I am a huge admirer of Bill Gates. I think he's one of the towering great figures of the past 150 years or so, ranking with Franklin Roosevelt, Thomas Edison, and the Wright Brothers. But occasionally, the man does utter some monumentally stupid things.

I'll come back to that thought momentarily. But first, I want to talk about a classic science-fiction story called "Press Enter," by John Varley.

It came out in 1984. I've remembered it fondly since then, but didn't reread it until a few months ago. The story, a mystery surrounding the death of a superhacker named Kluge, is set in the present day at the time the story was published. I put off rereading it because I was concerned that the story might be badly dated, fixated on 21-year-old computer technology, and unreadable.

The story still holds up. It's quite good, actually. And yet it's also quite dated--not in the technology, but in the attitudes toward the technology. Specifically, the theme that computer scientists were like magical wizards who would soon rule the world.

Computer technology is "the future," says one character, adding, "It's power, if you know how to use it. ... You can make money with one of these things. I don't man earn it, I mean make it, like if you had a printing press. ... People who run the computers will take over. They already have. ... "

And now we're living in the future that Varley was anticipating. Things hardly worked out the way he said it would. It's true that Gates, the world's richest man, is a computer geek, and computers have generated quite a few billionaires and multimillionaires, but the rest of us are hardly supermen. We still worry about mortgage payments and doctor's bills and paying for the kids' college and whether we'll ever be able to afford to retire and if anyone will want to employ us after we're 50.

Varley's premise seems particularly ironic given the events of the past four years. It's more or less precisely four years ago when jobs in the IT sector started going all to heck. It was mid-2001 or so when the massive layoffs started. I spent most of 2002 self-employed myself, and by the end of that year I wondered whether I'd ever work in the computer industry again or earn even half of what I'd been making in 2001. Fortunately, I got a good job in the first couple of days of 2002.

I compare that whole experience to the end of the movie Titanic. I was bobbing around in the freezing water, starting to feel sleepy and numb, and, just as consciousness was ebbing away, an arm snaked out of a lifeboat and pulled me in and wrapped a blanket around me and gave me some hot soup ...

Yes, I'm excessively melodramatic. You're not the first person to mention this to me.

And now we come to Bill Gates, who wonders why more kids these days don't go into computer science.

"Gates said Monday that even if young people don't know that salaries and job openings in computer science are on the rise, they're hooked on so much technology--cell phones, digital music players, instant messaging, Internet browsing--that it's puzzling why more don't want to grow up to be programmers," according to our article.

This is spoken like a man who was born well off, attended Harvard, and became the wealthiest man in the world. He's never had to work for someone he disliked, wondered where his next meal is coming from, or had to stand in the rain waiting for a bus (to paraphrase something once said about science fiction writer Larry Niven, born the heir to an oil fortune).

Kids these days are worried about money and survival, in a way that we haven't seen since before the baby boom. The kids who will enter college in a few weeks are kids who turned 14 when the planes hit the World Trade Center. They spent most of their adolescence, the time when kids get ready to enter the world of adulthood, learning about terrorism, war, the economic downturn, outsourcing, layoffs, increasing deficits, the health-care crisis--am I leaving anything out here? They resemble, in outlook, the generation that grew up in the Depression and fought in World War II. They grew up knowing the world is a scary place.

Even today, the headlines about IT careers fall far short of the exuberance expressed in Varley's short story. The headlines are mixed and cautiously optimistic, like we all have cancer and we've heard from the doctor that we might be in remission. IT staffing is finally back to its summer 2001 levels. Foote Research reports that pay for key skills like application development and database knowledge are gaining fast and returning to their pre-crash levels. On the other hand, fewer employers are offering IT students summer internships and part-time jobs this year. Hewlett-Packard cut 14,500 jobs. And hanging over it all is the miasma of fear that workers in India or China will take all our jobs, fear that is never dispelled by reassurances that outsourcing is not such a big problem or is even good for us.

Why aren't more kids entering IT? It's because they, quite reasonably, don't know if there'll be any jobs for them when they graduate. That's easy to figure out, unless you're the richest man in the world.