Architecture astronauts take over.

Why I really care is that Microsoft is vacuuming up way too many programmers. Between Microsoft, with their shady recruiters making unethical exploding offers to unsuspecting college students, and Google (you’re on my radar) paying untenable salaries to kids with more ultimate frisbee experience than Python, whose main job will be to play foosball in the googleplex and walk around trying to get someone…anyone…to come see the demo code they’ve just written with their “20% time,” doing some kind of, let me guess, cloud-based synchronization… between Microsoft and Google the starting salary for a smart CS grad is inching dangerously close to six figures …

Yep.

And the irony is that for Microsoft and Google, with rich cash flows coming from a grand total of three market monopolies between the two of them (Microsoft Windows, Microsoft Office and Google Search Advertising), is that it is in their best interest as companies to pay ridiculous salaries to kids in order to discourage them from coming up with the next best thing that may undermine Microsoft and Google’s monopolies.