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What the Future Holds for the REAL WebMonkeys

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:


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.