I was once asked to find a way to find the centre of gravity of a coke bottle. As soon as I started mentioning string, ruler etc., the interviewer told me I have nothing else, only the coke bottle..

Do away with open-plan offices.Who are the idiots who thought this would improve "productivity"..

My first computer exposure was on a mainframe (CDC Cyber 180). My university in Kerala, India had a collaboration with the Indian defence organisation DRDO. The operating system was something called NOS/VE, though as I remember it could run some Unix version virtually. I had Fortran 77 programs to be developed as part of the course. (finite element methods). As I remember, the machine had built in routines for the same. Screen was a green on dark terminal conected to the thing. No windowing or graphics.
Today kids have more powerful machines at home (or in their pockets). The famous computing power law be praised.

A famous quote attributed to Jamie Zawinski:
"Some people, when confronted with a problem, think "I know, I'll use regular expressions." Now they have two problems."

I am living this nightmare. Joined a project where schmucks are parsing SQL using regular expressions. Talked to a friend, a compiler developer expert. He told me that regexes can't be used for checking if braces are matched. Pumping Lemma. Those fuckers should have used ANTLR or something. Anyways planning to leave this project.

Project manager asked to "remove the debug breakpoints in Eclipse before checking in the Java file, so the client can't see them". Happened some years back. In an Indian software services co.