Cube Farms. The research that has been used to justify putting programmers into ‘veal-fattening pens’ is flawed; most of that research was done using graduate students or undergraduates attempting to solve a common problem. The thing is, if you have two or three people who are trying to solve a problem that none of them have ever seen before, cooperation is usually better than isolation–but if you have one person who is on a roll writing code and doesn’t have any real unknowns (other than the specific problem he’s writing code for), then interruptions are bad. (If interruptions were not bad, then they’d rig bells that ring every five minutes.)

If you are good at what you do, you do not need to be pestered every five minutes.

Underpowered machines. I cannot believe in this day an age that a 40 year old software developer making $100K+ a year (where “+” is a fairly large “plus”) writing Java code would be given a three-year old underpowered computer that new was only $600. But that’s where I am–and we’re not talking about some dumb-shit hole in the wall somewhere–we’re talking Ya-friggin’-hoo!, for Christ’s sake!

A Pentium 4 at 2.6mhz with 512meg of RAM and a 40gig drive with a 17inch monitor is simply unacceptable as a development platform–especially with a model that steals 32meg of that for video RAM–yet here I am. And all requests to IT has been met so far with stonewalling and silence.

Fucking nuts.