has collected over 450 reader comments and there are some comments that are so entertaining and thoughtful that I have to share them in case you missed them. So today I shall highlight some comments from my article about

Some background on these commenters: qmc is my classmate from school and Alex is an ex-coworker and friend. We do know each other in real life and they’re both interesting and intelligent guys.

This thread starts off with a comment from an anonymous guy:

canadian pharmacies no prescription cialison 11.28.07 at 1:04 pm

This reeks of sense of entitlement. At 24 you can not have as much experience as someone who has been doing a job for 10 or 20 years. You will see, when you are older and 20 year olds come in and think they know more than you, just wait you will see.

Then qmc and Alex chimed in, and I have to say Alex’s comment is absolutely priceless and the incidents he mentioned are hilarious.

canadian pharmacies no prescription cialison 11.29.07 at 6:31 pm

30-something,Just because someone’s been doing something “longer” doesn’t mean they’re doing it “better.” Some of them have been doing it “longer,” but not “better.” Incidentally, from doing some interviewing for my employer, I’ve met some “Business Intelligence Engineers” with 5+ years of experience that supposedly work with databases all day, don’t necessarily know either (a) how to code or (b) how to write efficient SQL (strange union query with aggregates instead of a simple outer join?)That being said, I realize I don’t know everything, but I expect some learning to go both ways.

canadian pharmacies no prescription cialison 11.30.07 at 10:35 pm

I agree with qmc. Age may, but does not necessarily, confer experience. There are definitely people who have been in the software industry for a long time and who are very experienced and whom I respect greatly.But then there are those who make be wonder, “How did you ever get this job?” I knew one guy who had been a programmer for years, but didn’t know DeMorgan’s Law. Several times he made changes to someone else’s code by pushing the NOTs into or pulling them out of a boolean expression without changing the ANDs to ORs and vice versa. What motivated him to make those changes I do not know; perhaps, he just didn’t like the way it looked. The first time he made that error, I dismissed it as a momentary lapse; but after seeing him make the same error multiple times, I realized that he didn’t know what he was doing. I tried explaining DeMorgan’s Law to him, but he wouldn’t listen. He tried to determine whether the code after his changes was logically equivalent to the original code by testing different cases in his head in an ad hoc fashion. I stared at him nonplussed; it was like watching an accountant try to add without knowing how to carry. Somehow he managed to survive many years as a programmer without knowing the basic tools of his trade.

Then, there was an incident with another coworker at Oracle OpenWorld; I’m not sure which story is more damning. We were given a free pass to OpenWorld as Oracle employees. For a couple of hours, we were allowed to walk around and tour the booths. At one booth, there was a slightly anthropomorphic robot. It would roll up to people and ask, “What is your name?” If you ignored it, it would ask, “What is your name?” over and over gain. So at first, I thought it was stuck in an infinite loop. But then, it said, “HEY YOU! What’s your name?” After a few minutes’ conversation, it became apparent (at least to me, and I think, to most of the audience) that there was a man behind the machine. It could recognize that a California state driver’s license was upside down and could recognize that a set of car keys had the Honda logo. Someone asked it to compute the square root of 3; it initially could not do it, but later it responded with an answer, after, I assume, the human operator plugged it into a calculator. I asked it what would happen if I put it inside a Faraday cage. It didn’t know what that was at first, but later it responded with a definition that the human operator probably found with Google. In any case, as we walked away from the booth, my coworker said to me, with all sincerity, “Technology these days is really amazing. I had not imagined that they could build a robot like that.” I stared at him incredulously and thought, “How can you be a programmer for so many years and remain ignorant of the state of our art? There is no way that AI is that advanced.”I do not know how some people managed to get by for so many years and remain so ignorant. Perhaps, it is an after-effect of the boom, when many people were hired indiscriminately without having their qualifications rigorously checked.

Alex’s comment is probably more appreciated by a nerd, but it is pretty awesome.

Well everyone, this is the 100th post! In the past four months or so has had over 20000 visitors and over 45000 page views. The large spikes in visitors I have had came from , , and . This blog really started as something to entertain myself and my friends, but I am glad that I managed to provoke, entertain, and inform so many other people from my little corner of the world to the end of the earth. So thank you all for reading !

I enjoy writing about whatever comes to my mind and so perhaps this blog may seem a bit random, but that is how I am. I want to share my life experiences with others and my blog is sending out my voice to be heard and I find that quite satisfying. I have had blogs in the past, but this is the one that has lasted the longest and I have definitely put in quite a bit of effort into writing this blog. When I was young I wanted to be a journalist, but for practical reasons I became an engineer. In a way this blog is fulfilling that childhood dream because people are reading what I write, and I am publishing anything I want.

For a little flash back, here are my personal favorite articles of this blog:

— This article has been featured as an editor’s pick at the and the ! Additionally it was linked by Karen Datko of blog.

– Since I wrote this article I found that there is a huge interest in selling eggs. Now about 30 to 40% of my search engine traffic comes from people searching for information on how much they can get for their eggs. It’s pretty funny to me.

– A collection of crazy bosses I have observed.

— This is my personal pessimistic view of the future, but as people have pointed out, I may be wrong because more jobs will be created.

— This article just never dies and was linked by J.D. at . It showed me that a lot of women have cheap boyfriends and are quite bothered by it because there are searches about this every single day. It is also now .

This blog will continue to grow in the future, and most recently I started a . It is written in simplified Chinese and it is a place for me to practice my Chinese. So far I only translated one article, and it took me a pretty long time. We’re living in a crazy era, and I am sure there will be a lot of insanities for me to record.

Until next time, I leave you with this excellent video

Once again, thank you all for reading and commenting on .