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

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.

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.