[ImTalking]

My kids school had a career night where parents from all sorts of different jobs came to answer kid's questions. I was the IT rep and I thought I would be inundated with kids all night. Well, I had 3 kids. 2 were definitely geeks and one was a smart kid who said he would try other jobs before he would think about IT.

I couldn't understand it. Here we have an industry that is full of billionaires and success stories and yet only 3 were interested. I thought maybe they felt is was too boring just staring at a screen all day. Maybe they didn't understand how pervasive software is and how it basically drives everything. Or maybe they have a different definition of happiness which programming seemingly won't give them.

[laughfactory]

Well, IT and software and engineering are all _hard_ domains where it's well known that it'll be 1) hard work, and 2) hard work, and 3) how likely is it that they'd be able to create the next Google or Facebook. I think between the slope of the skill acquisition curve and the sense that everything's (or will be) done before by these huge success stories, kids just don't see a gap for them to fill there. It's really hard for them to imagine that Google (or any of the current hot properties) will have its day, like IBM or AOL, and then fade into irrelevance. So they can't connect the hard work to making the next big thing.