Hey that's me

Joel Spolsky writes:

I noticed (and confirmed this with a recruiter friend) that Windows API programmers here in New York City who know C++ and COM programming earn about $130,000 a year, while typical Web programmers using managed code languages (Java, PHP, Perl, even ASP.NET) earn about $80,000 a year. That's a huge difference, and when I talked to some friends from Microsoft Consulting Services about this they admitted that Microsoft had lost a whole generation of developers. The reason it takes $130,000 to hire someone with COM experience is because nobody bothered learning COM programming in the last eight years or so, so you have to find somebody really senior, usually they're already in management, and convince them to take a job as a grunt programmer, dealing with (God help me) marshalling and monikers and apartment threading and aggregates and tearoffs and a million other things that, basically, only Don Box ever understood, and even Don Box can't bear to look at them any more.

Huh, that's weird. He just described me. I know everything about COM and monikers and marshalling and apartment threading and the rest of it. I read the 800-page "Inside COM" book about eight years ago, and I still remember it. And as he says, I am senior, and I am in management now. I guess it's time to recalibrate my self-image. At this rate, someday I'll be one of those semi-retired COBOL programmers who gets pulled back in to fix the Y2K bug.

And I'm only 27.