Many fine individuals are now in trouble because of the path you describe.

Back in the "floppy disk days" to which you refer, it was very common for young people who "got it" in terms of programming and what's important and what's not, to leave the university to take on a high-paying job as a programmer because they figured they'd get on the carousel at a relatively high salary and do the good work that they did. They'd keep up with the technology and steadily increase their worth.

Unfortunately, the way things have gone, with companies being bought and sold, personnel being purged and replenished for purposes of reselling the company, and so on, these excellent and talented people have become unemployable because their many valuable accomplishments are lost on the "HR Office", which doesn't know about the association between LAN and ETHERNET, or SMD, ESDI, and SCSI and disk interfacing strategies. HR often doesn't let the resume proceed to the hands of someone who'd actually appreciate the quality and quantity of work reflected in it.

What I've seen again and again is a small successful company growing into a large not-so-successful one on the backs of individuals such as you've mentioned, and had the ones capable of understanding and doing the necessary work flushed out as the company is "dressed for sale" and replaced with highly credentialed but otherwise unqualified people in order to make their roster look good. The purchaser of such a company then has to flush out the "dressing" and try to recapture the talent that they need in order to say afloat. I've seen good companies die, and the lives of talented programmers "go down the tubes" as a consequence of this.

this is odd, this is exactly the issue I adressed in my (otherwise unrelated) post above http://www.8052.com/forumchat/read/188579