To take yourself to the next level of development, from just a rank-and-file, there has to be passion. Otherwise it's just for the money. At least that's what I get from your telling of Parable of the Accountant. To the car analogy (and yes every analogy breaks down), I would say that while you don't need to learn how to change a tire to be a competent driver, it's at least worth learning how to do. Coding might not have the same "life-skill" value as changing a tire, but you can make the argument of learning to retrain your brain towards how to analytically solve problems is. That's the value of learning how to code. Not so much the hello world, but to stop and think "How can I write software to make this easier." Should everyone learn to code? No. Should everyone who uses a computer for their work, learn to code. Yah, I think so.

Moneyball is an excellent allegory for software developers. Can they code. That's really all that matters. The only way to know if they can code, put them in front of a whiteboard and make them code. Everything else doesn't really matter as much to me. For those that don't have time/desire to work on projects outside of their normal day job, understand that you are competing with people who are equally as smart, who put in just as much time at the office, but also work on projects outside of work.

A couple of points: 1) Gawker has been around longer than Facebook Connect, and OpenId. Many of us have had gawker legacy accounts. You might have converted your readership to use internet drivers licenses, but not all sites are willing to do that. FWIW you can still use your legacy YouTube account if you wish. 2) It's pretty clear that Gawker did not save passwords. If they saved passwords (ie encrypted ones), then Gnosis would have cracked *all* the passwords. Cracking encryption typically involves attacking the key-strength, not brute-force guessing the original plain-text message. Based on the information given, it seems like Gawker saved DES based Hashes. Using a salt wouldn't help if they insecurely stored the salt (given the stupidity with their password security I don't think this is a bad conclusion to reach). Like Petebob796, I could give a rats ass about my gawker account, so I used a weak password.

Ill reserve judgement till Stack Exchange 2.0. I wonder though, were your feelings cause or effect? Said differently, had Stack Exchange been wildly successful landing each of you bajillion dollars, would you feel the same?