>When I worked at M$, there was a guy there named Kevin who used to love the word 'paradigm.' I used to think he used it to show off.
>
>There is a changing paradigm in the world. It used to be that things cost a lot and labor was cheap because people could afford to pay their average living expenses while receiving an average wage.
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>But the paradigm is changing.
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>With inflation everywhere, labor costs have gone up while generally product costs have gone down. If product costs less, then the management (who knows nothing about either hardware or software) does not understand why the software (or software consulting) costs more than the computer itself.
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>Now what happens next directly involves the psychology of management control. One of the ways management traditionally maintains order is by maintaining a hierarchy and that hierarchy is delineated by wage. Management does not want to pay someone more than themselves but they have to face the fact that computers run the world and the technical people who run the computers ought to be compensated for their contribution. The situation is worsened when many programmers are looking for work; this makes management feel that programmers and their like are less valuable on account of the surplus of labor.
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>With any change there is conflict: conflict that opposes any change to the existing order and fear of the unknown. Obviously I am not a sociologist nor a psychologist, but I can see the trend and see it's effect. The world is a vastly different place than it was when I was growing up: my father was a union bus driver and stayed in that job until he retired. It used to be that we could go to national parks for free and could drink the water that came out of the tap. Not any more. Today we have to relearn a new skill or even change entire careers perhaps even several times in our life due to the fantastic rate of change. The major corporations want us to continue buying their product and continually upgrading to preserve their profits while we are working harder than ever just to keep up.
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>It's a changing paradigm is all I can say.


Well written!

The status quo cannot persist much longer. HUGE ground-shifts are going to take place in the near future. Perhaps before this year has passed.
JLK