Question: Are you guys having as hard a time as I am finding good developers in the labor pool? Interviewing candidates is a snipe hunt here in Sacramento. Answer: All the good developers are leaving your state because of your #&*$# democratic policies. Maybe if you changed your liberal ways (blah blah blah)

Devs talking to end users is an oversimplification. Our current website was designed and constructed by a firm in San Francisco... We are in San Diego... The only people we met were the account rep and the leads for design, development, and project management. Speaking as a dev manageron the client side, I didn't need to meet any of them in person. Would I do it again? Sure. The one thing I would do differently is use a truly collaborative workspace instead of one way gotomeeting/webex sessions from them to us. I tried to explain ui behavior using still screen shots and they just didn't get it. I currently have an offshore development relationship with a vendor... And I friggin hate it. The time difference, the language barrier and the cultural barrier (that seems to encourage doing the absolute minimum with zero thought to innovation, creativity or efficiency) makes it a miserable experience.

It does seem wordy. How about: Standardize data delivery for any export process regardless of delivery method.

Good grief, guys. These massively flawed analogies are making Aristotle spin in his grave. I understand where you are coming from with the unemployed bit... I miss the early 80s when I used to rush home from Jr high as fast as I could so I could work on bit blitting in assembler on my Tandy 1000. You are talking about having time to hone skills. Unfortunately everyone (to this point in the thread) has latched on to "employability" which was not the point. As far as having time to hone your skills goes, the state of unemployment is only useful if you don't have to worry about money. A better environment for honing skills is one where you have a job that presents you with challenging coding opportunities and a manager who protects you from the BS that interferes with your ability to code.

Flawed logic. A good programmer with poor communication and marketing skills is such a ubiquitous concept it is a stereotype.

It sounds like you are ideally suited to software project management -- either as a project manager or manager of software development.both make use of tech skills, but are abstracted from coding. A lot of people who enjoy development are being forced in that direction to grow (or keep) their careers... You are lucky to find yourself gravitating in that direction naturally.

What is happening here is darwinian... I think you are stuck in the same mode of thought that is plaguing the music and movie industry... How to make money the same old way in a rapidly changing market... The answer is, you dont. The way for the small guy to get big is to either get seed money to fund a focused full time effort, or grow slowly while you work elsewhere and figure out how to become the most popular app in your market. With large numbers of eyeballs comes the opportunity for revenue - whether through banner ads or the craigslist targeted pay service model. Sure the 13 year old kid can make a service site... But is he mature enough to read his user base and know how to grow the business? Not without help. The hope of a buyout is a pipe dream and should not be the goal of a business. That is a bit like buying a million dollar home on a $50k/yr salary because you plan to win the lottery in the next year.

I don't know why I'm shocked that someone hasn't jumped to the defense of *nix... I floated in here from the CodeProject insider article that featured this post, so I didn't notice that this was the .NET forum at first. I tried my first foray into *nix (in at least 15 years) with Ubuntu recently. The only reason I did this was so I could experiment with an OS that would see all 8gb of ram without costing $1500 and run VMWare Server. I load the OS and patch it up. Like you, I have to re-learn the command syntax just to get around. I download VMWare's free beta 2.0 server... and it doesn't work. I google the problem and try to decipher the fix. I figure it out... and something else bombs. Google again... "Lots of people have that problem, no one is sure why. Try these 10 things to fix it" No thanks. I load Windows Server 2003 Enterprise and patch it up. Load VMWare Server 2.0... and it works. End of story.