With my stomach full of turkey, I was cleaning out my mailbox when I came upon a recent recruitment e-mail from Microsoft.  It was for some Windows security software developer positions which I am obviously over-qualified for based on my experiences and knowledge.  Wrong.  The job requires a 'BS or MS degree in CS or equivalent field'.

You see, I dropped out of UC Berkeley about 20 years ago because I lost interest in physics over software engineering.  I have been programming since I was in highschool and taught myself well-beyond the undergraduate CS level, so I started working as a software engineer instead of switching major to CS and face the boredom.  Besides, I was having difficulty paying my way through college.

Anway, I thought it was amusing that a company started by Bill Gates, a dropout like me, requires its engineers to have a degree.  Thinking that it might be a fluke, I checked some software architect positions at Microsoft Career pages and found that all of them requires a degree in CS or equivalent field.  Obviously the job requirement for the Chief Software Architect position is different from mere Software Architect positions at Microsoft.

If this is not hypocrisy, I don't know what is.

One discovery I made about myself since I started blogging is how my perspective about myself differs from most people.  For me, so called self is like a cat sitting on a wall that separates the real world from the inner world.  When I look at myself, I am looking down onto a community of emotions that interacts with each other like balls on a pool table.

When something happens that affects my inner world, I am sitting on the wall watching the balls move and bounce off walls or collide with other balls.  Under high emotion though, the cat will jump onto the table and become a large fast moving ball that knocks everything out of its path.  Watch out!