The way I see it, we are all still cavemen, except nowadays, fire isn't the only thing that excites us! We still exist in a world of "Survival fo the Fittest".. even in coding.. In the days since the introduction of automatic garbage collection, what I have found is a lot fo people getitng into programming for the alleged money, and not for a love of programming. They are not interested in how many clock cycles it takes to execute a command. why should they care? They have plenty of them to play with. I say we should still worry about the inner workings of our (generated) code, because instead of us having control over our own destinies regarding our memory usage, Big Brother decides what do with it for us, and I am afraid Big Brother is Fallable, just like the rest of us. And that is what is driving the new niches in the .NET world.. These niches are developing for the few out of the careless attitudes of the multitude.. Memory Handling is still an issue. Architecture issues have moved higher up the food chain, and not all programmers are equally qualified to deal with them. Multiprocessor, and Grid development are higher on the agenda. These are the niches that we need to move into, as if we don't, we cannot be sure that someone else will.. and this is where I get back to survival of the fittest.. To propogate good programming practice to the next generation of programmers, we need to stand out from the masses as leaders of our respective tribes.. There are enough managers to worry about what the customer wants.. we need to be the ones to worry about where our trade, or craft is going; and HOW a customer gets what they want, as we are the only ones qualified to do it!