I think it must be coming up to my 4th year anniversary of having "quit" open source and when I come back to places like Slashdot I can't help but wonder if this mustn't be what people returning to communist countries must feel like. I quit open source when I realized that those who ran this industry had at their core a mentality of "the code is free, why aren't you?". I jumped ship over to enterprise C# and let me tell you my former brothers, it's a land of fat pay cheques, a tidy bonus and most importantly, get ready for this, it will come as a shock, respect. Come my repressed brothers, leave this walled garden, you know that straight after this story will be another talking about $1.50 php coders in China or Apache admins working for instant noodles. Leave this depressing, tall-poppy, work-for-nothing, zero respect, oppressed peon existence and come join all the people who left long ago to the land of Professional (Microsoft) IT.

Tell me something, why isn't he the project manager in this scenario?

This industry is swaddled by a parasite layer of project managers, business analysts, account managers, various "creatives" and other do nothing/know nothings who take the lion’s share of the budget before the core gets a look in.

No other highly skilled profession is like this, legal firms are run by lawyers, doctors start private surgeries, architects happily roll up their sleeves as the years move on and get out in front of the customer. Not IT though, oh no, we're all delicate wall flowers who can't be trusted to not freak the customers out.

It's half our fault for this ridiculous geek mythos we've built up and half the fault of our parasites who been parasites will do everything they can to maintain the status quo.

Don't learn another language, take those years of industry experience, bin the D&D t-shirts, put on a suit and apply for one of those managerial roles. Kick the parasites out, eat the rich, and take this damn industry back.