"Disclaimer: At the time of writing, I don't have any kids of my own, and I have no firsthand knowledge about how to raise kids. Enjoy reading, though!"
Great! So I'm just off to write a blog post on how to produce gold from base metals. I have no firsthand knowledge about alchemy, but how hard can it be?
Except that it's not just 'a link' is it? It's billions of miles of copper, fibre optics, routers, switches, media converters, legal agreements, large buildings, nuclear power stations...
No it's not. You're being reductive. Even self-motivated, driven, talented people have shit happen in their lives that can effect their performance and capability at work. Then they will require both formal and informal support from their company, which has a duty of care.
This nirvana of extreme self-motivation at all costs you seem to espouse is not a reality for most people on the planet. It is most likely a privilege.
If only this were true. And yes, it's cutely naive and tunnel-visioned to think so. However, I've been in teams where the drag on the ticket was very much a developer. When that happens, you need processes and experienced people in place to fairly manage their performance, help them into contributing more effectively, and if they don't improve, get rid of them.
A gaggle of developers are not going to be able to do this. Hell, 50% don't even have the social skills to say hello to each other in the morning.
I know a few people who, if not live exactly like this, certainly think like it.
Walling yourself off from all dependencies (physical, financial, emotional) in order to grow your brain and Just Write Code might seem like a smart thing to do, and the purism of it will appeal to some. If the OP genuinely obtains no enjoyment at all from anything else, then that's fine - that's what it sounds like.
But it's the pay-off that stings, the 'shit you don't need' attitude, which is ultimately judging everyone else as inferior for not making the same choice, or having the (immensely privileged?) ability to 'make your work your life'. I love and value my family & my friends, and spending money to spend time with them enriches my life.
This is a horrifically simplistic argument that doesn't stand up.
We are right to be cynical about everything. Things (technology, products, whatever) need to prove themselves before they are worthy of awe. Especially when the potential ubiquity of things like Glass impacts everybody, not just those who choose to subscribe to the latest whatever.
To see the value of that, you need to have failed (or seen things fail) in the real world. I think this is why those who are having an OMGasm about Glass are either younger than late-20's or professionally biased (ie. tech journos).
This is a cute, facile idea, but not thought through. It's not a problem of technology per se - content itself doesn't want or need to live forever. I reserve the right to alter or remove content that I publish.
It's trendy to think of the web as completely stateless, distributed etc, but the reality is that it's not. The state of resources changes over time because the world changes - and URIs are only around to reflect that.
The problem with HTTP is that you mostly can't tell the difference with a 404 between 'It's not there (and was never there)' and 'It's not there (but used to be, and has gone away)'. Servers should send a 410 to reflect that.
In 1995, all we had at university had was a bunch of SunOS & HP-UX workstations. Yes, they had X, mwm and (later) CDE, but you just had to learn the command line to do anything particularly useful. Man pages, a few of the IT service's leaflets (How to use troff/LaTeX), searching the web (Altavista! Dogpile! Webcrawler!) and asking in Usenet groups when I hit a real roadblock. I started building small shell scripts out of need to automate some things, and learned about the shell environment and the overall Unix philosophy doing that.
This was over a period of years rather than weeks or months - I probably can't say that I was proficient on the CLI until around 1999 when I really started getting stuck into Linux and building everything from scratch. I find that young developers today expect to learn everything immediately, expecting a one-true-way to wisdom, rather than accepting that true mastery seeps in over time, largely through doing and getting things wrong. So, experiment, and don't give up when you can't figure out something immediately.
Kirill Zubovsky - maybe more people would listen to and act on your sage UX advice if you didn't come across as such an entitled dick when you're giving it.