Thanks. I knew there were one or two....I'll have to do that.

Heh, i looked it up on mapquest and it's apparently like a half hour. But the town I lived in was Baxter, it's like....maybe 300 people. I think I went there from 8th grade to freshman year, which would be...99 to 01.

My mom used to go to pella all the time though, something about tulips or something.

Typically spend most of the day perusing the planet.

Seriously though, if you're lucky you actually get to spend much of your day writing code, testing, debugging, and perfecting the application. Yet for most, you'll end up documenting your work, talking about problems in meetings, trying to teach/mentor the n00bs, supervising contractors, or outside on smoke break to get away from your crazy line of work. And that's just 8-5. I didn't get into the pager thing overnight or weekends. FYI, I changed teams and started over just to be rid of the pager thing. Although I do take my turn on-call, it's not nearly like my old project team. I now work in the Data Warehouse, Database/ETL(Extract-Transform-Load) Architect. FWIW, at this point, if I could find something...ANYTHING, to pay near what I get now, but outside I/T, I'm all over it!! Sadly, I'm nowhere near the # Phil was talking about, or else I'd be just fine to stick around. :)

As for how to get an in, I was lucky to be wrapping up a BS in Math during the rise of dot-com lunacy, so jobs were literally everywhere. Once I got a little experience (6 months before my 1st company was sold and moved to Dallas), I found my current home(now 7.5 years). Nowadays you'll likely need a CS/MIS degree, or a serious technical aptitude to get in the door, and w/out that degree you'll be starting on the help desk or as a gopher for the client(PC/workstation setup) for a year or two.

Cory just posted a lot of truth.

There was a lot of money being thrown around at technical gurus in the late 90's. At times I was billing 3k a day.

We did ok in the 90s the backlash after dotcom bust due to a bunch of bad business plans P/E out of line, and general take the money and try sh1t approach to work in developing internet business.

Tech Consultant, emps of those companies took the industry backwards for the most part $10-20/hr.

It has made the can do folks back in demand again.
Painful lesson to lots of people.

Experience and solid work will help the older developer types.

Younger IT guys will need a Cert in their area, plus degree and some experience to get above starting money.

Head down, sharpen the saw regularly. Don't be afraid to move with a few projects/years once you confident in your skills.

Pella is close to Hooverville!

No.

My degree is in history/German...

Yes.

You get a flat discount on new windows (everything at Pella is essentially made to order) and in addition they have weekly auctions of "scratch and dent" where you can get nice windows for pennies on the dollar.

I'm a personal friend of the Help Desk manager, btw.