Ask HN: You're an “experienced” developer. What's your story? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: You're an “experienced” developer. What's your story?

1 pointKennyFromIT3 comments

If you're a "gray beard" (man or woman), I'd love to hear your story!

Tell us about your past and present. Things you'd like to share that might otherwise get lost to history. Your career decisions. Your life decisions. Regrets. Triumphs.

Anything really - just let us learn from your experience. Thank you.

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I think that I wrote my first program around 1964 or so. My high school girlfriend's dad worked in the computer room at a GE installation nearby. He showed me how to write FORTRAN programs. I would write the statements on coding sheets, he would bring them in to work and have the key punchers render the statements onto 80-column cards. The program would get run on a GE machine (sorry, can't remember the model) and I would get a 132 column printout, with diagnostics if something went wrong.

Fast forward to 1971 or so. Then I was in the US Army trained as a Combat Engineer and assigned to an Engineering Battalion in Germany. There was a computer on a nearby base and the programmer was getting ready to rotate home without a replacement. Some clerk somewhere must have noticed that I took a FORTRAN course in my first year of college (Northeastern) and so I was reassigned to the computer section.

I had two weeks of OJT with the soon-to-be-gone programmer on a UNIVAC 1005 and then I was on my own. After I had been programming for a few months I thought "Hey. This is the shit."

When I got out of the Army I went to UMASS, Amherst and finished up with a BSCS. That was in 1974 and I have been programming more or less continuously ever since. I say more or less because that have been layoffs, company implosions, and a rage quit but I have never been out of work for more than 3 months.

And I still love it.

Thank you for sharing. This many years later, can you clearly identify how being a programmer has impacted your life (for better or worse)?

I went to school in 80's and graduated with a BS in CompSci/Math minor in 1990. I was originally a 'Business' major but quickly realized that the only class that didn't completely bore me was Calculus. I don't know why, I was never considered 'good' at Math, but I realized that I actually understood it and enjoyed the fact that I could get the little 'algorithms' working. I switched to Comp Sci because I thought I could probably get a decent job at some point with it, but had no idea if I could handle it. I also found that I enjoyed my Math and hardware classes more, but wasn't sure what I could do with a Math degree (remember: no internet, no 'data science'.. ). I really kind of dreaded my pure programming classes, tbh. I took a couple of electives in AI (expert systems in Prolog, and a Lisp class) which actually got me a job with an oil company who was doing pricing with Expert Systems (you probably don't know this, but 'AI' back then was (also) a relatively big business.. there were a few companies doing expert systems, and neural networks ). Anyway, after about 6 months, they canned the initiative and no one heard of AI again for another 20 years ;). I moved on to doing C/C++ development.. then windows client/server development for another 5 years. The Web/Internet was becoming a thing at that point, so I started working in that.. I was a consulting technical project manager on a large consumer e-commerce app for selling CD's online. That led to many engagements building similar apps using a new language (Java) and 'application servers', for other media companies. Then digital distribution was becoming a reality in the late 90s'.. I worked on the secure initiative of Napster for about a year.. building low level C servers, cryptography, etc. Fantastic experience. That led to development of an open-source rights management project for mpeg4 a/v.. now defunct. Anyway, got married, kids, divorced.. Now I work with a large Media company managing big data initiatives. I'm not sure if the decisions that I made were right for everyone.. I closely followed industry trends (languages, frameworks, etc), and tried to get engagements that allowed me to work on them but always at a lower level..I felt I wasn't smart enough to understand impact unless I knew all of the details.. consequently, I've always been employed, but always on the execution. I rarely got a chance to articulate strategy.. not sure if that was the best choice. IT is a difficult business.. always on, always moving ahead.. lots of energy/time spent trying to stay relevant, given how fast the industry changes. Tougher in your 50's, because it's perceived as a young man's game. The rates of change are also a good thing.. the pace of innovation is frankly unequaled in other industries.. and I get bored easily if I'm not challenged. I have such a breadth of experience that I can easily solve problems that are multi-faceted because I've seen so much. Younger developers, although extremely bright, simply don't have the experience to understand all of the idiosyncrasies of each toolset/framework used at a typical company. That comes with time, of course. Being the 'OG', they come to me.. which I guess is good. I don't know if I have any 'triumphs' per se.. no billion dollar paydays.. I have a series of smaller triumphs.. ones that were important to me. Each new system deployed, each new technique, or language learned, generally any challenge achieved, is a triumph for me.. but they're all personal though. I did have a chance at a buyout from a larger company once that I didn't take.. that is something I think about. Things would have probably been very different for me today, if I took that. I regret not focusing more sometimes on my personal life, since the job was all encompassing (at least that's how I naively perceived it).. but looking back it didn't have to be. I was so afraid of failing in one area, that I didn't focus on other important areas that eventually took a serious toll.

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