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Poll: How long have you been programming?

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Re: Poll: How long have you been programming?

#182

Post by steve8918 »

cydonian_monk wrote: post #148
bunsenhoneydew wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did pretty much the same thing, graduated with a masters in mechanical engineering. Taught myself to code and switched careers. Lots of cross over skill. (and engineering is very boring...) :-)

I did the same thing (ComputerEng, but more of a EE focus), mainly because there wasn't a job market that was interested in me when I graduated. I suspect this is more common with engineering grads than most others. The barrier to entry for programming is much lower than that for engineering, which requires taking the FE, getting licensed, apprenticeships (in some locales), getting relicensed, and still no guarantee…

This was also a motivating factor for me. Where I went to school, there wasn't really a lot of hardware jobs, but if I switched to software I could go work at a bank. After about 4 years I packed everything up and moved to Silicon Valley, just in time for the dot com bust :)

Re: Poll: How long have you been programming?

#183

Post by amyhackernews »

The better poll would have been: when did you start programming.

I started really young so programming was never scary to me. It was just like a slower version of drawing or cooking. i.e. you're making something but it takes a long time to do the code "recipe" to get the ultimate result. ... It also didn't help that the only way to save your programs was to play them to audio cassette...

Re: Poll: How long have you been programming?

#185

Post by Estragon »

super_mario wrote: post #150

I started with BASIC on Commodore 16 ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_16 ) and shortly after MOS 6502 assembler back in the mid 80s when I was in my early teens. Commodore 16 had a monitor program build in, all you had to do is type MONITOR and you were able to edit memory directly in machine/assembler code, save it, run it etc ( http://www.commodore16.com/php/images/books/downloads/Tedmon... ). Later, I got…

I learned roughly the same way, except in my case it was a TRS-80 color computer, 6809 assembly, and Forth. I was absolutely fascinated with data compression back then.

The CS classes at Uni seemed really boring, so I went into mathematics instead.

Re: Poll: How long have you been programming?

#187

Post by bandy »

DamnYuppie wrote: post #184

The number of programmers drops more then half between 10 and 20 years, and drops again between 20 and 30 years. I am wondering if this is due to people leaving the field or companies not wanting to hirer older developers?

Yes and Absolutely. (With the latter causing a good deal of the former.)

Re: Poll: How long have you been programming?

#189

Post by yangyang »

I started out with BBC BASIC on my Dad's model B when I was 7 or 8. I remember reading a book called "Structured Programming" or suchlike, and hardly used a GOTO again - BBC BASIC was reasonably advanced for its time in having DEF PROC and DEF FN.

From that I progressed to an original IBM PC AT (still got the Model M keyboard from it), using QuickBASIC at first, then QuickC. Then my Dad got a 486sx20 with a stratospheric 16mb of ram. Kept going with the C and some assembler on DOS, messed around with OS/2 2.1 and REXX as well, and then got Slackware Linux 2.1 in 1994. I messed around with all sorts - C, lisp, x86 assembler, C++, shell scripts.

I've programmed professionally, using Delphi, Java, C++, Perl, Python and C#, for 15 years.

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