Oh... and almost ALL the guys I worked with at Maxey's computer store, the Byte Brokers - are still in touch with me on Facebook - many were users on my Citadel BBS - and were friends on Sacramento 916 Citadels back in the day - they're almost all successful in Information Technology careers. I'm kinda of the MOST successful - I was back then - I still am - at least in net worth - but most of them are still employed in IT and making salaries - where I am virtually unemployable at this point.  "I figured out how to run a pirate Citadel BBS on my Cox home internet with a full production environment using Linux Proxmox VM servers in redundant clusters," just won't get you a corporate job these days. 

Now if IG opened a startup - I bet I could convince him to hire me as a Citadel Systems Engineer III and pay me $75,000 a year - which would be exploiting TF out of me. And he would be making 7 figures a year if he could afford to give me that opportunity. And I'd nail it. But if that doesn't pan out - I'm working remotely in the medical industry doing billing collections making $24,000 a year when the CEO is making MILLIONS. 

And healthcare is a whole other ballgame on how effed things can be. 

Heh.  Don't count on it  :)    My work on Citadel has opened career doors for me, but it's never been a revenue generator in the direct sense.  If there was a way to turn it directly into revenue I'd have done that a long time ago.  I always thought that if I somehow became mega-wealthy some other way, my post-employment effort would be to open a Citadel Software Foundation and have people working on software projects that empower people to be independent of the big tech firms.

But then I'd have to worry about corruption.  I'd have to worry about it becoming like Wikipedia or Mozilla, taking in non-profit money and 95% of it getting spent on activism.   (Wikipedia for example -- made $185 million this year, spent $3 million on hosting, and the rest they spent funding domestic terrorists.)

I worked my way through a career and I'm sitting in a pretty good spot right now.  The company has been relatively good to me, after the most recent move I'm with a really great group of people that treat each other well and work on cool projects, but I can't retire early or anything like that.  But you know what -- I'm happy and content and joyful.  That matters.

i tell my engineers, if you wanna get rich go be a plummer.  the ones that do.... get rich.  the ones that don't, languish on the corporate sofa hoping for their 3% raise every year with the occasional 5% promotion.  7% if they're extra special. welcome to workin for da man. 

or in our case the last few years instead of a raise we got a bonus of about the same amount as if we got the normal COL increase..

While on the surface it sounds ok " we got money " and lots were ok with it. its not ok. Its subject to not getting anything next year, and it does not count towards your pension as that is tied to your last 5 years of salary..  And few people are bothering to 'excel' for their yearly review.. why bother. just do enough to stay employed. Only way to get more is change jobs.

Sat Dec 13 2025 04:44:03 UTC from test2

i tell my engineers, if you wanna get rich go be a plummer.  the ones that do.... get rich.  the ones that don't, languish on the corporate sofa hoping for their 3% raise every year with the occasional 5% promotion.  7% if they're extra special. welcome to workin for da man. 

or in our case the last few years instead of a raise we got a bonus of about the same amount as if we got the normal COL increase..

At the most simple level that is Teh Sux0r, for the most obvious reason: it is not cumulative.  Next year you will not get X% on top of that X%.  For example, a $3000 raise on a $100000 salary is actually $4031 over ten years.  Plus the base amount is last year's amount next year.