Its been 6 years since I worked there and I haven't kept up with them, but at the time Amazon employed some core developers of Perl and some of the major libraries (I believe they paid people to work on Mason). My knowledge is very out of date however, and they may not even be as big a Perl shop as they used to be.

My girlfriend is deaf, and traditional office environments have typically been hard for her. At some point she decided to start working from home so most of her interactions would be over email. She had experience working for non-profits and picked up some SQL and knowledge of some of the databases backed financial systems that those non-profits use (notably Raiser's Edge). She found a decent amount of work on E-lance doing financial reports for non-profits using Crystal Reports and SQL Server Reporting System, and when it came to hard SQL she was able to ease her way into it, taking on more and more complex reports over time. Now she's a full time contractor, working from home, telecommuting to non-profits all over the world, making good money.

Learn some SQL, one of the report generating tools, and how some type of business stores its financial data, typically a non-tech heavy one that's not likely to do this stuff in house.

I actually like Gnome 3 as well. I thought I was the only one. Unity drives me insane however. It seems like the two were going for some of the same concepts but Unity missed the mark.

Thank you sir for that insight. The takeaway of this whole discussion is that the key to job security is a four digit slashdot ID.

It wasn't actually phone support, but it was low level end user desktop support. Basically instead of "have you rebooted it?" over the phone, I would go to their office and reboot it, and anything more complicated I was supposed to send it downstairs for level 2 support (I actually got yelled at for reinstalling a driver once).

And this was by no means a hierarchy. Tech support was just the easiest to break into without experience. The move to sysadmin was natural, work on servers instead of desktops. QA was a calculated because I wanted to write production software. It was actually a step responsibility wise, but got me closer to dev.

All of those have the potential to rise up and make careers out of. I know from trying to hire them, senior QA people are worth their weight in gold. I just knew from the beginning that I wanted to write code.

One other thing I should point out is that I've found startups to be generally more accepting of a lack of a degree. My current large company was the result of my previous startup getting acquired.

I'm a senior developer at one of the world's biggest software companies. The only reason I didn't move to management is because I want to continue writing code. I dropped out of college in the middle of my second year.

A degree certainly helps you get a job, and skips you past a few of the bottom rungs, but after a certain point talent and experience are all that matters. Its true that without a degree I had to work my way from tech support -> sysadmin -> software qa -> software development, and my friends who stuck with schol went straight to software development. However when I finally got to write code for a living I was already considered mid-level, and they were junior devs, and now ten years into the field we're all about at the same place.

Maybe my path wouldn't work for most people, but "you will die penniless and alone if you don't go to college" scare tactics just annoy me.

In response to 10 and ADD, are you going to include other learning disabilities in the list of things we were better off not diagnosing kids with? My dad is dyslexic, and as a result was kicked out of two elementary schools and just scraped by in the third. The diagnoses they gave him at the time was "brain damaged". After being set back repeatedly he learned to adjust and is now a mathematician and software engineer. How many kids from that time were tossed aside and didn't reach their potential? Unlike the good old days you're so fond of, I was diagnosed relatively early on, got the help I needed, and as a result it hasn't held me back at all. You really want me to go back to a time where I would have spent my childhood being called stupid?

Seconded. Also while not an astronaut took on NASA management in the Challenger committee and won.

Oh really, I didn't realize that happened. That's actually pretty cool then, it means there's progress. The brush off google gave when asked about JIT made me think it'd never happen.