IBM's Profit May Rise as Shifting Jobs to India Reduces Costs 1796

Les Cargill I got a comp sci minor in 1971. I still remember that of the 35 in the program, only 5 of us could actually hack our way out of a wet paper bag. The "instructors" operated straight out of the book, and hardly understood what they were doing. Its like chess; you can know the rules, but it takes a certain kind of mind to be any good it it. Most arent.

I've been online for over 20 years, often on programming forums, and a lot of guys reported the same experience I had. Often we'd have someone come wanting a quick fix; we'd offer the code to solve the problem.

Rather than cleaning up what they'd done, they'd leave all the erroneous code in place, simply inserting jumps around it. Hence bloatware. I've used debuggers, and you can see lots of it is like carpenters building a house but leaving tools and junk littered all over that serve no useful purpose.

Years ago, we realized that the software houses were simply stealing code. Lotsa guys left 'back doors' in their code so they could use string search tools to locate it and find out what it was being used for. Mickysloth stole a lotta code along with these back doors. They will never get a handle on the sabotage software on that account.

And since we were not going to get paid anyway, the open source system has opened up, where we can, at least, put our names on our work and then sell consulting services on how to best apply it.