Ask HN: How did you become a software engineer?

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.

My dad, computer-savvy but not a programmer, taught me some very basics when I was in my early teens (late 90s). It happened to be in Java, but mostly amounted to printing text and if-statements, which could be in any language. From there I used the circa-2000 Internet to learn about programming, did some ultra-basic C and C++ Win32 programming. In high school I started making websites for friends, for tiny amounts of money. The frontend HTML was ultra-basic, but the backend was all in PHP with MySQL for storage and I wrote some fairly involved CRUD apps over years.

At the same time, I was always working in the background on various video game engines, mostly in C++. Did a little homebrew work on the PSP[1]. The culmination of all that was a friend and I making a 3D platforming video game in C++ with OpenGL, completely from scratch[2]. Switched to Linux and started making my own desktop apps for fun and trying (mostly failing) to contribute to projects. The same year I finished high school, I got a "real job" as an intern doing Java-based QA programming, thanks to an uncle who worked there and knew they needed programming interns. After two years there, I got my current job doing C systems-level programming and now I've been here for over 12 years.

I did go to a public US university to get a four-year Computer Science degree. It was a complete waste of time and money and is easily the biggest regret in my life. I was already working in industry before I even started college, for the first two years as an intern and then the other two years at my current position. I learned almost nothing in college and knew more about programming than most of my professors. I also had (and have) zero interest in computer science. It was just something I was told I had to do to get a good job. Complete waste. This was back when college was relatively cheap. I absolutely would not encourage anyone to go to college for the prices they are charging today. It's a scam. (This is all US-focused, no idea what the situation is like elsewhere.)

As for books, Code by Charles Petzold (Microsoft Press)[3] is far and away the most useful programming book I've ever read. Anyone who does anything related to programming should read it. It walks you up from the very basics of computing all the way to modern computers in a very understandable way. I read it in early high school and it definitely shaped my career.

[1] These two PSP games remain among the projects I'm most proud of in my life, https://www.brightnightgames.com/games.php

[2] We mostly succeeded, not bad for a pair of high schoolers, I think https://www.brightnightgames.com/games.php?game=sa&sec=devel...

[3] https://www.microsoftpressstore.com/store/code-the-hidden-la...

Got in to university as a History major, decided I needed a job in the future that actually makes money, and transferred to the CS department. 10+ years later, I'm still a SWE at a FAANG. It's definitely not my passion, but it pays the bills and has lead to a low-stress life with great work-life balance. I'd do it again in a heartbeat.

Practical use cases before theory.

I studied computer science and media, but to be honest, it was only a help AFTER I worked in my first dev job for a while.

I'm more of an inductive learner.

Also, I was neither good at math, nor a quick learner. Currently I'm helping my girlfriend with her studies and I have the feeling, learning programming languages and using them for over ten years made understanding math syntax much easier for me.

I think, if I programmed for a few years before studing CS, I'd been much more successful.

> How did you first get into programming?

In high school, my friend and I realized you could program TI-84 graphing calculators. We made really simple games (guess a number from 1-100, hangman, etc.). I didn't even realize I was programming at the time.

I was also influenced by my dad (he was a software engineer, so I wanted to try it too). First formal education was an AP computer science course in 12th grade.

I was into math/puzzles/logical stuff at that time, so a lot of the initial concepts that you have to learn were both easier for me to pick up and more interesting (compared against someone who knows what they want to build, but views the intermediate knowledge/skills as something they have to slog through).

> What is your experience with university?

MIT, CS degree. Both the degree and the brand name helped with finding work.

In practice, it's hard for me to identify explicit things I learned during school that have also been applicable and useful at work. I suspect that the most useful learnings weren't part of any syllabus (e.g. fluency with a language).

> How did you get your first paid work?

Internship, through which I received a full-time offer.

> What do you do now and what do you love/hate about your job?

Currently funemployed, but previously an engineering manager.

The fun part is when the team's work comes together and produces a result.

The not fun part is when my line of thinking doesn't line up with someone else's. It is sometimes (often?) frustrating for me to debug why our approaches differ, then figure out how to make progress from there.