Now, this is just my impression... I have no statistics to back this up. But I've been working in IT for 20 years, and eh, it is changing. The sort of person

Now, this is just my impression... I have no statistics to back this up. But I've been working in IT for 20 years, and eh, it is changing. The sort of person who gets hired is changing. My impression is that the industry is changing... not really in the tools we use (UNIX is older than I am; we keep re-hashing some combination of C and lisp, it seems that virtualization tech is on a one decade cycle. It's the same shit, new packaging) - no, the industry is changing because more "normal people" are entering it. Standards are going up in terms of expectations of things like social skills, being tall, good looking, etc, etc, all the things you'd expect to need to succeed in sales or management or other things that a normal person might do. My observation of my unemployed friends; the sort of people who were seriously into computers in the early to mid '90s, is that they are generally rejected on "cultural fit" grounds. "You aren't cool enough to work here" I mean, it's still way easier in tech than in sales, for a person with poor social skills or poor confidence, a man who is short, or someone who is plain ugly, but every year, the vast difference between sales and engineering seems to be shrinking. It's pretty dramatic, really, because when I started in the '90s, it seemed like this was the haven for people who were not welcome anywhere else. Being smart enough to do the job excused a lot of negative attributes that would not have been excusable in other fields.