>>>>>>>>>>I hear you. On The Other Hand, I wonder if technology has actually put more people out of work entirely - other jobs always seem to appear.....
>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>Net/net i think it's about a wash , but entire job classes have vanished while some have been created.
>>>>>>>>When someone first talked to me about programming as a career, I thought he was suggesting that I work in TV.
>>>>>>>>There were no programmers then so that was a brand new classification.
>>>>>>>>On the other hand, does anyone remember telephone operators or typists? There were zillions of them.
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>I think a lot of them retrained as Fuller Brush Men (FB Persons?) or door to door Encyclopedia salesmen.
>>>>>>
>>>>>>That's better than the reverse. I once worked on a project which was started by a door to door door salesman. What a mess!
>>>>>
>>>>><g> What's worse is when you get called in to "just make a few little changes" to an app that is a hot mess and then find out the door to door salesman that wrote it got promoted and is now the guy you are working for who has sensitive feelings and great pride in his app <s>
>>>>
>>>>Oh! Have I been there!! Most recent such adventure: the owner told me when I was allowed to take notes! I threw my pencil on the floor at the jerk's feet. He was too stupid to realize that taking notes can aid mental recall of items to cover when we were allowed to speak. Just before that glorious "job" I took a project where I was answering questions about said project on one of these boards. Every suggestion I gave was resisted, until the owner made them try it. Every time (6 out of 6) the suggestion proved correct. So I got a call and an offer. When I got there, the owner did not back me up against the existing terribly outdated practices. I can go on and on about such things. You must have heard about my discovering the use of a public variable would have made a system cause patient deaths?
>>>
>>>And then were told is was a small price to pay for the convenience of a public variable <s>
>>>
>>>One of my favorite potential ( a potential I never fulfilled ) client from hell was the Dr. who wanted me to write a medical app and said " I could do it myself but I just don't have the time."
>>>
>>>Yeah, and I can do my own lasix surgery but I get bored easily.
>>
>>Best Dr. client I ever had was Dr. Stephan Vas. Head of Microbiology at 2 hospitals, professor of Microbiology at McGill university in Montreal. Very logical and scientific. Lots of fun.
>>
>>This going down memory lane let`s me raise an issue I was sworn to secrecy about for a period not less than 2 years. I already told a couple of people this. Being the 20th year since Microsoft bought Fox Software, I think it's been long enough. I used to work for the PR firm for Microsoft very long ago actually from 1991-1994. While there, I used Fox for large databases for a subsidiary called Decima Research. I had John Hawkins and later Tamar Granor on retainer in case I needed help or advice. I also got to know Mike and Toni Feltman while there and showed what I learned about massive tables to them. I even got my first article published in June of 1995 based on what I learned there.
>>
>>So, one day I got an invitation to a meeting for a demonstration of a new database product. I had no idea what it was. I also did not know who the people were except for a couple of people from our company including my direct report. Well, the demo went on for a time and I was really disappointed. So I spoke up, innocently, and said Fox can beat that easily. I was asked to demonstrate. So I did. I connected to our tables over the LAN and badly embarrassed these other developers. They were running locally on a faster machine than I had.
>>
>>After the meeting ended I went back to work. Later that day, I got called into my direct report's office, and had many things "explained" to put it mildly. In fact, I never saw him so annoyed. I was only supposed to observe, yada, yada. My job was hanging by a thread.
>>
>>It turns out the product being demonstrated was called Cirrus. There were computer magazine reporters present. There were Microsoft people there. One of my superiors ended up going to work at Microsoft. As many of us remember Microsoft purchased Fox Software in 1992. I was ordered to keep the incident to myself for the next 2 years.
>
>Apparently "Cirrus" was the project name for MS Access: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Access#Project_Cirrus
>
>So you embarrassed an early version of Access?

All the later ones too I'd guess..