JoeDavola

Cupliable homicide is a max of 15 fucking years.

Unfortunately nobody gives a shit about men; but if they did there would be a website set up where you could crowdfund this mans defense lawyers and try and get him out of prison. How the fuck was he meant to react in that situation?

This is the same country where the woman was able to bludgeon her husband to death a year or two back and got away with it because her husband was such a nasty person, right?

It was a compliment! But yes if you're smart enough to run a small business then you're as smart as any of the folk you'll be talking to about writing you a bit of software with a small-ish budget...especially....*shudder*....'Web Designers'....and you can do as good a job yourself with a bit of an investment of time.

Nerd!!

Because we all know house prices never go down...

To put this in some context, do you often see heavily armed Pumas behind your gaff?

Ah, but the hooker doesn't love you the way your wife does... ...as long as you do everything she tells you all the time.

Replace encouragement with 'demand'. I know a bloke who proposed to his now wife and she wouldn't say 'yes' until he had bought a house. It's worked out fine they have two kids now (she calls the shots obv), but home ownership was key to making him 'good enough' for her.

Plus everyone around them will be telling them "you can't lose with housing". I still get this from people when they're talking about the areas in NI that crashed hard 8 years ago and have since inflated back to unreasonably high prices..... "yes it's very expensive but you'll still make money on it when you sell it"....do you not remember prices crashed 50%+ 10 years ago?

Awaiting @gibbon and @spygirl's input!

@MrLibertyRedux has provided a wonderful summary of the various ills of the industry. Great post.

I found a way 'out' when I was 28 by moving to the job I'm in that pays enough for me to live on (maybe 5-10K less than if I went back to the stressful jobs) whilst giving a fraction of the stress of most software jobs. But you wanna talk about thankless engineering jobs, I know a Civil Engineer - the amount of stress that career seems to be for utterly unremarkable wages...

Yes, this too. Engineering is not a respected or well paid occupation in the UK, and many corps see engineers as an annoying cost to be minimized. Any wonder someone might be unmotivated after 20 years of being treated like that. EDIT: My pay raise this year was something like 1% - my mate who stacks shelves at tescos is getting a 10% raise I think over 3 years or something? As @Iamcynical says, it's getting to the point where some people will be taking on crippling stress for not a hell of a lot more than if they took a much easier job. Stressing out for a £40K salary is a mugs game, especially if you can play the Tax Credit game.

The problem here is that you'll get business folk talking to 'consultants' (really salespeople) from Microsoft and Oracle and places like that, who will promise the new software will solve all your problems without any further development costs blah blah and they don't realize what a fuck up it is until the business relies on it so it's just a big time and money sink.