[msie]

Only one problem: when I arrived at the job, after 8 years of learning how to program in an academic environment—I couldn’t program. I won’t get into the details. But I had no clue. I couldn’t even turn on a computer. It was a mess. I think I even ruined people’s lives while trying to do my job. I heard my boss whisper to his boss’s boss, “I don’t know what we’re going to do with him, he has no skills.”

At first I was in disbelief of this. Then again:

- he probably did no internships or coop programs

- assignments were small projects with little collaboration with others

- he only used sysadmin-administered computers

- he was at a college at a time where mainframes and workstations were the norm

- he never did any pc programming outside of school