Message to the Fortune 500: Just get rid of anyone with the title "scrum master" they're dead weight. You were fooled, deal with it. I am trying to move my team over to Kanban right now, but we have all this reporting crap up the chain all designed around CA Rally, the worst productivity tool ever made.

My second thought is that the US MIC is out for itself. It would be one thing if we had a defense system like the Swiss which I look at as pretty sensibly invested civil defense infrastructure (which, btw, the Swiss are rapidly losing as they forget the lessons of the past). Instead, we spend billions on expensive, fancy technical weapons systems that don't necessarily measure up. For example, the Littoral Combat Ship that has an aluminum hull that cracks in cold water. Or the F35 which has to be one of the biggest aeronautical boondoggles in history. We just keep pouring billions down rat holes because of corporatism. I currently work in the health insurance biz and it's the same tune--billions going in all kinds of odd directions in order to make money but outcomes haven't changed or have gotten worse. But our stock price is great!

What's most unfortunate is that millions of professionals want and need solid computers to do their work on. This is why we went to Apple from the horrible PC experience. Both Windows and the laptops from Dell and IBM weren't holding up because "made in China." Now Apple has chintzed out in a big way.

I'm typing this from a 2018MBP. The keyboard sucks, I barely use it. My company has hundreds of these in service and the failure rate of keyboards is quite high. One of my colleagues is on his 3rd unit in just under a year and we quip that he should torture test these things for Apple. Have seen numerous motherboard failures, odd issues with the screens, and a couple of bricked units. The battery thing has not happened to anyone I know personally.

I have had zero problems with this current one, but a 2016 model I had in 2017 had to be repaired, it just completely died.

The dongles are a plague. I have one attached to the back of my screen with velcro so that when I go to meetings I can hook up to the A/V equipment without having to run back across the building to get the damn part that should just be part of the whole computer.

For most people, especially kids, shows had no continuity at all. I remember trying to watch Robotech (re-runs?) in the mid '80s and once in awhile I'd see two episodes in a row that were in the correct order. Doctor Who was the same way except that was on PBS and often times I could see a couple in a row. Things didn't change until my parents got cable sometime around 1985 or so.

One more anectdote I'll share: My kids both loved Scooby Doo so we bought all the old episodes on DVD. What strikes me most about the cheap animation is how few characters there were in Scooby Doo. If the gang was walking in a town or an amusement park, there were almost no local color--no people at all. That gives the show a creepy, xenophobic vibe. The gang is always all alone in an alien landscape, sort of like they were transported into an alternate reality.

1) Vice.com, so it is automatically edgy, scant on actual facts and details, and often just completely wrong.

2) SV has a lot of people who work too damn much.

3) Not everyone in SV has "money" as in "Fuck you money" and for those who do, it should not be hard to purchase intimacy in some form.

4) All these cuddle parties, eye gazing, and what have you events are a poor substitute for actual intimacy (not that I am against holding them) in a loving relationship, which makes me think the substitution must mean something--people there are desperate for any human contact. We are PC-ing ourselves to death.

5) Every generation thinks they invented sex. This current go around is risk averse while attempting to appear edgy and yet at the end of the night, I'm sure there's the same hurt feelings and sense of rejection we all have had. It doesn't matter how inclusive everyone is, the hot chick is not going home with the fat, bald guy (unless he has #3).

By the way, I went to an engineering school, I know quite a bit about problems dating and how that all plays out. Seems like things are just a bit worse these days.

Silent or not, party member or not, you will be dragged from your home in the night and never seen again. This is the reality of what it was like.

So you might as well be brave and speak out against it because that's the only actual defense you have.

Extra credit: I'm a lowly millionaire, how do I get a seat on a Board of Directors? I have a PhD, 20+ years in the technology field. Am more than qualified for any kind of corporate governance role, etc.

It's all optics and bullshit. Scala is pretty easy to pick up, as is any programming language. The problem is you have to spend the time. Time for most people, me included, is extremely limited.

In some parallel universe, I'm sure Clojure is the #1 JVM language. It's great and Rich taught me so much about functional programming and many other things. But at the end of the day, Clojure here in this universe didn't take off and I'm not sacrificing my career to beat that drum anymore. I tried hard, I really did: 2013 & 2014 were the years that were make or break. The wave didn't crest. When the people maintaining the plugins to Eclipse faltered, it broke down hard. IDEA never had solid support, either. Then, when the support tooling faltered, it was really hard to make the case to management, especially when other asshole developers were arguing for their pet tools. Type safety, meh! I don't need it, never have... So I write Java Streams and it pisses me off every single fucking day.

There is nothing more to say than "if you can find a job doing Clojure you are extremely fortunate."

I say "died" but I know that people still write in Scala and Groovy, but how many new projects are you seeing in those languages?

At one point I set out to find work doing Clojure, but not much turned up in my locale. I did one professional project at a former company and only got the green light for using Clojure because it was basically a throw-away in a couple years when a new business process was coming in anyways.

Good luck to you, but it's not a niche I would want to be in. You have to mold yourself to the market, not the other way around (usually).

In my current role, I could probably work 3 days a week and meet my same obligations. Our scrum master could be fired and nobody would even notice.

We're going to re-learn all those lessons all over again.

But I have to go begging for working cold medicine.

Reading through the comments, people already said it all, but I came back to vent. After 20 years in this shitty business I can vent if I want to.

I currently work in the US Midwest with a lot of foreign colleagues. They're pretty good people, OVERALL, but the ones that aren't are super-shitty, but that's true of the pastey-white native born Americans, too. But when the going gets tough, and when you need to be creative, the folks from, let's call it "that other place" just don't have any solutions.

Many of the people I work with wait for me to build a solution, then they literally copy and paste it into their project whether or not the design suitably fits their problem. A lot of projects here are a mess because of this "square peg in round hole" behavior. Worse, many of those guys get promoted above their mental capacity and now they're calling the shots and making horrific decisions because they networked with each other and shut out the truly competent people. This is the tippy top of the Fortune 500 here I'm talking about, btw. This is not some Mom & Pop podunk shop and the stakes are high. And so if this constitutes "best and brightest" we're in deep doodoo.

I noticed awhile back that a lot of my funds were very Apple heavy, and so not as well diversified as I would have hoped (index funds included). They disclose this, mind you, but you have to read what you are buying. Anyways, I moved more money towards international and mid-caps to try and offset risk. Index funds have a way of being frustratingly constrained. It's not a silver bullet is all I'm saying.

Don't get me started on bond funds. Total, total crap the last few years. REITs same way.

The only really decently reliable returns I have gotten were from my own portfolio of stocks (not a fund) and some high-dividend yield funds. But even dividend paying stocks nosedived last quarter (Q4 2018), which I attribute directly to the FEDERAL RESERVE and its fuckery with the funds rate.

Everything is manipulated one way or another, never forget that. It's hard to be a small investor with others moving billions around all the time.

If you're still reading, I ditched a lot of bond funds in 2018 and went towards shorter term individually purchased bonds and even brokered CDs until interest rates settle back down.

Vanguard's bond funds are just kind of trash and don't do what they are purported to do for your portfolio which is try to solve the ever-elusive correlation problem. Many times, I've watched bond funds move in lockstep with equities because the Fed is king. Not a safe haven during a big drop, just smaller losses?

The people on Bogleheads will hate me for saying this stuff. If you're new to investing or naive or don't care, just do a 2-fund portfolio with total stock and total bond and call it a day. There.

RIP John.

While I am against cheating, of course, I have to think that having all those cars junked just due to that scandal was a far bigger waste and far worse for the environment.

Everyone thinks unions are some great system but they suck in actual practice. The absolutely suck--it's just more egos and personalities in the way of you making a living. The best thing about tech is the low barriers to entry--that is populist, not unions. If you are good you succeed, if you are not good, you become an architect or a manager or leave.

Every city, county, local municipality, and school district over-promised on pensions while underpaying salaries.

I always thought the weird face makeup in those dystopian sci-fi films like Johnny Mnemonic were just there to make the street hacker type characters look edgy, but in fact, even back in the '70s and '80s, the authors were on to something.

What I basically found out trying to "retire early" is that there are the "high" paying career jobs in offices and everything else is $10-$15/hr. crap work. There is barely anything in between, mirroring what is happening to the middle class--it is being hollowed out so that there will only be rich and poor and nothing else. Places like Mexico are already like this. It is sad and completely avoidable, but oligarchs and autocrats don't want it that way.

So revolution it will be. Only a matter of time and hunger.