Careers: It can be tempting to practice brutal honesty in an exit interview but the costs almost always exceed the benefits. Take the case of one Advice Line reader who did just that, thinking it moral and reasonable, but then after applying for a position at the same company never got so much as a response. “You criticized the actions of an individual,” Bob Lewis writes in Another look at exit interviews from the interviewee side. “No matter what other result came from you’re doing so, you probably branded yourself a troublemaker. Now it’s coming back to haunt you.” From the feature well: Spanning from application development to virtualization and nearly everything in between, like middleware, our stable of bloggers and columnists, 15 of them, each pick the next big things in IT. “Because the writers are domain experts, their predictions for tomorrow’s breakthrough technologies are grounded in what’s happening today,” explains editor-in-chief Steve Fox. Thus, this is a near-term look, not some futuristic odyssey toward infinite possibility. Gripe Line: When the FCC auctions off wireless spectrum come January, the question of whether the providers will lock customers into using the service’s own proprietary features will be a paramount one. “It’s hard to predict, but you might want to look at an interesting pattern of gripes recently being generated by one of the likely bidders for the 700-MHz spectrum — Verizon Wireless,” points out Ed Foster in Verizon locks out a spectrum of features. “To be fair, it doesn’t sound like Verizon is the only wireless service locking out the features they’re selling.” That, of course, makes matters all the worse. Quoteworthy: My advice to Microsoft is to really continue to be an open platform for at least the AMP part of LAMP and show that developers can use whatever mix of open and closed source that they want. Otherwise, the default assumption is that developers interested in open source should ignore the Windows platform completely, and I think that would be a mistake. — Zack Urlocker, Input for Microsoft on Mix 2008. Careers