| I'm old (57), so this happened back in the 1980s, and isn't very relevant to current market conditions. I started out in amateur radio, and made connections through a friend with a Man who had a small computer repair shop. I started fixing things while still in high school. One day he got an EPROM programmer, and there was a program that talked to it written in Turbo Pascal. The next thing you know, I was programming in Pascal, having already done things in BASIC. I went to College, but I picked poorly, and couldn't afford it, coupled with bad time management, ended up dropping out. I eventually got a job as a programmer. I wrote BASIC code that talked to Industrial Programmable Controllers (PLCs). For about a decade I ended up writing, then supporting in the field, a system that used portable computers to record inspections of fire protection equipment. I loved that job, because I had written the software, and could definitely fix ANY issue that arose. It was during this time that I wrote a cooperative multitasking library for Turbo Pascal 5, under MS-DOS. After that I went to work for a small firm that repaired Industrial electronics, and ran an Internet Service. I did both of those for a few years. It was about this point that I wrote Forth/2 a native code Forth for OS/2, mostly because I was told you couldn't program OS/2 in assembler. Eventually I ended up as a system administrator for a trade show marketing firm for 15 years. I fell into a trap, there was less and less work over time, and they didn't want to risk the running systems to phase in improvements I had written in my free time. Don't repeat my mistake... if you find yourself with more than half of your time free, it's time to move jobs. Next I took a job making gears, it paid less, but was interesting. I have a friend that I've been helping do repairs... it was interesting helping him get his bucket list item working... he always wanted an Atomic Clock, and by the end, we had repaired a few of them. Then Covid hit, and now my programming skills are old, and I've been sick for a year. Update to answer questions:
Love/Hate - I love that you can build anything you want, provided sufficient time and effort. It used to be that everyone built their own tools for navigating the file system, etc. and had fun showing them off to friends. Shareware was an amazing way to learn and share programming knowledge, and even make a few bucks. I hate the fashion aspect that seems to have swallowed the industry. It used to be that knowing how to program was the key, you could learn the details of a language on the job, and usually only took a few days/weeks to get up to speed. Now everyone wants 5 years experience on the 6 year old platform. |