After 30+ years in software development, I can honestly say, the day you retire, and become a greeter at Walmart, is when you recover from burnout!

The best way to get the best spaghetti coders this side of Naples Italy to stop is to have the code reviews performed by Catholic Nuns! Sister Mary Concurrent reviews the code, and if it resembles spaghetti at all she will whack you on the knuckles with a yard stick (or metre stick), or the dreaded wooden pointer that resembles a cane used in Singapore!

Hey! I take offense to be refered as a graybeard, although my graybeard is mostly white now. Most of the graybeard developers in the over 55 crowd have now become the "Terminally Un-Employed". They have been jettisoned by companies as too expensive and have been replaced by offshore developers. Mainly here in the U.S. But the funny revelation is that when companies run into serious development problems encountered by outsourcing or inexperienced developers, whom do they call? The graybeards! So when you see a white bearded, white haired developer, in a white robe, say hi to me, Gandalf the White!

We cannot have a good social life like non-developers, aside of the study time we must put in to keep up with technology trends, the non-technical %#&$*@)#'s whom we have to develop software for have no concept of how constantly changing requirements in the middle of development is going to impact the project deadlines. And! They could care less.....

Did my BSCS in 3 years part-time and 3 years full time including summer sessions, and senior year coop while taking a 12 credit load. I saw many of my fellow students and friends give up on CS and EE degrees because of the hard work involved. The joke is our school was if you cannot make it in engineering, you go into physical education........

Please forgive our spelling, at least for some of us developers who started our career in some of the older programming languages where we had very short maximum length requirements for variable (member for you young'ins) names. So there are some excuses, albeit lame, for spelling mistakes. But, I agree with you about mis-spellings especially when there are spell checkers available. I have read many articles both on computer science and in magazines such as Time, Newsweek, and the Wall Street Journal with a multitude of spelling and grammar mistakes. I asked some of the people here in my office if they use the spell checker, and out of 15 people, only four (4) including myself do. The basic answer for not using the spell/grammar checker is that it slows down their typing.