I, Cringely . The Pulpit . Leaner and Meaner Still | PBS

I have a friend in the Midwest who runs a small job placement service specializing in programmers. He has an engineering degree and is good at spotting talent. A few years ago the people he placed made about $70,000 a year, but no more. Last year he placed someone at a big firm. This person had 20 years of programming experience and was really good. The job paid $21,000. Then the employer laid this worker off during his first week on the job, bringing in an H1B replacement. That employer was MasterCard.

So, if that’s what happens for somebody with 20 years experience…  if anything were to happen to my job or to the company I work for, my probable career path would be: Fry Guy.

ZSFA — Rails Is A Ghetto (2007-12-31)

In which it is revealed that the original, numero uno, flagship Rails application, the one that inspired all the others, that made David Heinemeineimeinememeir Hansen a cult figure — the original rails app had to be restarted 400 times per day.

Now, DHH tells me that he’s got 400 restarts a mother fucking day. That’s 1 restart about ever 4 minutes bitches. These restarts went away after I exposed bugs in the GC and Threads which Mentalguy fixed with fastthread (like a Ninja, Mentalguy is awesome).

If anyone had known Rails was that unstable they would have laughed in his face. Think about it further, this means that the creator of Rails in his flagship products could not keep them running for longer than 4 minutes on average.

Repeat that to yourself. “He couldn’t keep his own servers running for longer than 4 minutes on average.”

Assuming his statements are true (which we may never know) he basically duped us all.

I guess I shouldn’t feel so bad about never having become a Rails whiz after all. (For the record, Zed prefers Merb, though he’s getting out of the Ruby biz altogether).

The rant is a good read, though angry and hostile and rude.

Ruby needs less killer apps and more creative madness anyway. If Ruby starts taking itself too seriously it’s going to just turn into a Python clone.

UPDATE: just noticed part 2 is out, and it turns out that stuff about DHH is based on a total misunderstanding.  Shaw ends up praising DHH for being a decent kind guy to him even after he ripped him like that.

I might have some more comments on the rest of it when I’ve got some more time.

According to this article in the Economist, it might not be true after all that everything was gloriously wonderful when we were hunter-gatherers and started promptly sucking when we started agriculture.  The reason everybody was so healthy and hearty when we were hunter-gatherers may well be because the weak ones were promptly slain in battle, for example.