Back from the Red Hat World-wide Engineering Meeting. It was fun. Here's a couple of observations.
Our core development departments apparently follow a staffing model "hire superstars, and they'll work it out", which of course is helped by the overall state of U.S. economy. The rest of the company gets to collect all the good folks who had enough of it with proprietary software from other places, in particular from DEC's campuses.
The collorary to this is that it's pretty hard to place even solid performers who I know personally, the competition is so stiff. I seriously fail to understand how I was hired in the first place. Also, it is very pleasant to work with people who, at minimum, do not need elementary things explained, and typically are better than that.
I found more pilots in the development department, although most struggle to stay current in respect to number of landings, BFR, and medical. Tough life...