I preferred to think I was well liked...smile... Slavery was never abolished. It was maybe shelved, then dusted off, updated and expanded to include, well, most everyone. Liberalism at its' finiest - control of everyone and everything from cradle to grave. I'm torn. I'm mostly a .Net guy these days. I love the new IDEs, the debugging, objects and such, the whole immediate gratification you can have now days. But I miss a lot about the old days - desk checking because your program deck only got read into card reader once a day during the day, and as often as you could squeeze in on Production shift off hours if the operators like you. And I do miss IBM 360 style assembler. Anyone can hack at Cobol or VB3 and program - homemakers could - whatever gender they might be. But getting your program to work in assembler - I always felt more accomplished. Oh, and shooting dumps. Given the technology curve, wonder what the technolgy will be like. This is still kind of on point, but I've heard many jobs will be replaced by robots to include vehicles that drive themselves for delivery, snow plowing, manufacturing at every level, etc. That the computer will be as fast as our brain in 10 years or so, so I'm guessing they will be able to develop a scripting language that turns requirements into decent code and then stop offshoring our jobs, they can just depreciate most of us, everywhere.

The thing that pisses me off the most though is that these companies all want "on-site" contractors/employees. First off, as a contractor, it's my understanding that it is illegal to require on-site work unless it can be demonstrated that the work can only be done on-site.

Ah, you are an independent. Then, as you already know very well, "legally" they cannot require you to work onsite, unless you waived that in the fine, or more likely normal sized print. This makes my point about how far the pendulum as swung. Many many years ago I was on contract to a big company, and I didn't want to be extended again. They gave my company an addendum to my contract that basically said I would stay their until, and if, they ever tired of me. I told my management this was completely unenforcable and they agreed, but that if I didn't sign that paper right then and their that I'd be off that contract right then and there and that ALL the folks we had contractging there would be gone too, probably never to return. But I'd have the satisfaction of being right. Learned a very valuable lession that day.