Salary Survey Extra: Happy Birthday to Bob Dylan
Posted on
May 25, 2017
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Salary Survey Extra is a series of dispatches that give added insight into the findings of both our annual Salary Survey and our smaller Salary Survey PLUS polls. These posts contain previously unpublished Salary Survey data.

The answer, my friend, is blowin' in the wind.

Yes, we meanthat Bob Dylan. No, so far as we've been able to determine, that Bob Dylan does not really have anything to do with IT certification. It's totally possible, say, that he sat down and got his A+ at some point, or that he's been through Cisco Academy and is CCNA certified. He's a pretty sharp guy, after all.

There's no overt connection that we know of, however. Beyond the fact that, when assembling our annual Salary Survey last fall, we were struck (entirely at random) by a well known line from one of Bob Dylan's many famous songs. So we turned it into one of those Not-So-Serious questions at the end of the survey.

That, and it really is, or at least very recently was, his birthday. Bob Dylan turned 76 on Wednesday, May 24. How are you feeling Baby Boomers? Hanging in there?

Before we get to the survey question and its results, however, why not enjoy a few tidbits of Bob Dylan trivia? It is (was) the man's birthday, after all. Did you know:

  • Joan Baez (with whom Dylan was later romantically involved) recalled of hearing him sing in person for the first time, "I never thought anything so powerful could come out of that little toad."
  • Though he converted to Christianity for a time and still references Christian beliefs on occasion, Dylan was born and raised in Judaism, receiving a bar mitzvah at the time of his 13th birthday in 1954.
  • Dylan wrote the song "Knockin' on Heaven's Door" for the Sam Peckinpah western Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (1973), in which he appears as Alias, a stranger who befriends the Kid.
  • Apart from a medically-induced three-month break in 1997, Dylan has toured continuously since 1988. His heavy schedule, dubbed the Never Ending Tour by media in 1989, has included nearly 3,000 live shows to date.

The Not-So-Serious question from our survey references the protest anthem "Blowin' in the Wind." The third verse of the song begins with the rumination, "How many times must a man look up / Before he can see the sky?" To answer Dylan's musing, we turned to the incisive philosophical insight of IT professionals.

Here's what they told us:

The answer, my friend, is blowing in the wind. — 48 percent
Duh. One. — 30.2 percent
This is one of those things like the angels dancing on the head of a pin, isn't it? — 8.1 percent
Look, maybe he's lived his whole life underground, all right? — 7.2 percent
I don't get it, is he blind? — 6.5 percent

Original question: How many times must a man look up before he can see the sky?

About the Author

Certification Magazine was launched in 1999 and remained in print until mid-2008. Publication was restarted on a quarterly basis in February 2014. Subscribe to CertMag here.

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