My wife was part of a 1970 school coding outreach that UVic had when it set up the brand new C Sc specialty in the math department. She supplemented that with evening and weekend studies at SFU while she was the Infection Epidemiologist at Vancouver General and made the career switch from Microbiologist to IT. She was making more than me before we had our 1st child and her skills were in such demand that she got to job share and eventually started getting cold call solicitations to work from home on her own schedule.

Being in IT in during the RayGun / Lyin Brian / Thatcher / Dubbya's Dad depressions of the 1980s was a bit like living in an alternate reality of Gold Collar full employment. GTA was the only area in Canada with unemployed computer geeks. "Computing Canada" published a snarky story suggesting that those either were posers who didn't really have the skills, or were unable to relocate because of negative equity mortgages after the housing market crashed.