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Who said I wanted you for a friend? Third career mistake: choose your friends wisely.

Precisely why I will steer clear of such a smug wannabe oligarchist such as yourself.

Apparently, you think that boss of yours is your "friend" and "protector," and you have chosen to hitch your fortues to his success. He'll take care of your career.

Wow! Your Immense and Ponderous Brain has mindreading abilities as well!

Absurd. He needs a service and I sell him my labor. Of course, since I am in the United States, and since the cost of my labor is artificially inflated by EPA, OSHA and other regulations, there are certain minimums I cannot go below, which such minimums are not set thusly in China and India.

Sure. You'll never know career success until you finally decide to be true to yourself, and crawl out from under a shadow. But, if I know your type, you think it's too "scary" out there on your own.

Guess what? 95% of America thinks it's too scary to start their own business. There's no shame in seeking a different path.

But you, Mr. Smug Himself, thinks that anyone who does not follow YOUR career path is a coward or is lacking in some way.

Not everyone is capable of being a CEO, either mentally or emotionally. But Mr. Smug Himself cannot abide by that. Those people are commoners and subhuman.

You really should move to Argentina. You'd fit right into the Oligarchy.

"Let them eat cake?" Do I or the government owe you bread and a career that you don't yet think you owe to yourself? Look in the mirror, not on these posting boards for the reason you are going nowhere.

Am I going nowhere? Well, I make a little less than a third of your money, but I guess the Immense and Ponderous Brain struck out on that one. I'm not exactly going nowhere. But I do see the trend. The trend is that the vast majority of people will be out of ALL work in the next 10 to 15 years. At that point, those people will be unable to purchase basic goods and services. Do you really want to see what happens when a society is denied basic services? Think: Russia 1918.

You evidence more Libertarian-Democrat jealousy than most. You suffer from "Shadenfreud-itis"

Nonsense. I applaud your success. What I am disgusted by is your attitude. Your smugness and selfishness; your complete lack of concern as to anyone except yourself; and your mistaken belief that all people can be CEO's -- and your contempt for anyone that cannot -- is what has me feeling a little future-Schadenfreud towards you. If you were a little more humble and a little less self-absorbed, I would wish you nothing but continued success.

I have another friend who is quite successful. His screen name is Southack. His successes mirror or exceed your own. Yet I wish him nothing but continued success. Do you know why? It is because he is humble and is not completely self-absorbed.

No, it's really about you, not your success.

I have admired a number of Southack's cogent analyses, and I supect that his personal and business success is foreign to the "beggar-thy-neighbor" politics-of-resentment hair-shirt you prefer to wear.

Shed the sack-cloth and the woe-is-me and the perverted desire you harbor, which hopes to make yourself look good or feel better at someone else's expense, or failure -- Career mistake #4 --. Career success for you stands a long way off with an attitude like that.

If you are looking for my failure, you'll have a long wait. Why don't you crawl out from behind that rock of fear from which you spitball success (your own included), and finally after 17 years in your career you can get to work on earning some successes you can truly call your own.

"I'm not exactly going nowhere. But I do see the trend. The trend is that the vast majority of people will be out of ALL work in the next 10 to 15 years. At that point, those people will be unable to purchase basic goods and services. Do you really want to see what happens when a society is denied basic services? Think: Russia 1918."

You are doing fine, Laz, and certainly going forward in life.

But do you really think that all jobs will be gone in 15 years?!

Look, IT has just gone through a boom and a bust. It was over-hyped in the beginning, and it's being pessimistically oversold in the present.

And while it is true that menial, repetitive jobs (be they in IT or in most anything else) **are** going to be mechanized and automated away, that's not cause for doom and gloom in my book.

We automated and mechanized farming, if you'll remember, and now we produce better food, safer, in larger numbers, at less cost, and with fewer people than ever before.

Certainly banning the automation of farming would have been a net negative for America 20 years down the road (picture 1930 to 1950).

True, lots of farmers lost their land and had to move on. True, they had to retrain and pick new careers (or adapt the better farming technology and make millions).

And you're going to see that self-same thing in IT. Just as farming has foreign competition, so too will IT. Just as farming was once the dominant profession, so too will the relative fall of IT be viewed in a similar light.

Are there still American farming innovations?! Of course! Will there still be American IT innovations?! Of course!

In fact, the foreign IT competition will force state, local, and perhaps even the federal government to reconsider their ponderous, onerous anti-business legislation (descrimination laws, anti-right to work union laws, pension funding laws, tort reform to rein in out of control lawsuits, EPA regulations, OSHA nonsense, et al).

The other side of the coin is that lots of so-called "high-tech" IT jobs were nothing of the sort. A code slinger putting together an order-entry web page ain't cutting edge, much less high tech. Ditto for system administrators installing software updates, checking for infections, and setting up new user accounts. It shouldn't really surprise anyone to see such jobs either being automated by robotic software and/or being outsourced to 3rd world grunts.

But innovative software, that's another story. Look at the game and utility markets. Plenty of entrepreneurial efforts from the little guy make it into the American system, and those guys are being handsomely rewarded. Why aren't we seeing Indian and Chinese programmers come out with such games and comercial utilities?! But we certainly see the Americans doing it, and I don't see that trend stopping.