My Programming Journey | Hacker News Reader

My Programming Journey

gavinhoward.com

33 pointsingve14 comments

> programming wasn’t even a “real job” (early 1980s)

This made me laugh. You young-uns! I earned my first money for programming in 1970. I wrote, in IBM 360 assembly language, a "subroutine" to compute square-root, using a Chebechev polynomial to get a close approximation, and two iterations of Newton's algorithm to get the required precision. I got a job with Control Data Corp (as a COBOL programmer) a year or so later. But the real point of my laugh is that real jobs in programming probably started in the early 1950s.

Author here. Yeah, I know. That's why I put it in quotes. Also, I rushed this post out; I didn't intend to see it here.

"real" here can be shorthand for "popularly recognized", e.g. "pretty much everyone recognizes it as a useful vocation and has a general idea what it involves".

It's not to say you couldn't get paid to do it in 1955. But if in 1955 you told someone at the hair salon or the bar that you were a "programmer", you would get funny looks ≈ 100% of the time.

They would probably think you handled programming for a local movie theater, arts organization, performance venue, or something like that. But my guess is they would find it an odd way to say it.

My dad was just talking to me about his experiences going to school and college in the 70s and, while he learned to use FORTRAN on a time-shared mainframe, programming or computer science as a career path wasn't advertised to him as a possible career path. Most administrators and guidance counselors at the time probably didn't understand those fields yet. Might have been different if my dad went to Berkeley, but it would not surprise me if most of the education didn't see programming as "real" yet.

Heck, the web was almost brand new when I was in elementary school, and there was only one teacher who decided to take the initiative and teach kids HTML. He wasn't even my normal teacher, and I think I kind of just got pulled into it for some reason. In any case, I carried those skills he taught me all the way into adulthood, and I'm a web developer today! If he didn't host that class, I might not have ever bothered learning about Web technology. Otherwise, it wasn't like computer skills were part of the curriculum beyond learning to type.

Weird. When I was in Grade 12 in 1967, someone from IBM came to our school to talk about computing careers. I graduated in the first B.Sc. class in computer science at the University of British Columbia in 1971. Virtually everyone I knew in the class had a computing job on graduation (I didn't, apart from a part-time job, because I wanted to do grad studies). Maybe Vancouver wasn't then the backwater we thought it was.

Maybe. At CDC I my job title was Systems Analyst.

>Before I was born, my father somehow went from a farmboy to a college-educated programmer at a time when programming wasn’t even a “real job” (early 1980s).

Same here, I was a warehouse worker. I took a pay cut for this move, but I loved the work. Little did I know what the future held :)

Very nice read.

Thank you for the compliment. I was not feeling very happy today, and that helped.

When I was a kid, programming was something I did to screw around and procrastinate my real studies. I saw it as one or two steps up from video games or crossword puzzles on the spectrum from "waste of time" to "valuable self-development."

My dad, who hated computers with a passion but could see them becoming more and more pervasive in society, always thought that being "good with computers" would be something I could fall back on if I had to. He was right. That's basically how I ended up in my first software development job, which I enjoyed enough that I eventually decided to pursue it as a career.

That was a nice article, and it reminded me that programming truly is a weird journey. The destination is almost certainly not the point of it.

The path to mastery is nonlinear and fraught with obstacles that extend beyond technical knowledge

your ability to writing this out and provide in a liner way make it like a painting to me. You should have no problem in a real world work environment with the right support.

checking our your code, it's great as well, you surpass level of many engineers i know who has staff/principal in their title.

don't let the fact about those job or interview letting you down. You write out C code like nothing from these.

You're absolute a great programmer.

You will have better succeess doing your own SaaS instead.

Thank you for your compliments and vote of confidence. I appreciate it all, especially on a day when I don't feel so well.

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