Sandy, thanks for a thoughtful and heartfelt response and for calling my attention to this thread. And Sporty, thanks for mentioning the original incident.

I think it's really important that there be space in this monastary for each of us to describe how the sofware profession treats us as individuals. What's it like to be a foo Perl progrmmer where foo is a different ethnicity, gender, age, whatever, than I am? I would hope that PM would be one of the places I could start to learn about that.

And the other thing is that we *are* the software profession. If we don't listen when someone says "this is how the profession is treating me", who is going to listen?