My older brother, who has done a lot of work in the open source community, including on the multiprotocol instant messaging client Gaim, recently applied for a job at VMware, a company that, as I understand, develops a technology that allows virtual machines to run on top of computer operating systems. The interview was reportedly very long and very difficult. He had to design, on the spot, several programs in areas which he has never touched, do them efficiently, and then do them a second way. He also had to explain how a certain program event would work, from the program level to the libraries and down to the operating system.

He seemed a bit nervous about a few of the interviewers, who were turned off by his lack of a college degree and the twenty-plus years of experience that a lot of the employees had. Because of this, he expected (if he was to get the job) to get a lower starting pay than the average employee with a degree got.

Yesterday, we sat down the play a game of poker when the phone rang. My brother took it outside and we waited for what seemed like an hour. When he came in, he announced that he got the job, and that they were actually giving him an upper-end starting pay. He's starting at a salary that's above what my parents make! The company also paid my brother the expenses to move to Palo Alto and get settled down. He's going to share an office and will get two computers to work on.

I'm really proud of him. He's done a lot of work to get here, and he has remained determined dispite a lot of discouragement by some people, and now it's paid off for him. He's kind of down about leaving his hometown and all of his friends and family, but I think it's important that he starts to build an adult life for himself now.

In other news, I finally decided to get an instant messaging client. I went with Gaim, partly because I know lots of people who use different instant messaging services, and partly because I have a connection with the development group (meaning that if I want to request a feature or report a problem, I'll have a better chance of getting the change made). It's also available on pretty much every Linux distribution, and there's a lot of support for it.

(Note: This post has been modified. The dollar amount have been removed.)