I'm a self taught programmer with no college. I taught myself html and some basic javascript and vbscript before I completed high school and out of high school was able to get an entry level QA job. 4 years later, when I would have been graduating from college, I was already making more money and had more knowledge and experience in my field than a college graduate would and I didn't have any debt. I graduated high school with a 1.6 gpa, my family for most years of my childhood had an income beneath the poverty level and on the years where it wasn't, it was not much over. So there goes your theory about this only working for ivy league students with rich families. If you have the desire and capability to learn, you can do so outside of college as well as within college.

Sure technology can fix it, just have a tracking chip embedded under the skin somewhere like a cat.

I could see myself potentially falling into this category you have identified. I don't post often, but I read a lot. I am an ex Microsoft employee and I generally like Microsoft and Microsoft products. I tend to post pro Microsoft messages when I read something anti Microsoft that is so ridiculous I just can't hold myself back. When Linux and Mac fanboys cram their biased opinions down other people's throats and truly believe they are being subjective it triggers a fairly violent response in me. Microsoft is not always right, and not always the best, but it definitely isn't always wrong and isn't always the worst. I try to be subjective and unbiased but I freely admit that I believe that Macs and Iphones/Ipads are overpriced and overhyped. I haven't got to play with a surface yet, so I'll wait until I can before I come to a conclusion on it. I'm sure there are a lot of Microsoft employees/fans who troll /. and only post occasionally.

I used to work for Microsoft and while I was there I interviewed at least 100 people. Some of the things you are saying are just laughably untrue. Microsoft (as well as other companies) look for talented people with potential to be excellent employees and NOT some guy who happens to have experience with the one specific technology or programming language that we need at that moment for a specific project. We would regularly hire people with experience only in Linux, or Java or hire C++ developers for a job where they would be doing mostly C# or JavaScript or whatever. Very rarely we would need an "expert" on a specific technology or technology stack and give that more weight in the hiring process, but that was definitely an uncommon one-off situation. Having been through Microsoft's hiring training and having been one of 50 or so people who was a regular interviewer for positions in Windows Live, I can tell you that technical skills (even for the technical positions like developers and SDET's) were only about %20 of the focus for a typical interview loop. The problem is that it's hard to find a developer who is the total package. Some candidates could code through whatever hoops we gave them but fell flat on their face when we tried to get them to be creative, or delved into their interpersonal skills. Others had great creativity and interpersonal skills, but were shoddy coders. When we did find a candidate that was a good fit, we would hire them and normally spend the first few months training them and helping them get up to speed on the technology and products we were working on. I know this because I was also in the mentoring program and mentored a number of new hires on my own team. I could see you maybe making the argument that the hiring standards Microsoft is setting are too high, or that it's wages for tech workers are too low, but that's a very different argument than you are making.

Exactly, we need a standard format kind of like HTML for web pages. Once we have that then every tool for editing those documents will render everything exactly the same and all our problems will be solved! I know we had some problems with browsers, but it's gonna be different with document editing software, I swear.