Are you guys writing software or competing in a comp for the literacy department :-D

Good advice is always certain to be ignored, but that's no reason not to give it.

I always smile at the term "reasonable overtime" in a contract. You'd think people who spend their time issuing completely unambiguous instructions would know better....

Good advice is always certain to be ignored, but that's no reason not to give it.

I'll second that. Kids, wife, boat, farm, whatever. If you have more than one thing in life, then you "have to" (want to?) manage the time you spend on each of them. In my last gig we had a couple of in-house jokes In our group we had "Work balance" (instead of work-life balance) We had 2 casual dress work days per week. Saturday and Sunday In my current gig, neither of the above apply. The team is happier, more productive, way more pleasant to work with, and getting comparable results. (And I get to spend time with the kids, wife & boat) Good advice is always certain to be ignored, but that's no reason not to give it.

Wow, that sounds familiar. I had a similar boss. When I ditched that company and moved to my next gig it was the best feeling ever.

Good advice is always certain to be ignored, but that's no reason not to give it.

You could take the problem away by sending out xls files for viewing (along with their formatted cells)

Good advice is always certain to be ignored, but that's no reason not to give it.

Oh goody. Just another way of making the machine do what I say instead of what I want :). The difference, as far as I can tell, is that they've restricted the number of things I can tell it to do.

Good advice is always certain to be ignored, but that's no reason not to give it.

Visual Studio allows you to write command line programs in VB, C# and C++ (managed and unmanaged if I recall) Borland (or whatever they're called now) allows you to write command line programs in C++Builder and Delphi. In both cases you write all of the code (no wizards or wiz bang gizzmos), so I don't really understand the point being made in the article.

Good advice is always certain to be ignored, but that's no reason not to give it.

I think Simons response is about the most balanced of those I have seen here. No, in itself Agile is not simply a justification for bad business practices. On the other hand, I've seen plenty of organisations that use the term as an excuse not to plan. No-one would spend a million dollars on a new high rise building without a fairly comprehensive plan. Having said that, no-one would expect that plan to go down with the level of specifying where every individual nail will be placed. Plenty of people seem to attempt to write software with those extremes of planning though.

Good advice is always certain to be ignored, but that's no reason not to give it.