"You won't make as much as you make in the private sector. You should think of it as a tour of duty"

Sounds like a modern day Shackleton job posting

I feel his pain but it's easy to quit when you can cash in your stock options and pay off your mortgage

Yes, that's how you do it. If he was burned out and asking how to do it, the answers would be variations on this.

He did it.

They took down the link. Appears to be a cheap publicity stunt indeed.

I like the price point about $1/1000records. Just curious to hear how you arrived at this price point.

Our infrastructure is pretty efficient, making us able to keep our operating costs low. We wanted to have a pricing point that was below any other similar services we could find.

In other words a system for non-ambitious dinosaurs to get in their cronies and milk the system while almost being assured of a job for the next decade

That was the first thing that sprang to mind for me too. You don't always get a referral right. I've had wonderful friends who have made lousy coworkers, if I was even more incentivized to protect them I think you'd see a pretty stagnant workforce develop over time.

I do not get it. How does the referral scheme described in the OP cause anyone to be almost assured of a job for the next decade?

The point being a referral based system incentivizes people to bring in quantity to stack the odds in their favor. Quality gets sidetracked, not necessarily maliciously.

"On the hiring side, we found that brainteasers are a complete waste of time. How many golf balls can you fit into an airplane? How many gas stations in Manhattan? A complete waste of time. They don’t predict anything. They serve primarily to make the interviewer feel smart."

A similar equivalent in coding interviews would be "what does obscure function/feature do?"

From the OSM home page: "We started it because most maps you think of as free actually have legal or technical restrictions on their use, holding back people from using them in creative, productive, or unexpected ways."

To me, this is the biggest issue using other mapping services. T&Cs can be a real pain - API usage restrictions, data usage restrictions, quotas, licensing.

Mind you the restrictions themselves are not the big deal but the fact that most major mapping providers don't make these restrictions clear enough - you have to sift through the terms page in most cases and read vaguely worded "legalese" to figure out if what you're attempting to do violates their terms of use.

I just got an email from a recruiter who's looking for a SQL DBA. The applicant must know (note the lack of mention of DBA skills): Java Script, jQuery, CHTML, CSS

I also frequently get asked by recruiters "how much do you make?". How is my current salary any of their business?

Personally I don't think that recruiters are worth paying any attention to. At least not in the cookie cutter version. If they want to get in touch then that's cool, but if it's a generic email it will get labelled as SPAM.

Like someone else already said, you get a generalized education with colleges, unless you know what you want to do for the rest of your life at 17. The other flip side to apprenticeships, particularly in the US, a year into it company management could decide to shut down this cost center and then what?

Hearing about Poe's law for the first time but in my corner of the woods, we blame it on the lack of a sarcasm font

A "sarcasm font"... People working on lightweight markup languages should pick up the hint if they're looking for new additions. For instance, in Textile, enclosing a string in between "(:" and ":)" could display the text into sarcasm fonts (notice that I am being dead serious in here - those happy faces around do change things in a paragraph).