| Graduated with a BS in Mechanical Eng in '96. Like a number of other commenters mentioned, folks like me who were in STEM majors all had to learn how to code in some form or another, though I don't think I ever took any classes as such.
A popular joke then:
"what do mechanical engineers do when they graduate?"
"they learn to code and become programmers" In my case, I had a part-time job in a lab writing programs in C++ to get various lab instruments to be remote controllable from a terminal and had to learn on the job how to do it. One of the professors in the lab gave me a copy of "Numerical Recipes in C" to help me with the C++ code I was writing. It didn't help at all! I was also part of the generation that learned basic programming on a TRS-80 (aka "trash-80") in BASIC, then in HS some Pascal and FORTRAN in an informal computer club. My family never owned a home computer, but the school had a bunch of windowsOS machines curious students could play with. Looking back now, it seems like I was really primed to be part of one of the first waves of professional programmers, and indeed a number of my friends did go that route. But by the time I graduated from university, I kind of hated coding! Recall that in the 90s there was no stack overflow, no google, no way to see how others might have solved the problem. If you couldn't figure out how to get something to work, you had to just grind away at it no matter how long it took. At the time, I honestly thought whatever future there might be for professional programming I sure didn't want to be a part of it. And I also didn't think it would take over the world like it did. I left uni and I spent a number of years traveling abroad and teaching ESL before dusting off my coding skills and getting a series of coding jobs in various industries. I am extraordinarily grateful that I learned "the hard way" how to code, but more than once I wish I had gotten my degree in CS instead of ME. |