I'm not passing any judgement about Lax's treatment towards people, and I certainly agree that as humans, we all react according to the situation as well as the circumstances, and when we're not in a professional environment, we are less likely to act professional (and in this sort of environment, more likely to vent), and that in no way defines who we are.
As for the software engineering market though, in 2004, it's true that attitude is extremely important. Four years ago, any decent developer could say to their boss "fuck off and die", and in the worst case, nothing would happen, in the best case, you'd be fired on Friday and have a better paying job on Monday. Developers were that scarce.
Fast forward to 2004 though, thousands of startups have disappeared, leaving many more developers jobless. Even larger numbers of students have emerged from whatever institution will give them a sheepskin. The job market is flooded with software/computer engineers. Getting a job in today's market is damned hard.
Its true that employers have concerns about developer attitude today. They are not shooting themselves in the foot, they know that there are so many well qualified developers out there that they can afford to be picky. What's worse, there seems to be exactly two kinds of companys hiring engineers - those that want the very senior people, and those that want the "fresh outs" (recently graduated). Middle-carear developers are getting fucked in todays market because they either do not have enough experience, or have too much. Many employers want someone inexperienced because if the individual is able to learn, the experience comes easy. Shaping someone's attidude and professional habits is difficult the older one is, but fresh outs are quite mallable, thus making them prime pickings for the larger companies that can afford the ramp-up time in development abilities.
Summarizing, the job market absolutely sucks for developers today. I say this in part because I was unemployed ::cough:: an independant consultant for two years when my last company went under. Having 17 years experience developing prior to that made things difficult for me; if I didn't have the -exact- experience people were looking for, they kept looking. (What, you've written code for pagers? Sorry, we're developing mobile phones.) Finally I did find something that is a perfect fit. I hope Lax finds his perfect fit soon as well (even though it will come to the detriment of the MQ community
).
