Programmers' Day (opens in new tab)

Of course, these are interesting and great numbers, but I don't think that they are the only measure of value.

McDonalds may make 'only' $60,000 per employee, but it employs over 1.5 million people. I'm grateful that McDs are providing jobs for those who need them. They also of course offer opportunities for people to own franchises and run their 'own' businesses

Instagram has 3 engineers[1], 9 million users[2]: 3 million users per engineer.

[1] (counting the co-founders as engineers) http://www.crunchbase.com/company/instagram [2] http://www.kullin.net/2011/09/instagram-now-has-9-million-us...

Mozilla used to welcome each employee with a little knicknack and say, "This represents your million users. Try not to abuse them too much."

I hope you mean users-per-engineer. :-)

Oh, seems that Facebook makes 1.2 dollars per user from your numbers

> Apple makes $2,000,000 per employee.

Most of their employees are not engineers, but work in retail. Which makes it a bit of an odd case among the other tech companies :)

We can all do this!

Given { −2, −3, 4, 13, −1}, is there a non-empty subset of the numbers that sums to zero?

Easy, for sufficiently small problem size!

Pah, real programmers are doing that every day.

I (stay in bed and) have a dream.

That's different, you're remembering a specific person and what they did. I don't need to remember programmers, I am one and I work with them every day.

It just feels to me like harking after gratitude but the reality is that there are loads of people who do useful, important jobs and who get on with it day after day with no more than the usual acknowledgement.

If you do this where do you stop? Firemen day? Doctors day? Sewage workers day?

If you're a programmer, you don't need a special day to think about programmers, if you're not a programmer, then programmers are just one of hundreds of useful trades you should be thankful for, but I see no reason why we're special.

хорошо... каждый день, день программиста (I have no idea if that's right, but I was playing with google translate)

You're right, I should have said Extended ASCII

He probably would not have chosen that. Another piece of Dijkstra lore is that he really hated the term "bug". He said that by using this term the programmer tried to avoid his responsibility for making correct programs by suggesting that errors somehow creep into your program out of their own volition through no fault of the programmer.

Dijkstra was really hard core in terms of correctness. He insisted that each programmer had to work out a mathematical proof that his program will always provide correct output for every single possible input, and submit that proof when submitting the program. Things did not work out that way.

> As a child, when asked what I wanted to be when I grew up, I always answered that I wanted to kill bugs.

You should have joined the Mobile Infantry. They're doing their part in killing bugs.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x7-PQIuWwLo

(yes, when people mention killing bugs, I do Starship Troopers jokes ;)).

I, for one, am all for a "guy who designs the machine that makes tiles for bathrooms" day.

No seriously, manufacturing engineers need more recognition, and don't even belong on the same list as lawyers. More children need to know that "building machines" is a viable career choice. I wish I had known . . . [/rant]

That's not the best argument. We have System Administrator's appreciation day and Administrative Professionals day here in the USA.

Not to forget, created tangled code to untangle later.

You should try writing some unit tests then :P

yep. I just commented on exact wiki words.