expect to find a better deal anywhere else (decent salary, great coworkers, WFH).

As soon as I put up the "don't contact me" marker, the number of pings I get from recruiters doubled. Still offering the same depressing-sounding jobs with long commutes. I guess saying you're not interested piques their interest.

Don't get caught unaware by the next major CME. Read the space weather forecast from NOAA.

I was thinking it sounded like whuffie.

Mt. Fuji is more well known, but I wonder how all this seismic activity is affecting Mt. Miyajima in the southern part of Japan? It's another active volcano, one I visited in the 90's. It was actively smoking at the time, and surrounded by lava beds.

There are many arguments against adding the IDE, but I don't agree with this one. People said the same thing when Google came out with Gmail. "We've already got hotmail and yahoo and a million other free email services. Why do we need another?" If this tool is good enough or simple enough to use that it becomes ubiquitous, then it doesn't matter what's already out there.