August 28, 2012 
Getting hooked on computers is easy—almost anybody can make a program work, just as almost anybody can nail two pieces of wood together in a few tries. The trouble is that the market for two pieces of wood nailed together—inexpertly—is fairly small outside of the “proud grandfather” segment, and getting from there to a decent set of chairs or fitted cupboards takes talent, practice, and education. The extra 9,900 percent had neither practice nor education when they arrived in our trade, and before they ever had the chance to acquire it, the party was over and most of them were out of a job. I will charitably assume that those who managed to hang on were the most talented and most skilled, but even then there is no escaping that as IT professionals they mostly sucked because of their lack of ballast.
The bazaar meme advocated by Raymond, “Just hack it,” as opposed to the carefully designed cathedrals of the pre-dot-com years, unfortunately did, not die with the dot-com madness, and tod
(Full Story: A Generation Lost in the Bazaar – ACM Queue)
