I came to it partly because for a long time, it never occurred to me that I could make a living as a programmer, since I was raised blue collar and had no hopes of going to college. In fact I did go to college but dropped out after a year when I learned that it’s virtually impossible to go to school full time and work full time at the same time, especially when you work below minimum wage. I was nineteen and completely on my own, operating without a net. I soon learned that you can’t serve two masters at the same time and most minimum wage bosses really don’t care about your personal problems.

I was a policeman for a short while. I didn’t have the temperament for the job. I washed dishes, installed appliances, drove trucks, dug ditches, played cashier, tried my hand in sales and bombed out. I once had the perfect job developing prototypes for a small aerospace company and blew it chasing a girl. I worked as a security guard and even as a nuclear missile mechanic. I wired houses and cars for stereo, I delivered cars, fertilizer and once even had a job as a target for a crop dusting company. In short, I tried a lot of things. I wanted to be an architect, but knew that could never happen without being able to get into college. I wanted to be a mad scientist, the friendly, absent minded professor, old, grey haired and respected.

It was only after trying all of these different things that I stumbled back to computer programming where I’ve remained all these years. It’s not that it’s safe, as much as it’s something I dearly love and completely understand, having a literal though process. I’ve often thought that I think like a computer: everything can be reduced to a binary state. This makes it easy to program computers because we speak the same language

What would I do if I didn’t have programming? I can honestly say: I haven’t got a clue and I hope that when they carry me away, I still feel the same way. Maybe I’ll be a forest ranger.

if one’s lost, then possibly, I will have to become a professional wrestler

BTW, I can’t imagine a day without my laptop so I could be in the same boat as you!

We are indeed some of the priviledged few that have a job that can pay well and we can really enjoy (most of the time!)

The company that made the language addon went out of business, and their company that depended on it went out of business too. They thought their careers were over too. They hadn’t used any other programming languages since uni, and even then not very intensively.

I don’t know what happened to them, probably went into management.

On the other hand, I know people with chemistry degrees that have had no specific issues finding work rather different to that what they have done before.

Then, in 1968, while I was in the US ARMY it fell to me to take over for a programmer on a Univac 1005 when the programmer rotated home and there was no-one to take his place. All of the work was in SAAL, the assembler language on a 1005. I had this job for about 6 months before it was my turn to go home. By that time I had decided that I wanted to program professionally so I went to college on the GI bill and got a ‘roll your own’ degree in CS –the school I went to did not have an undergraduate curriculum for CompSci, but they did have a grad school program– I took all of my core requirements as an undergrad and all my computer courses in the grad school.

Now, more that 30 years after school I still can’t think of anything which I would rather do. Somewhere in the middle of my career I began to wander off into management for a short while and got bored out of my skull. But then I discovered UNIX. I dove into programming again, and I have never looked back.

I think that if, somehow, I was no longer allowed to program then fuck it, I would just be a junkie.

I can’t handle doing something for 8 hours a day that requires me to turn my brain off. It drives me insane after a few months.

I’d like to think that if programming wasn’t available as an employment option, that I would be doing . . . well, anything else that requires more use of my brain than not. There are a lot of fields like that, and I think I could be satisfied in any of them.

Actually becoming gainfully employed in any of them is another matter entirely though.

The answer would be electrical engineering. Learn to program without a compiler.

Good for you. Thanks for injecting a little sunshine into this oh so cynical place. I mean it.

A well wont leave innocents in great suspense. I am nearly finished physics bachelor. Will probably do programming, but also thinking of continuing technical physics, or experimental physics. (Master)
So experimentation or technical design would be interesting too. (Or “Inventor” :p, but the hard part of that is finding problems, too.)

Of course, it might be, however, that either programming some in subsets of the things to program become so easy you do not particularly need to be a programmer to do it.
Or there might be programmer tools to make a good programmer work better. (And good programmers continually search for these to try stay ahead.)

In my opinion it is a great fallacy of capitalism that people need to have work, and that scarcity of work lowers wages even if there are more resources. There are two responses:
1) Capitalism is bad, replace/modify.
2) People are bad. If people would just decide not to work, and share money, the labor would not be scarce.
I think capitalism has its perks, but just letting it go alone will go awry.
BTW drifted a bit.

Funny, my current job is nothing like that.

But my reaction was quite different: “Why are you so afraid to take risks?”

My friend was a chem PhD looking for very specific niche working with protein synthesis. I love programming. But I don’t love Java. I don’t love the publishing industry. And I don’t love the OS I’m working on. Still love my job though. My friend claims to love chemistry, yet is basing decisions off of what lab equipment, funding, and proteins he’s working with. There is a difference between your trade and your tools. I think when you receive so much training on a certain toolset that you forget why you’re doing what you’re doing in the first place. As an unfounded generalization… I see a lot of academically trained people unwilling to try things that they aren’t specifically trained on. I say take a risk and find out what you’re really passionate about. Is it really chemistry or are you just being safe and choosing something you already know how to do. Maybe it is time to take a risk and try a different branch of chemistry. If you hate it then at least you know whether you truly like chemistry or are just being lazy and doing what you already know.

1. Medicine
2. Finance
3. Architecture

They still remain secondary interests of mine even as a programmer.

The sweet aspect of this is that I can apply my 10+ years of graphics and 3d experience directly to software development. They are very compatible.

Your chemist friend should consider applying what is obviously a bright mind to software development himself. He will be able to draw on his experience in Chemistry that will give him domain knowledge and the potential to find a niche developing software/consulting for firms that need that sort of specialist.

As far as my backup career…..well…..do they still pay money for plasma at the Red Cross?

i have always answered the question with: always have a backup.

there are many jobs out there that make as much, if not more, money as your current profession and don’t require a very high skill set.

for example, i have a mortgage broker’s license and have had it for many years. i’m currently employed as a programmer, but if i lost my job, i would go back into mortgages.

many people i know are mortgage brokers, realtors, stockbrokers, property managers, the list goes on and on.

point being is that it’s stupid in life to put your eggs in one basket or think that you will be doing the same thing 10 years from now. you should always be spanning your horizons and learning new things and always have a backup plan.

A silly question, of course, but an intriguing one.

I would probably do something in medicine, as that gives you interesting intellectual challenges as well. I doubt I’d be as fulfilled as I am now though.

Great post!