Hi Barbara,

>To argue the other side of the street, my son, age 26, recently left a job because the programmers working with him were (and this is a quote from a 'youngster') "Old dinosaurs who didn't know anything about data normalization, OOP or any recent programming designs". And he's Access and VB (I know, I failed somewhere :-)

Certainly, there are exceptions to any generalization (such as mine). Just a personal opinion, but I think it's much easier to learn something like data normalization than the underlying principles. That's just my take.

There are those (me included) who will point to the similarities between OOP and the structured programming paradigm. As someone who came from the structured programming environment into OOP, I immediately saw the connections. In fact, one OOP programmer, who saw my 2.6 framework commented that "you've applied a lot of OOP principles". The statement wasn't really true because I had just followed the structure programming principles. So there's a strong connection there.

As for you son, my sympathies< g >. Maybe at DevCon you'll find a support group that'll help ease the suffering.:-)

>However, the 'working an ungodly number of hours' suggestion is sure true. I won't do that anymore but it's "the way it is" for most people right out of college. Steve (my son) got a lot of grief for announcing he was leaving early every Wed. to coach Little League - even though he put in 12+ hour days the rest of the week.

I certainly don't put in that many hours on the job. Normally, it's 8 to 9 hours, five days a week. There are, once in a great while, those rush jobs, where I have to work a little longer. The last time that happened, was about 5 years ago.