re: the relationship between my personal life (bi, poly, pagan, etc) and my being fired from jobs ... Your curiosity doesn't bother me. :) It's wierd to a lot of people, it's even wierd to me. See at every job that I've been fired for being the way I am, I've only realized after having been fired that the reason why I was fired had to do with those things, even though I might have known at the time I was being fired that my bosses were lying when they gave their reasons. In my case I just happen to be so far afield of normal thought, that I don't have the self-preservation instinct that a lot of people have that says "no no no, don't say that, it'll make them uncomfortable". So I say it, they get uncomfortable and the next thing I know the job ends. Now there have been jobs where I've tried really hard to force myself to have those alarm bells and what seems to happen in the rare cases in which I do censor myself is that because I'm censoring myself the other people get the feeling that I'm hiding something ... because I am. :P Granted that I get the impression what I'm hiding isn't nearly as "bad" as they think it is, but at the same time what it actually is was bad enough for them to fire me in the first place. It hasn't happened at every job actually, I'll admit, it's just happened at more jobs than I care to remember. Other jobs have not paid me what I'm worth and then the company has gone out of business (or virtually out of business) or not paid payroll on time for months on end all for reasons unrelated to my work. But getting back to the ones where I've been fired for being "wierd", what tends to happen is that straight people at the company will bring up some subject in or around sex (or sometimes religion) while out having a smoke or at lunch and me being who I am, I express my opinions... and then it's all downhill... At Gothica for example my boss (who hired me) was talking to his other programmer about hookers when I entered the conversation... hmm... it seems to be perfectly okay for people to talk about sex and sex-related subjects at work as long as they happen to be straight / mono / conservative / waspy kinda folk. :P But I digress -- the issue really being that I can't control what they talk about, they talk about sex periodically, they don't want me to talk about sex and I feel like I've proven that I'm incapable of learning how to censor myself in a way that will help them to remain comfortable around me. So all things considered I think it's better that I surround myself with "freaks" who'll accept me as I am. :)

My purely subjective impression of it in the software industry is that it has more to do with fundamental personality characteristics than with age. It strikes me that the people I've worked with across age ranges either are concerned with results or are concerned with convention by and large, with very little deviation ... they seem to be pretty well polarized... and I have as difficult a time dealing with the folks on the results side actually because the folks on the results side in my experience are usually mostly concerned with getting results at break-neck speeds and are willing to sacrifice both quality and HUGE amounts of time later fixing the problems that are caused by programming at those speeds. I like to take a genuine R&D approach, in which you can take your time, experiment as much as you can, have a *high* failure rate and adapt or adopt the results of those experiments that have worked well. I've only come close to that kind of environment once while I was at Site Manageware and having spoken with some coworkers since leaving I've discovered that their environment has become very beurocratic and academic-centric since I left. For a number of months it was a great job, the best I'd had, but I discovered after a year working there and having my wages garnished that even though I was paying $300/mo extra back to child-support, the arrearage had gone *up* because the state applied interest to the arrearage, which meant that even at $50k salary I wasn't getting out of the debt. I'd originally been promised a raise to $70k at the end of the year, but in spite of having been their "go to guy" who answered everybody else's tough questions when they were stuck with a problem, they didn't seem willing to give me the raise. That's why I left. It's probably for the best anyway. I'm rambling again. :)