Actually, a better title would be “What does the future hold for the real Webmonkeys?”
Tim Bray wrote up a piece about how his brother – some sort of tech manager – was stunned by the quality and quantity of resumes he got for a job posting for a relatively mediocre job: Just shows how bad the market currently is.
Don Box – a Microserf – apparently picked up on this thread and added his thoughts about this situation, which both Tim and I find interesting:
…In general, I would be very hesitant to encourage anyone to pursue this career path. Like writing a book, the only people who should do it are those who can’t not do it. I’m hopeful however that there will be many generations worth of funding for those few people who absolutely must live in the world of executable abstractions.
That’s an interesting and provocative take on it all, and I think it sheds a little light on what’s going on now, namely the following:
- The whole dot-boom was ignited by the propeller-heads that were doing this out of love of this sport. They had to do it. While the fuel that kept the boom rolling was $$ (VCs, dreaming of wealth, not bitwise operators), this also helped make it go “boom!” (note: it would have anyway; nothing is as good as the Net was hyped to be).
- A lot of people laid off from tech jobs are the very people who made it all happen: techies, desk support etc. The managers go last, and they have no clue outside a Visio diagram about how the company actually works. And a lot of the other people left – tech or not – came into this game for the $$ of it, not the fun of it. So even the tech people that are left are the passionless ones.
- A lot of people have gone into CS – as they went into Law or Medicine before – because it was a solid career move; you’d get out and be able to get a nice, well-paying job unless you were a real tool. How that has changed!
- And let’s be honest – unless you have a manager that is tech savvy and understands what makes a tech team work well (hint: not $$; yes, it helps, but…), who is a manager going to hire: The sharp-dressed, business savvy college graduate who sprinkles his sentences with XML, outside the box, pro-forma terms — or — the passionate nerd who grew up on MUD, builds his own whitebox computers and gets excited about cutting a tenth of a second off page load time? Passion loses; we all lose.