Hard to figure out the hourly rate at which you would be happy to return as a contractor to a place you quit. Quadruple regular rate?

You can't have things quickly and also ask everyone in the building for their opinion on those things at the same time. It just doesn't work that way, no matter how much you want to be liked.

They're called priorities, not equalities.

Are there any hack job shops that actually take pride in doing a quick hack job and turning a buck? Be nice to at least work for honest spaghetti coders.

How to optimize when you're my boss and have written VB6 for the last twenty years: find anything you don't understand and blame it for the slowness.

Sometimes I envy the blind because nobody invites them to "let's talk about what colour to make this" meetings

If you guys are ever looking for a chance to shine in the eyes of people you don't respect, may I humbly suggest multithreading a 20 year old project that uses COM and global variables?

I didn't need that hair anyway.

Client uses CVS, tells me stories about how awful their new acquisition is because they don't use source control at all, only building off a file share...

Points for trying I guess?

If there's one thing that gets my goat it's "voodoo debuggers."

There's no actual need to dig into the root cause of a problem if you can blame the new thing you don't understand. Especially when later, after someone competent actually looks into it, the bug turns out to be a change in the old stuff that did it.

If there's two things that get my goat, it's people who fix something caused by human error or negligence and then don't write an automated test to catch it the next time it happens.

Word from on high today that the new product should be completely redone as MDI. Now I know how new bad software is made.

Window management is hard, let's just pretend 1994 never ended instead.

Sure, I like what the designer who understands colours put up but can we just make the entire thing dark grey because new things scare me?

Why aren't there any programming cram schools that make their students learn to use a debugger?

Menus and ribbon tabs are the same thing and also my opinion carries more weight than yours. Why yes, this is the only place I've ever worked. How did you guess?

Spent a year making a revamped user interface? Add some grey, I miss Windows 3.1. Readability is just a "trendy" thing anyway.

You'd think something so watered down by compromise would be easier to build but of course all the legacy code makes it impossible to.