"We're just a means to and end - and not an end in itself." - our head at yesterday's meeting. I was just browsing through some articles, all dealing with the question why young people / women / whoever isn't interested in a carrer in IT any longer. My boss told us the answer: we're just there for customer's sake, we're costing too much money, our only raison d'être is to satisfy the customer.

I was too tired to tell her that even the opposite of this would be still wrong. Why should one try to convince people to have a career in a work environment without any self-confidence? Why this bullshit about that abstract customer? Most customers I talked with were actually nice people, they were, in fact, people. No need to frighten IT workers because of this evil customers. Who takes his work seriously doesn't need a monster to be afraid of, he's proud to deliver good work.

The complete loss of self-confidence up to total self denial is the main reason for people backing away from a career in IT. If we could get back our self-confidence, coffee-cup reading like this or that would get obsolete. Give IT the glamour back and people will come.