I've been a programmer since the late 1980s. And there isn't a day that goes by anymore when I don't think about how much I'd like to get out of this field - and Windows is the reason. But, no, not Windows as such, rather Windows technical users and programmers. An entire industry has its collective head up its ass for no good reason. I'm sick of it. Technology has been held back 20 years because of this crap. If it can be THAT BAD, and no one notices, then it is truly hopeless.
I'm a systems programmer. I've worked in a scientific research environment, designed large scale telecommunications systems, and work in the financial sector on very large database design and operations. I'm considered successful. I'm respected by peers as a leader in technology. My current job is at a company that creates software applications as a product, for Windows. I've learned from working in this job I have now that there is an entire technology economy, of which I'm now part, cranking out the same pointless re-invented wheels over and over for the past decade. Applications. GUI applications. A tiny, tiny little world of tiny, tiny applications, for tiny, tiny minds, repeated, so far, endlessly. The "skill" in this work is not engineering, but learning to work around the faults of a crappy O/S. One can't even speak to Windows programmers about what it's like to work with an O/S not designed by a marketing department, one designed for things to make sense. They don't know what you're talking about. The genius of Microsoft was convincing an entire generation that flaws, reboots, crashes, and destroyed data were normal for computers.
I'm reminded of the incredibly complext models of the solar system that were created by true believers to make things "work out", that is match observations, in the face of their insane insistence that the sun circled around the Earth. It's that bad. And that's my job.
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