“Commonly, people believe that defeat is characterized by a general bustle and a feverish rush. Bustle and rush are the signs of victory, not of defeat. Victory is a thing of action. It is a house in the act of being built. Every participant in victory sweats and puffs, carrying the stones for the building of the house. But defeat is a thing of weariness, of incoherence, of boredom. And above all of futility.” - Antoine de Saint-Exupery

As developers, we solve problems for a living. We spend our hours at work fixing things, testing things, troubleshooting things. It gives one a great sense of pride and accomplishment to fix almost all the tech problems that get in the way of productivity. But what happens when this need to solve problems becomes the problem itself?

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This is a response to the article 101 Reasons Why Freelancers Do it Better.

“Once you start thinking about it in a mercenary frame of mind, then you’re finished. You’re a joke, because there are too many mercenaries out there already. ” -Tommy Shaw

1. The general “me me me” of the article.
2. The overcharged, late, and general lack of quality most freelance programmers have… and why? They don’t have to have high quality and, eventually, get lazy on at least one project.

Seriously, in IT, my experience with freelancers keeps getting worse. It just goes wrong… juggling multiple contracts, delayed deadlines, low quality product. Sure it’s not *all* freelancers, but I’m going to gamble and say most. The client hires you because they do not know what they need to get the project done… if they did, they’d more than likely do it themselves. Freelance contractors know this and often take advantage of this fact. Land big contracts, screw smaller ones over but keep them around for “steady” income. Pardon me for my bigotry… freelancers suck… and I am so totally tempted to be one sometimes and near double my income.

“Positive reality, it is the seeking for ideal truth.” - George Sand

Where does the idea end and the program begin?
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“Patriotism is a kind of religion; it is the egg from which wars are hatched.” - Guy de Maupassant

I’ve spoken a great deal thus far about the importance of knowing when black and white thinking is helpful and when it’s harmful. For most people, it’s easy to make this distinction. Doctors tend to learn what procedures are there for safety and which are there for to protect the higher ups. Police officers know that if they wrote tickets for every offense they saw, they’d be busy as hell and pissing off the people instead of protecting them. Music professors teach the rules of music and then teach the student to ignore them. Yet developers… we are very rigid. There’s a right and wrong way to do everything. This thinking gets us very far, but there’s a dark side to all this: evangelicalism.

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Marketing is the art of making something seem better than it really is. -Suso Banderas

Marketing. Ain’t it grand? All those jingles in your head, all the brands you buy, all the old AOL discs you have floating around… who is to thank? Marketing. Marketing and developer trends have pretty much been independent of each other as most developers seem to have a firm grasp on what is being marketed to them and what the genuine article is (hence Linux wasn’t just a pipe dream). Marketing was mostly left to the business people who couldn’t fit in technical manuals in between their yachting and weekly car buying agendas. They didn’t care what virus protection was, or Y2k, or what-have-you… they just knew they needed it. And that, my friends, is why I hate this Web 2.0 crap.

Note: If you couldn’t tell, I’m not pulling these quotes out of my rear. I want to thank the owner of http://en.wikiquote.org/ for the ironic use of his application.

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