My friend--we'll call him Eric--was not a normal student. For one, he majored in Computer Science and Mathematics rather than Business or Psychology or Biology. Now, I can almost understand Computer Science, as many otherwise sensible individuals were taken in by the Great Hi-Tech Scam of the 90's, but Mathematics was truly bizarre, adding nothing to his likely earnings potential. But that was like Eric--he didn't care what anyone else thought, he did his own thing.

While the rest of us were drinking or dating or attending university sporting events, Eric stayed far away. Yet he was not a homosexual--on the contrary, judging from his exquisite collection of hentai. Instead, Eric spent his spare time fiddling with a then-new operating system called GNU/Linux. It sure didn't do much, but he had fun getting it to, say, read a floppy disk, and that's what really counted for Eric.

All in all, despite occasionally trashing the campus network and an incident involving spamming racist emails under hacked accounts, Eric was a wonderful human being and terrific friend. Yet Eric's is a cautionary tale. Upon graduation, while the rest of us were going to Wall Street or law school, he took a job with an Internet startup.

Five years later, Eric, one of the most intelligent and capable people I've met, is without a job or a future. He is now broke, bled dry by the outrageous rents of Silicone Valley, stuck with a useless CS diploma in a world with a surfeit of programmers--and still a virgin, I gather. Never forced to develop his "people skills," Eric is still incapable of interacting with non-hackers except in the most structured of contexts. Meanwhile, I and his other college friends have moved on to successful careers in finance, management, law, and medicine.

Therefore, even as I call for tolerance of hackers, I must urge all hackers reading this entry to reassess your proud embrace of both their technical talents and social limitations. Not only for the sake of your family and friends, but for your own future. Take it from Eric--the secret to success doesn't lie in the GNU/Linux source code, nor is it found in the TCP/IP stack of a Department of Defense computer.

Get out of the basement. See the sunlight. Work out, play some sports. Develop your social skills, maybe even go on a date. Get an MBA, CPA, JD, or even a MD. But whatever you do, don't expect to make a living, as many hackers once did, as a system administrator or programmer.