Pixels don’t care

I'm not disagreeing, I'm saying that if you've never met someone face to face but you've worked successfully with them using IRC/IM/Email/Some-source-code-revision-system as your communication tool (as the original article Author implies) then meeting 'face to face' to get to know them may not be necessary.

I think we've all met people like you describe. But let's not tar the author with that either. What he describes does indeed happen all the time, and you don't need to invoke irrational discrimination to explain it: employers offer lower salaries to the young and inexperienced because they can (these people are hungrier, "need" the jobs more, and have fewer options) and because it saves them money. That's maybe not noble but it's not insane either. This may be especially true in the web development world which (to my eyes as a 41 year old systems hacker) is populated by a much larger fraction of young and inexperienced developers. Unless you're a true rockstar, there are a half dozen candidates just as good as you willing to take that job.

If you look to history, you can see overtime we acquire new ways of changing ourselves. There was a time when there wasn't makeup, but nowadays people can use makeup and change their appearance. Same thing with dying your hair, getting a plastic surgery, or arguably even body building: by getting this down to a science, we can figure out how to best change our physique. But really, all of these methods are crude, really crude.

But I'm super excited about what the next of couple of decades will do change this. I think we're on the verge of being able to completely define ourselves, and I don't just mean in the sense of designer children, i.e. genetics. I'm also thinking more along the lines of augmented reality and new bionic bodies.

Even today, there is a woman, Aimee Mullins, who has prosthetic legs. In her TED talk (http://www.ted.com/talks/aimee_mullins_prosthetic_aesthetics...), she talked about how she could redesign her legs however she wanted. For example, she could be 6 inches taller, or when she did a fashion shoot, she could have cheetah legs: http://img0.liveinternet.ru/images/attach/b/3/17/452/1745283.... (NSFW?) At one point in the talk, a person from the audience shouted out "It's not fair!"

And this is epochal, right? This is just a sign of what's to come. You look at Second Life and you see these avatars people have designed for themselves, they have control over how big their chest is, what skin colour they are, height, whatever. I can't help but dream of that being extrapolated to the real world, where we have complete control over how we express ourselves physically. Everybody would feel comfortable in their skin, everybody would look super-sexy, and we would find radical new ways of expressing ourselves (personally I would love blue fur).

Now I know what some of you are thinking right now, isn't this really superficial? In Second Life we already see huge tits and perfect abs. In one sense, culture becomes magnified tremendously. The body almost becomes a blank canvas to extrapolate the mind onto. But also, it's not superficial at all, it's exactly the opposite.

Let me explain it by posing you this question: what defines you? I've thought long and hard about this, and I've come to the answer: you are defined by what you can't change. When OP can't change how tall he is, he's defined by that, especially so in his workplace. On the flip side, when you can change something about yourself, that is a means of expressing who you are. We can change the style and the colour of our hair, and this is a huge part of culture: just look at all those hair magazines.

So what we have here is you are defined by what you can't change and what you can change is a means of expressing who you are. But, and this is the point I'm trying to get at, when you can change something that you couldn't change before, what defines you becomes smaller. So when in the next couple of decades, when we can change our sex, skin colour, physique, species?, what will truly define us becomes an interesting question.

And it is in this sense how it is exactly the opposite of superficial.

There's a Buddha saying: "You are not your thoughts." And you are not your body either.

He was 20, so he might still have not finished out his growth.

/speculation

If you have demonstrably great work, what does formal education do for you that will affect your work for some company? Similarly, if this guy isn't the one landing the client or dealing directly with them on a regular basis, how can the pixels possibly care about for whom they are assembled?

I read these parts of his anecdotes as excuses concocted only after an in-person meeting.