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It's a dangerous thing to run a blog about one's IT career. It's the technically proficient who are most likely to read a website like this, and who are most likely to read a tech-related blog, and it's the technically proficient on whom I'm most likely to want to make a good impression as my career advances. Blogs are a good way to make bad impressions on people you've never even met. Blogs are self-conscious things. They assume an audience, and without that audience there's no point to them. Sure, you might think of the idea of a private journal or diary, but blogs are not that at all: they're very public things. If you're reading one that isn't your own, you'll find it difficult to justify such a thing on purely private grounds without lying to yourself in the process. As such, you should expect that every blog you read is written with its audience in mind. Things will always be censored to some degree, in some way, or will be made intentionally shocking for the "benefit" of the audience. You'll see a lot of passive-aggressive behavior in blogs, a lot of pity-seeking, a lot of trend-chasing and a lot of trend-resisting, and a lot of attempts to spread ideas and opinions to infect the minds of others. This blog is no exception. Keep that in mind whenever you read what I have to say about someone else here, and keep that in mind whenever you read anyone else's blog entries, too. Blogs can be great advertising. People link to things they want other people to see. Sometimes they use those links to advertise themselves by making their own blogs seem interesting by way of what they link. Sometimes they advertise things they support or other online endeavors of theirs by linking to them. Often, they do both at once. It's typical to see people throwing gratuitous links to things into their blogs to drive up traffic and to show how cool they are, and also to drive traffic to whatever it is they're linking. What that will sometimes translate to in TR blogs is links to businesses that TR members run or that employ them, in hopes of increasing business. I'll do that too, right now, just to get it out of the way. Here's one of my employers: Wikimedia Foundation Here's what you've probably already seen of the Wikimedia Foundation: Wikipedia As of this writing, I'm a thirtyish professional computer geek: I work both as a datacenter technician (for the above-linked nonprofit organization) and as an IT consultant (as an employee of a consultancy, mostly doing 1. web development and 2. unix/linux systems implementation and management). I'm an ethical theorist with very strong and well thought out political opinions, and that spills over into my analyses of IT industry trends quite a bit. I'm an INTJ, a "synthesist", the focus of whose strengths is apparently in qualitative analysis, according to the personality tests. I'm also "smart" and "lazy", according to Rommel's leadership metrics. Perhaps I should explain that: Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, despite taking orders from a bunch of murderous, genocidal Nazis (but I repeat myself), was a brilliant military commander in World War Two. He has made interesting statements about the desirable qualities of leaders, and if he wasn't hampered by basically insane superiors (Hitler, in short), he may well have won the Second World War for Germany. I'll just directly quote what he said about how he selected leaders within his command. "Men are basically smart or dumb and lazy or ambitious. The dumb and ambitious ones are dangerous and I get rid of them. The dumb and lazy ones I give mundane duties. The smart ambitious ones I put on my staff. The smart and lazy ones I make my commanders." Enough about me. What do you think of me? In case you're interested, you can look up Field Marshal Rommel at Wikipedia.