It was the logical choice, really. I'd been programming since a young age, it was logical that I'd become a programmer.
I often wonder if there's a job out there that I might enjoy as much or even be better at. Only other profession I might be interested in is watchmaking (sounds crazy but there's actually a huge demand for watchmakers), but the cost of tuition and the risk I might not be good at it means I'll probably never give it a shot.
No one chooses insurance, it chooses them. Joined a management consulting firm out of school, got assigned to a bunch of insurance cases. Escaped to Oracle. 1998, got a call from a friend of a friend: I hear you know a lot about insurance...I just got a million dollars to start an online version of GEICO...are you in? 17 years later, my career is insurance.
First I played video-games all the day. Then I had to fix/upgrade my own PC because I couldn't afford to pay anyone to do it. This got me deeper OS and networking knowledge than the normal user. From building and repairing PCs and building networks for friends came editing configuration files and later writing scripts, first to get things running on my bad machines and then to cheat in games or automating some IRC stuff. Which led to becoming a programmer.
The only thing I knew after school was how to do stuff with computers and playing games, so I did a degree in computer science and worked as a developer.
I didn't really choose to be a developer, I just did it most of my adult and adolescent life and some time people asked if I could code for them and they paid me.
Sadly this led to boring jobs, since I never really searched for anything, I just did what people asked me to do.
Technological generalist: programmer, project manager, product developer, database guy, etc.
Why am I in tech? Partly due to participating in the Duke of Edinburgh's Award program and partly because I just took whatever was interesting at university until I was forced to pick a major... when I tallied up my course credits, the shortest path to a useful degree was "computer science" so I did that.
Why does my career look like the plot to "Memento"? Because each time I reached a point where my work was no longer that interesting, I looked around and started doing something else.
So I went from front-line cast member at Disney World[1], to a university grad, to Java dev for a small dev shop, to Perl/CGI and Javascript at a tech mega-corp, to acquire/process/present data on a trading floor, to semi-retirement, to Japan, to a web-dev shop, to an ecommerce mega-corp. At the moment I don't do any development but that will likely change soon as I miss it.
I feel I've been really lucky. I could easy have (and almost did) crashed and burned but somehow it has worked out so far.
The trick is to look at every opportunity and ask yourself "if I turn this down and never get another chance, will I look back and wish I had done it?". If so, think hard about what really matters to you and do whatever will maximize that.
[1] I took a year off university to go work at Disney on a cultural exchange program. It was an awesome experience, I met my future wife (who was on a similar program) and gained extremely valuable customer-relationship experience.
I was offered an internship/mentorship by a family friend to do web development since he knew I was already fairly well-versed in computers & higher-level programming concepts. The rest is history.
It was December, I was bored to death staring at my four screens and thinking the weather really sucks in Europe in winter, and some guy calls me out of the blue asking me if I want to move to the beach. I had a chat with a few colleagues, one of them told me he spent a year in Australia and loved every second of it; his wife refused to move from Europe as she liked to be close to her parents, so he was stuck in the miserable weather and resigned to his fate.
I took the Skype interview at 6am in the dark of my flat, wearing my suit for work, and he made sure to tell me about how he had just gone surfing that morning. I had to do three trades from the train platform due to the delay and a time change in South Africa we forgot about.
My boss was busy making a lot of money on a volatile morning and took a couple hours to process my verbal resignation, at which point he jumped ("you WHAT?") and told me to go see HR. They trusted me, and were relatively busy, so they let me stay til the next day.
We had a chat in a conference room where he told me that his biggest regret was how his career kind of "just happened", with positions of ever increasing money and responsibility keeping him in the game until he was life-locked (kids, house, cars, skills, network...). He encouraged me to go seek adventure, he had wished to go to Asia at "my age" but never got round to it.
Sydney was even more awesome than I imagined. The rest kind of followed naturally; that and I never managed to get back in, so had to keep going, self-teach, moved companies, etc.
But it all comes down to a cold, miserable day in Geneva and an executive trawling LinkedIn for suitable hires for his team downunder. I sometimes wonder whether I'd have eventually quit to do my own thing, or whether I'd be, like some of my friends from university, debating whether to go for the DBS or the F-type this season.
Funny thing is I started a few blogs anonymously, and they never really took up, and I stopped all of them within weeks of starting. But I keep coming back here because, well, a man is weak, and those upvotes mean something, that somebody read it and enjoyed it.
Somehow that "pays" more than the dollars I could have gotten consulting for the same amount of time it took to write it...
Neither - my co-founder and I consult over the whole data chain from tracking to recommendation engines and automation, and I write around 10% of the code, usually SQL and scripting; this finances our startup R&D better than taking funding in Singapore, which is only generous towards Singaporeans.
I think finance is a broad industry with a wide mix of experiences and competence and it entirely depends on which firm you are working for. I'd work in any position for someone like Jim Simons, Paul Singer or Seth Klarman, I'd probably try fairly hard (and tried fairly hard back then) to get in somewhere like Glencore, places like IMC or Tibra sound quite fun, but I'd hesitate to take up any kind of job at some of the smaller banks, startup funds or other dubious entities. Even some of the non-bulge bracket but global banks are seriously bureaucratic and technologically still in the 1980s (without the culture of proper engineering allegedly more common back then). Then there's the special cases: at Standard Chartered, you get to work with people like @donsbot which is fantastic for your technical development independently of whether you enjoy the industry or the company.
The money is good, but not that good. By specializing in something there is a lot of demand for outside of finance (say, "big, proper" dev ops) you can pull a lot more money than by being an average quant or the "guy who makes the tools for the traders", even if the best quants will pull large amounts of money. We interviewed dev ops people making north of USD 300k a year for managing less than 100 servers.
Lastly, a lot of business people in finance look down on IT; they see it as a commoditized industry with less intelligent people than those brilliant people who have "survived" markets and bring in revenue (one might make the same argument about them - the most often said thing on a trading floor is "would he make the same money without the bank's name on his business card" and "personality" and free lunches was never a factor in choosing the bank I'd trade with). If you can forgive them for that, wear your suit, swallow your pride and do what you're told, you can make an easy living in those places.
I'll probably stay at home forever. Taking care of the house and kids is one way I can show love to my wife. Though we might go into a semi-retired "make video games" mode in a few years (my wife tells me I'm a top-notch tester, and I have pretty good game design sense.)
Hope the next question is not too snoopy - I'm just curious, so feel free to ignore me. Taking care of a 5 year old sounds like far from a full-time job to me (presumably he's in K / pre-K). I have two kids myself (4.5 and 1 y.o) so I have a bit of perspective. What do you do with all the free time?
I bought my parents' old house and spent 2 and a half years cleaning and fixing and renovating. We have a young family living with us, and I spend some time mentoring them and helping with their small child. I handle all the cooking, groceries, yardwork, etc.
I've been interested in computers and software from when I was 8 or so. I've to thank my father who introduced me to computers when he let me use his C64 (for gaming at first but I quickly turned to writing Basic programs as well).
I became an entrepreneur because of freedom and flexibility.
My cousin studied the same and I'd see him making software (cheats) for this game some members of my family played (me included) and wanted to do the same.
I had goals and dreams of becoming a professional chef. Even applied for Le Cordon Bleu my senior year in high school.
In the meantime I was tinkering with building websites and learning HTML and that. I built a few sites and one day a friend who taught me told me to put some playboy style pics on my site and it'll attract people to come. Being 16 I was down for looking at hot girls. So I did. Then later he told me to sign up for these "webmaster programs" and put links on my site and I can make money. So I did.
Long story short, Paris Hilton did what she does best and lets a sex tape of herself leak and I got ranked in the top 5 sites when people started hammering Google searching for it and I was doing about $5-10k/week in revenue off that video. I decided after 10 years of running porn sites I'd bunker down and really learn to program, and now I'm a software engineer.
So you can say Paris Hilton is the reason I do what I do.
The reason I founded a startup is the same reason Jack Sparrow is a pirate. The freedom to choose what to do and how. And when.
For example, right now I'm in the middle of a 3 week paternity leave because of my second son's arrival. Here at HN there's this vibe that if you run a startup, you're not supposed to sleep or take vacation. But really, why be your own boss if you don't use the freedom that comes with the package?
I started trying to make games when I was 5 or 6 on a ZX Spectrum. In retrospect, I never chose to become a software engineer... it was just the obvious thing to do. Interestingly, at that age I was also starting to write short stories. I didn't explore that path professionally, but I've taken writing seriously as a hobby a couple of years ago. I've written a novel and three screenplays so far.
In summary, I'm doing what I was already doing when I was 6. Not sure what to make of that.
I wanted to be a math professor. One day I'm sitting in the office of my favorite professor and we're talking about grad school and PhDs. I asked him if it was worth it. He told me that you don't do it because it's worth it, you do it because you love it. I knew this, and I loved math, so I nodded.
Then he told me what my career could look like after I graduated. Part time, working at 2-3 universities, where teaching math was more of a hobby than a job. I decided that for me, no matter how much I loved math, it wasn't worth it.
Fortunately, I'm pretty good with computers and programming comes naturally given my math background. I'm really satisfied with where I am now, but math is the one that got away.
I went to grad school for a Math PhD for 3 years and then dropped out to switch to computer programmer. If I didn't go to grad school, I would have regretted it, but having done it, it seems like a waste of time now.
That was on reason I switched out. I would likely be a permanent adjunct or be grateful for whatever tenure-track job I could get at some low-ranking university in the middle of nowhere. And if you don't get a tenure-track job at one of the top research universities, your teaching load can be pretty high.
I still occasionally read about stuff that interests me. I'm thinking about making some Math-based HTML5/mobile games in my spare time.
My biggest regret right now is that I'm stuck in the PHP/LAMP webdev niche, and I'm having a hard time getting interviews for anything else. If demand for PHP dries up, I could wind up in a spot where my experience has no market value and my career may be over.
Hey I'm just an undergraduate student right now, but if you're worried about job prospects, you should study Computer Graphics and Computer Vision. I find those fields to be way more math intensive than web programming, so it may be more up your ally. Plus, there's plenty of demand for positions in those fields.
You're an undergraduate now, so I'll give a lesson in how the actual job market works.
You get a job using languages/tools X, Y, and Z. When you apply for a new job, they'll screen your resume based on what languages and tools you used in the past, and use that as the basis for deciding whether to interview you or not. If the job ad asks for W, Y, and Z, that's close enough to X, Y, and Z, so you might get an interview. If the job ad asks for W, V, and U, no interview for you.
That is completely the wrong way to hire people, but almost everyone does this.
When you're a recent grad, people will hire you even without a perfect experience match, especially if you graduated from a highly ranked school.
Once you get a couple of jobs with X, Y, and Z, you'll probably keep taking jobs that use X, Y, and Z, because those will tend to make you the best offers. What happens when demand for X, Y, and Z dries up due to changing technology fads?
I'm at the point where I have a lot of experience in languages that are no longer used or are no longer trendy. That isn't seen as an asset, it's seen as a negative. People say "Why should I hire you FSK, when I could hire a recent college grad?" So my experience has no market value. Plus, age discrimination is a factor. (After you've been around the block a few times, you're less of a pushover, which is seen as a bad thing.)
That's why programmer is a bad career choice. Your experience loses its market value very quickly. You will do very well initially, but then you hit a wall and it's over. You have to move to management, start your own business, or always be chasing the latest tech fads. If you want to pad your resume with a new tech/language, do a project in it, even if it isn't the right choice for your employer's needs and you'll mess it up because you haven't used it before.
Computer vision may be "hot" now, but that's no guarantee of any demand 5-10 years from now. "Data Scientist" is also a hot item right now, is closer to my actual background (lots of database and data warehouse work, and lots of financial statistics and analysis), and I still can't get any interviews for "Data Scientist" jobs.
If you're in the bay area, we're hiring. ReSchedule Med is an automated staff scheduling solution for healthcare orgs. The scheduling part is pretty intense math wise, but we're early so we really need someone who can help with a bit of everything.
And good devs can learn another language no problem, so the PHP niche isn't a concern.
A couple months, I applied to all NYC HN ads, including the ones that said "You don't need experience in our tech stack." I got zero onsite interviews. I know that I know my stuff very well.
I grew up in a software company. Mom worked for a German company that designed embedded software used in automating sea ports and satellite tracking / telemetry. Mission critical kind of stuff. The company would hire developers from all over the world and they would come to Germany and often live with us for a couple of weeks before finding their own place. So many of the engineers became "big brother" kind of friends to me. One of them gave me my first computer. A Sinclair Spectrum 48k. I started using unix (running on a VAX) at work playing with their kit, too.
Mind you I didn't want to become a computer programmer at all. I would come home from school and stop in at my mom's work and all these engineers would be sleeping under their desks because a port worker had been killed when a container ship struck a pier or a satellite entered low-earth orbit and flamed out costing $100 million or something. I associated programming with tragedy and high stakes.
So I went to art school. My senior year I was spending more time in the computer lab than anywhere else. We had a lab populated with Silicon Graphics workstations and I'd written scripts to render my animation across all the machines so I could get a result in minutes instead of hours. Then the web became deregulated.
Lately I found my way into working on rail automation software that had safety critical requirements. Which is exactly what I never wanted to do and so I quit after 3 years.
I'm still in the industry and haven't figured out what I want to be when I grow up.
Conincidence mostly. I didn't actively search for what I'm doing now (10% hardware 90% software from very lowlevel microcontrollers/fpga to highlevel business apps). Or maybe is was just destined to be: I wouldn't really want to be doing something else (well, except for quitting jobs all together and go live far away and be self-sufficient, but that's something with a long learning curve).
Wanted to go for biology first but hearing what it would take to really get into cutting edge research I changed my mind and went for what seemed, given my hobbies and complete lack of interest for other non-tech fields,the most logical: electronics engineering. Thesis project was picked truly by coincidence (basically the last one left because we were late, lol) but the company offered me a job because I fit in pretty well. Still working there now parttime (did work in different departments as well in the meantime, now I'm back where it started) and parttime for a startup but the job is similar.
Career: Finance/Trading Platforms Developer (by accident). I wanted to be a doctor. And I hate math.
When I was 7, me and two of my friends signed up for a local free summer course for computer skills and typing for Pioneers (this was in Kiev, Ukraine, in mid-90s).
Learning MS-DOS was pretty cool and different. It was also great fun to make infinite-loop batch files that printed out some vulgarities on screen when the instructor wasnt looking.
One day, when walking into a class, an older (maybe 15?) guy in corner of the room (who turned out to be a sys-admin) drew my attention: he had a bunch of weird text on screen in some program I've never seen before (all i knew was "copy con mytext.txt"). Then, at a press of a button, his computer lit up and started drawing colorful circles and making noises.
I was fascinated by what I saw and, with encouragement of the the sysadmin visited couple of sessions of an "advanced programming" class. Although I didn't understand much, I was hooked.
With great support from my parents - who - and i'm still not sure how - found the means to get me a PC at home (those cost many months of salary at the time) - i started tinkering with graphics, windows, and random computer stuff.
Then a "Delphi for Dummies" found it's way to my hands somehow.
The rest of it all, leading up to today, is history as they say. For me however, it's a series of completely random, lucky, events that gave me the initial interest and subsequently permitted me to pursue an absolutely fascinating career.
Today, i am actively dedicating time to get young engineers interested in technology and show them what amazing possibilities it brings.
After a few crazy moves and dropping out of 3 different universities, I was down to washing dishes at some crap restaurant and underpaid tech support. After 18 months of that, I told myself I deserved better and just quit. A week later I got called for an interview at some financial-software company I'd never heard of, they were desperate for an Italian-speaking geek. 11 years later, I'm a well-paid consultant in an expensive niche.
I'm not an ambitious guy, I've always just wanted a nice house, not having to worry too much about money, and time to geek around. If I could do it all again, maybe I'd study harder, maybe I'd emigrate sooner, I don't know.
Becoming a programmer was a mercenary decision for me.
I dropped out of an Ivy League PhD program part way into my dissertation because I was pretty sure that finishing my doctorate in comparative literature and continuing down that career path would mean getting on food stamps.
Being a doctor or lawyer would have meant going to even more school, but it only took a couple months of reading to learn enough C# and JavaScript to get a job as a junior developer.
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[ 4.8 ms ] story [ 140 ms ] threadI often wonder if there's a job out there that I might enjoy as much or even be better at. Only other profession I might be interested in is watchmaking (sounds crazy but there's actually a huge demand for watchmakers), but the cost of tuition and the risk I might not be good at it means I'll probably never give it a shot.
The only thing I knew after school was how to do stuff with computers and playing games, so I did a degree in computer science and worked as a developer.
I didn't really choose to be a developer, I just did it most of my adult and adolescent life and some time people asked if I could code for them and they paid me.
Sadly this led to boring jobs, since I never really searched for anything, I just did what people asked me to do.
So, I started a software company that helps small businesses.
At one point in time though I thought I was going to be a chef. Ha.
Why am I in tech? Partly due to participating in the Duke of Edinburgh's Award program and partly because I just took whatever was interesting at university until I was forced to pick a major... when I tallied up my course credits, the shortest path to a useful degree was "computer science" so I did that.
Why does my career look like the plot to "Memento"? Because each time I reached a point where my work was no longer that interesting, I looked around and started doing something else.
So I went from front-line cast member at Disney World[1], to a university grad, to Java dev for a small dev shop, to Perl/CGI and Javascript at a tech mega-corp, to acquire/process/present data on a trading floor, to semi-retirement, to Japan, to a web-dev shop, to an ecommerce mega-corp. At the moment I don't do any development but that will likely change soon as I miss it.
I feel I've been really lucky. I could easy have (and almost did) crashed and burned but somehow it has worked out so far.
The trick is to look at every opportunity and ask yourself "if I turn this down and never get another chance, will I look back and wish I had done it?". If so, think hard about what really matters to you and do whatever will maximize that.
[1] I took a year off university to go work at Disney on a cultural exchange program. It was an awesome experience, I met my future wife (who was on a similar program) and gained extremely valuable customer-relationship experience.
I took the Skype interview at 6am in the dark of my flat, wearing my suit for work, and he made sure to tell me about how he had just gone surfing that morning. I had to do three trades from the train platform due to the delay and a time change in South Africa we forgot about.
My boss was busy making a lot of money on a volatile morning and took a couple hours to process my verbal resignation, at which point he jumped ("you WHAT?") and told me to go see HR. They trusted me, and were relatively busy, so they let me stay til the next day.
We had a chat in a conference room where he told me that his biggest regret was how his career kind of "just happened", with positions of ever increasing money and responsibility keeping him in the game until he was life-locked (kids, house, cars, skills, network...). He encouraged me to go seek adventure, he had wished to go to Asia at "my age" but never got round to it.
Sydney was even more awesome than I imagined. The rest kind of followed naturally; that and I never managed to get back in, so had to keep going, self-teach, moved companies, etc.
But it all comes down to a cold, miserable day in Geneva and an executive trawling LinkedIn for suitable hires for his team downunder. I sometimes wonder whether I'd have eventually quit to do my own thing, or whether I'd be, like some of my friends from university, debating whether to go for the DBS or the F-type this season.
Funny thing is I started a few blogs anonymously, and they never really took up, and I stopped all of them within weeks of starting. But I keep coming back here because, well, a man is weak, and those upvotes mean something, that somebody read it and enjoyed it.
Somehow that "pays" more than the dollars I could have gotten consulting for the same amount of time it took to write it...
I think finance is a broad industry with a wide mix of experiences and competence and it entirely depends on which firm you are working for. I'd work in any position for someone like Jim Simons, Paul Singer or Seth Klarman, I'd probably try fairly hard (and tried fairly hard back then) to get in somewhere like Glencore, places like IMC or Tibra sound quite fun, but I'd hesitate to take up any kind of job at some of the smaller banks, startup funds or other dubious entities. Even some of the non-bulge bracket but global banks are seriously bureaucratic and technologically still in the 1980s (without the culture of proper engineering allegedly more common back then). Then there's the special cases: at Standard Chartered, you get to work with people like @donsbot which is fantastic for your technical development independently of whether you enjoy the industry or the company.
The money is good, but not that good. By specializing in something there is a lot of demand for outside of finance (say, "big, proper" dev ops) you can pull a lot more money than by being an average quant or the "guy who makes the tools for the traders", even if the best quants will pull large amounts of money. We interviewed dev ops people making north of USD 300k a year for managing less than 100 servers.
Lastly, a lot of business people in finance look down on IT; they see it as a commoditized industry with less intelligent people than those brilliant people who have "survived" markets and bring in revenue (one might make the same argument about them - the most often said thing on a trading floor is "would he make the same money without the bank's name on his business card" and "personality" and free lunches was never a factor in choosing the bank I'd trade with). If you can forgive them for that, wear your suit, swallow your pride and do what you're told, you can make an easy living in those places.
I fell in love with my son. He drove my wife crazy. She'd rather be coding.
I'll probably stay at home forever. Taking care of the house and kids is one way I can show love to my wife. Though we might go into a semi-retired "make video games" mode in a few years (my wife tells me I'm a top-notch tester, and I have pretty good game design sense.)
I also run a competitive gaming site (with my wife and another friend): http://descentchampions.org/
I've been interested in computers and software from when I was 8 or so. I've to thank my father who introduced me to computers when he let me use his C64 (for gaming at first but I quickly turned to writing Basic programs as well).
I became an entrepreneur because of freedom and flexibility.
In the meantime I was tinkering with building websites and learning HTML and that. I built a few sites and one day a friend who taught me told me to put some playboy style pics on my site and it'll attract people to come. Being 16 I was down for looking at hot girls. So I did. Then later he told me to sign up for these "webmaster programs" and put links on my site and I can make money. So I did.
Long story short, Paris Hilton did what she does best and lets a sex tape of herself leak and I got ranked in the top 5 sites when people started hammering Google searching for it and I was doing about $5-10k/week in revenue off that video. I decided after 10 years of running porn sites I'd bunker down and really learn to program, and now I'm a software engineer.
So you can say Paris Hilton is the reason I do what I do.
The reason I founded a startup is the same reason Jack Sparrow is a pirate. The freedom to choose what to do and how. And when.
For example, right now I'm in the middle of a 3 week paternity leave because of my second son's arrival. Here at HN there's this vibe that if you run a startup, you're not supposed to sleep or take vacation. But really, why be your own boss if you don't use the freedom that comes with the package?
In summary, I'm doing what I was already doing when I was 6. Not sure what to make of that.
I wanted to be a math professor. One day I'm sitting in the office of my favorite professor and we're talking about grad school and PhDs. I asked him if it was worth it. He told me that you don't do it because it's worth it, you do it because you love it. I knew this, and I loved math, so I nodded.
Then he told me what my career could look like after I graduated. Part time, working at 2-3 universities, where teaching math was more of a hobby than a job. I decided that for me, no matter how much I loved math, it wasn't worth it.
Fortunately, I'm pretty good with computers and programming comes naturally given my math background. I'm really satisfied with where I am now, but math is the one that got away.
That was on reason I switched out. I would likely be a permanent adjunct or be grateful for whatever tenure-track job I could get at some low-ranking university in the middle of nowhere. And if you don't get a tenure-track job at one of the top research universities, your teaching load can be pretty high.
I still occasionally read about stuff that interests me. I'm thinking about making some Math-based HTML5/mobile games in my spare time.
My biggest regret right now is that I'm stuck in the PHP/LAMP webdev niche, and I'm having a hard time getting interviews for anything else. If demand for PHP dries up, I could wind up in a spot where my experience has no market value and my career may be over.
You get a job using languages/tools X, Y, and Z. When you apply for a new job, they'll screen your resume based on what languages and tools you used in the past, and use that as the basis for deciding whether to interview you or not. If the job ad asks for W, Y, and Z, that's close enough to X, Y, and Z, so you might get an interview. If the job ad asks for W, V, and U, no interview for you.
That is completely the wrong way to hire people, but almost everyone does this.
When you're a recent grad, people will hire you even without a perfect experience match, especially if you graduated from a highly ranked school.
Once you get a couple of jobs with X, Y, and Z, you'll probably keep taking jobs that use X, Y, and Z, because those will tend to make you the best offers. What happens when demand for X, Y, and Z dries up due to changing technology fads?
I'm at the point where I have a lot of experience in languages that are no longer used or are no longer trendy. That isn't seen as an asset, it's seen as a negative. People say "Why should I hire you FSK, when I could hire a recent college grad?" So my experience has no market value. Plus, age discrimination is a factor. (After you've been around the block a few times, you're less of a pushover, which is seen as a bad thing.)
That's why programmer is a bad career choice. Your experience loses its market value very quickly. You will do very well initially, but then you hit a wall and it's over. You have to move to management, start your own business, or always be chasing the latest tech fads. If you want to pad your resume with a new tech/language, do a project in it, even if it isn't the right choice for your employer's needs and you'll mess it up because you haven't used it before.
Computer vision may be "hot" now, but that's no guarantee of any demand 5-10 years from now. "Data Scientist" is also a hot item right now, is closer to my actual background (lots of database and data warehouse work, and lots of financial statistics and analysis), and I still can't get any interviews for "Data Scientist" jobs.
And good devs can learn another language no problem, so the PHP niche isn't a concern.
https://reschedulemed.com
My email is in my profile.
A couple months, I applied to all NYC HN ads, including the ones that said "You don't need experience in our tech stack." I got zero onsite interviews. I know that I know my stuff very well.
If you're willing to relocate shoot me an email.
Mind you I didn't want to become a computer programmer at all. I would come home from school and stop in at my mom's work and all these engineers would be sleeping under their desks because a port worker had been killed when a container ship struck a pier or a satellite entered low-earth orbit and flamed out costing $100 million or something. I associated programming with tragedy and high stakes.
So I went to art school. My senior year I was spending more time in the computer lab than anywhere else. We had a lab populated with Silicon Graphics workstations and I'd written scripts to render my animation across all the machines so I could get a result in minutes instead of hours. Then the web became deregulated.
Lately I found my way into working on rail automation software that had safety critical requirements. Which is exactly what I never wanted to do and so I quit after 3 years.
I'm still in the industry and haven't figured out what I want to be when I grow up.
Wanted to go for biology first but hearing what it would take to really get into cutting edge research I changed my mind and went for what seemed, given my hobbies and complete lack of interest for other non-tech fields,the most logical: electronics engineering. Thesis project was picked truly by coincidence (basically the last one left because we were late, lol) but the company offered me a job because I fit in pretty well. Still working there now parttime (did work in different departments as well in the meantime, now I'm back where it started) and parttime for a startup but the job is similar.
When I was 7, me and two of my friends signed up for a local free summer course for computer skills and typing for Pioneers (this was in Kiev, Ukraine, in mid-90s).
Learning MS-DOS was pretty cool and different. It was also great fun to make infinite-loop batch files that printed out some vulgarities on screen when the instructor wasnt looking. One day, when walking into a class, an older (maybe 15?) guy in corner of the room (who turned out to be a sys-admin) drew my attention: he had a bunch of weird text on screen in some program I've never seen before (all i knew was "copy con mytext.txt"). Then, at a press of a button, his computer lit up and started drawing colorful circles and making noises.
I've just experienced QBasic (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QBasic).
I was fascinated by what I saw and, with encouragement of the the sysadmin visited couple of sessions of an "advanced programming" class. Although I didn't understand much, I was hooked. With great support from my parents - who - and i'm still not sure how - found the means to get me a PC at home (those cost many months of salary at the time) - i started tinkering with graphics, windows, and random computer stuff. Then a "Delphi for Dummies" found it's way to my hands somehow.
The rest of it all, leading up to today, is history as they say. For me however, it's a series of completely random, lucky, events that gave me the initial interest and subsequently permitted me to pursue an absolutely fascinating career.
Today, i am actively dedicating time to get young engineers interested in technology and show them what amazing possibilities it brings.
Maybe one day i'll even write a blog about it :)
After a few crazy moves and dropping out of 3 different universities, I was down to washing dishes at some crap restaurant and underpaid tech support. After 18 months of that, I told myself I deserved better and just quit. A week later I got called for an interview at some financial-software company I'd never heard of, they were desperate for an Italian-speaking geek. 11 years later, I'm a well-paid consultant in an expensive niche.
I'm not an ambitious guy, I've always just wanted a nice house, not having to worry too much about money, and time to geek around. If I could do it all again, maybe I'd study harder, maybe I'd emigrate sooner, I don't know.
I dropped out of an Ivy League PhD program part way into my dissertation because I was pretty sure that finishing my doctorate in comparative literature and continuing down that career path would mean getting on food stamps.
Being a doctor or lawyer would have meant going to even more school, but it only took a couple months of reading to learn enough C# and JavaScript to get a job as a junior developer.