On the other hand, it is annoying to be one of the people on site with a remote team in an environment where other divisions are not remote. In some cases you become the person that gets interrupted all the time while the remote workers get to be productive.

Or they could raise prices.

The attached reading material is interesting, but this question is too similar to problems where you guess the next one in the sequence and none are missing.

A rule where the numbers are increasing does not explain why 3 or 5 or 6 is missing from the sequence in that version of the question that is much more common.

You could change the amendment process at the same time the amendment was amended that you don't want repealed.

I believe one of the only ways to do that is with a constitutional amendment. Those are hard to pass.

On the other hand, when maintaining code, it is really nice when it is predictable.

Eh... sometimes? But, honestly, that's not an assumption that should be made... you need to be fluid enough to handle it all. Even in the Theoretically Standardized codebases, different approaches and styles come and go according to the fad du jour.

Right now I have to deal with 3 codebases on a regular basis, in three-four languages, written partially by people not even here, over the past 5 years. On a bad week, I have to crack open 3-4 more codebases in 2-3 more languages... and don't even get me started on reading open source code.

If I am looking for predictability, I'm going to be disappointed, and if I need it, I'm going to fail. Grok it is what I say.

Oddly enough, most of the really dirty fixes I have seen involved not understanding the library and deciding that it was a bug in the library.

On the list of annoying places to work - places that have custom versions of standard libraries like JQuery.

For something that most almost anyone can follow, there are a lot of failures out there.

Wrapping library functions is very helpful when I am doing my own project. I understand the interface and can fix any misunderstandings I had when I used the standard functions. It is great.

However, when I run across someone who helpfully wrapped the standard interfaces in the code I need to maintain. I want to burn him alive.