Programmer's conundrums

To those of you 8-hour-per-day 9-to-5 folks, my apologies. Like punch cards and assembly coding, I hail from a bygone era when schedules were tight and machine resources scarce, even for manufacturers. A lot of "skunk works" type of activity was usually necessary to make a qualifying benchmark for a contact that could more than 100 jobs to the company payroll. But we were selling multimillion dollar systems. Odd hours to get machine access over extended periods of time, while still having to attend daytime meetings, flying cross country with a trunkfull of tapes to cage a few days of available time on someone's system. The really exceptional Field Engineers had it worse--they might not see home for weeks at a time, getting off a plane expecting to go home, only to find another ticket waiting for them at the gate. You needed special people for that kind of work. People who might grumble a bit, but who would go the extra mile. People who could think on their feet. No internet or email or laptops--just the telephone. Anything--even gimmick tests--to separate the wheat from the chaff was useful. As I've stated, the outcome of the gimmick test is unimportant. What is important is the way it was approached and the emotional reaction of the applicant. There are an awful lot of applicants out there who got a computer science degree because they couldn't make it as a trombone player. (On the other hand, one of the finest programmers I knew would take a six-month sabbatical when business was slow to go play his bone in Las Vegas--he had several albums to his credit). Like the Conestoga wagon, those days are gone and won't return. Now, it's get a bunch of Peecees (or something that looks a lot like them internally) and modify some off-the-shelf solution. More cost-efficient, I suppose, but less romantic. Sorry for being too old, Chuck