Half Sigma points out the Pentagon shooting as an example of yet another computer programmer going “postal.” He highlights a comment from a post about IRS-flier-intoer Joe Stack, yet another “postal” programmer:

IT truly is a ’soul destroying’ profession and is certainly no place for an older white guy like Joe Stack. I think Joe was probably pissed off about his inability to make a decent living in his profession, but at the same time he was too much of a brainwashed liberal pussy to really identify the reason his businesses became unprofitable…that reason being the influx of H1-B brown people over the past 15 years or so.

There’s been a lot of mostly negative discussion of H1-Bs over at that site, which is itself run by a programmer. I am not a programmer. But I’ve noticed the huge difference, for whatever reason, between “a career in computers” in the mid- to late-1990s, and the way it works nowadays. I’m not sure if “tragic” is too strong a word. I can sympathize, as someone from another career field — reporting — where I built my life on rules that changed quickly and horribly. (I wonder why journalists never commit any of these grand homicidal gestures?)

In 1998, it seemed any young man who had half a left brain was learning computer stuff and landing jobs that made $60,000 a year. In my world, that was a lot. A guy who actually had a tech-related degree did even better. But no degree was necessary, and certainly not one from a prestigious university. I knew a few young guys who made similar salaries as recruiters, luring other young men with computer skills to quit college and immediately enter the corporate technology workforce. My younger brother quit community college at 20 to program for a company that paid him more than twice what I was making after 5 years in journalism. His last job had been at a department store.

Such was the meteoric rise the computer field provided back then. I knew, or knew of, many men in their 20s who went quickly from being financially and socially adrift to being middle-class and married, thanks to computer knowledge. It was like being a hooker in Alaska: There was an insatiable demand and a short supply. Many guys who were struggling in fields like journalism or film made themselves instantly useful, and profitable, by learning the new technology.

The computer boom stood in stark contrast to what was already happening in journalism. In newspapers — unless you were the IT guy! — management was constantly rubbing in how grateful you should be that you had any job at all. And the only way to rise a little bit above the low-paid, abusive drudgery of community journalism was to become management at those same community papers. The main problem was that the big metro dailies had all but stopped hiring people with degrees from lower-tiered schools. But this was not immediately obvious, first because papers don’t provide reporters’ bios, and second because it went against what J-professors had told us based upon their own experience in the 1960s and 1970s. Back then, it wasn’t hard to start at a small paper with a state school degree and work your way up within a few years. You could get married, buy a house in a nice suburb, have kids, and otherwise make a middle-class life in journalism. You weren’t destined to marginality.

By the 1990s, it seemed the only way for a rank-and-file reporter to move up to a big paper was racial affirmative action. You probably think reporters are liberal, right? Not when affirmative action was the topic. It was especially bad in the Sports departments, which tended to be all white men, because they had an even harder time finding jobs than the regular reporters.

The hostility reminds me of the H1-B discussions. In journalism’s case, it turned out the larger issue was the dwindling economy for what we did. There were so few reporting jobs that “diversity” hires were among the few people who even had a shot. I figured this out after seeing how differently things worked for white kids from expensive schools back east, like Northwestern. They could work a few months at some BFE suburban paper and then get scooped up to, say, the Baltimore Sun because a professor made a phone call. But those people hadn’t always locked up the market either. It was the changing economy. Oh, and I saw plenty of the “diversity” hires still got treated like crap and spit out despite that one break.

And for IT, the change started with the 2000 tech bust.

My brother was out of work for more than a year. Things eventually rebounded for a while, and he had one of those independent contractor gigs for several years that pays you six figures. But it was harder to get work than it had been the first time around. And then we hit 2008. At least half the IT guys I know are out of work. A lot of men built their lives around an economy that may have turned out to be a glitch. No wonder they’re angry.
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HS updated with another post on programmers who go postal.