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Yeah I'm not even trying to say my route was ideal. Hell, I don't even know if I could reproduce it if I had to do it over again.
It's just what I had in front of me. That's not to say that it's better than going to school. 
Real programmers use butterflies
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Gary R. Wheeler wrote: wrote the sloppiest, most bug-ridden sh!t code I've ever seen.
I once worked with a guy like that. He was otherwise brilliant. Fortunately, he knew his code was crap and would turn his proofs-of-concept-algorithms over to others to rewrite.
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This guy was easy to get along with. Unfortunately, he really wanted to be doing Apple development, and we are a Windows house. I think he just didn't care.
Software Zen: delete this;
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I have a similar background but not wired like you. What I mean by that is I understand that people who fancy writing compilers (parsers) are a special breed. I'm pin level hardware savvy and have done some assembly early on but when I read your tech posts my head just spins I have no idea where you've been.
That's a compliment.
I was the last of 5, punk ass lead guitarist that had electronics in high school but wanted to build flangers and delays more than motors and study diode drops.
My parents gave me 3 choices on day in my junior year A: Get your grades up.
B: Join the military or C: drop out of school and we'll set you up in an apartment and you an get a job and a roomie to pay for it all.
Duh.
So I got a job soldering for a waterbed heater company in So. Cal where we lived, then an data acquisition company where I started as a line inspector but once they got wind of my electronics knowledge (resistor color code memorization mostly) the put me in the test tech group. You job hopped for advancement then then the last stint was sr. engineering tech at Emulex when DEC roamed the earth.
All the while I was fascinated with coding but have never done it professionally. After Emulex my wife and I bugged out to Summit County Colorado to ski a lot but there is no real jobs to be had in the tech sector in a resort town at 9800 feet in the sky. So we opened a pc shop that went great guns but now just gets along. I do some personal life enhancing code that helps my wife with her new gig as a business consultant. She was a 4.0 student and is the real brains of the two of us but detests the idea of herself coding even though she can unravel the snarliest ms exchange issues, has had enough.
I'm doing an MVC AspNet POS program right now for a side job I fell into selling retail products. That keeps me entertained.
The tech sector is a great equalizer. Nerds arise! 
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Ron Anders wrote: when I read your tech posts my head just spins I have no idea where you've been
I take that as a challenge to become a better writer. I don't want my stuff to be arcane. I'd like to bring a little witchcraft to everyone.
So I'll keep trying, and maybe one of these days I'll figure out how to make my stuff accessible to most people.
Real programmers use butterflies
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Praise You. Keep up the good work !
Caveat Emptor.
"Progress doesn't come from early risers – progress is made by lazy men looking for easier ways to do things." Lazarus Long
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What's GED ?
"I didn't mention the bats - he'd see them soon enough" - Hunter S Thompson - RIP
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It's a high school equivalency "diploma" you can get via exam in lieu of finishing school.
Part of the problem with me staying in school is there was a truancy law on the books which would have landed me in juvenile detention a lot because I wasn't able to show up for all of my classes every day because I had to worry food and a place to sleep. So to avoid jail, I dropped out.
Basically it's a way to test out of high school so you're not quite as bad off as if you had just stopped going.
Real programmers use butterflies
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Sounds like you had a tough time.
"I didn't mention the bats - he'd see them soon enough" - Hunter S Thompson - RIP
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Thank you for your post! It brought up such an interesting discussion and I feel truly humbled by the diversity of experiences that developers come from.
Compared to what some of you guys have been through, my life seems the pinnacle of boredom: saw a book about a new thing called "programming" when I was 15 and, for some strange reason, decided that's what I do in my life. Luckily I found some guys who would pay me a decent wage for doing that. Many years later I still don't know to do anything else. Talk about being monomaniacal  .
Mircea
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That's not that far off from how I picked it up, except i was a bit younger.
My parents bought an Apple ][gs in 1986 and it came with a programming manual for Applesoft BASIC.
I read it because I read while eating otherwise the act is boring. Not very mindful of me, but then I'm not a buddhist so it's fine.
It converged with my problem of circuit building. I took things apart and made things with them but to do anything serious in terms of building gadgets required money i didn't have at 6 and 7 so software allowed me to build things without continually shoveling more money at Radio Shack.
Real programmers use butterflies
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I don't think you can go that route today, there is too much focus on qualifications and too many get rich quick brats.
I had a similar route except I am mentally eminently stable and grounded despite running away from a dysfunctional family at 15, working approx 20 different jobs till I discovered software in my 30s (in the late 80s). Worked as a consultant (quote, build and chase the invoices) till I worked out that contracting you did not have to do the f***ing paperwork involved in running your own business.
Ended my career as a highly paid and valued developer at one of Asia's top banks. Today that path is not possible.
Have not coded in 2 years, it turns out I was a tart (please forgive the gender reference), only into it for the money.
Never underestimate the power of human stupidity -
RAH
I'm old. I know stuff - JSOP
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hah it's fine.
I'm not sure. The last four clients I've had didn't even ask for a resume.
One of them scouted me from my articles here.
Maybe I'm just being optimistic, but I think if you have talent and a little luck you can maybe still pull it off, even if the culture has changed. You may not be able to work at Microsoft anymore without a serious CV but I don't know - i'd like to think they'd still hire anyone that had the endurance for a 4 hour panel interview with whiteboarding. I've done that.
Real programmers use butterflies
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honey the codewitch wrote: i'd like to think they'd still hire anyone that had the endurance for a 4 hour panel interview with whiteboarding. I've done that.
The first time I read that I thought it said "waterboarding". Actually, having been through it, that's not too bad a comparison, especially if you are in an antihistamine fog during the interview.
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My first software job was 40 years ago. Curiously, my take is that it's easier to get a job without "qualifications" these days, though there's a lot of "certification" horseshite. But in 1981, everyone expected a degree. It might not be in computer science, because there weren't enough of us. But engineering, mathematics, or physics would do, especially if you'd done a bit of programming. I used to say that the problem with our software was that we had too many straight engineers, and it was comparable to someone landing a job designing circuits because they'd played around building speaker systems in their garage.
modified 16-May-21 19:57pm.
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It makes me sad for the rest of the world...
We developer have it easy, but the rest of the world is struggling. And here, in Australia, most good job is government related...
I wish the world were better for everyone!
Nay, sometimes I wonder why it is not already... We are a long way from 1600 BC! 
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honey the codewitch wrote: But I had hacked around on computers, programming since I was 8 years old.
"You find that that fire is passion
and there's a door up ahead not a wall"
-- Lou Reed - Magic and Loss
"In testa che avete, Signor di Ceprano?"
-- Rigoletto
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+1 for the Lou Reed reference.
Real programmers use butterflies
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That was an easy shot!
"In testa che avete, Signor di Ceprano?"
-- Rigoletto
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I grew up in a home (family, not foster), but I surely do have a heap lot of emotional baggage (including having spent a couple weeks of my life in a psychosomatic clinic and a couple years more with regular counseling to get to gripes with life).
I managed to finish school & university, but I've studied physics, not informatics. I work as a programmer now and one of the dudes at the company once told me that they didn't really want to hire me (for not having the right field they're looking for), but they were really desperate.
On the other hand, some educated-in-informatics co-workers of mine are way worse learners, than I am. That kind of guy who say "I've learned to do it like that half a century ago", utterly ignoring all the progress made in said half century.
I love programming for, among other reasons, similar to yours: you can do that stuff self-taught. I never needed a single cent to get into it, IDEs are free, learning resources are free, all that's left is the own will to learn and to think.
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honey the codewitch wrote: and got rich
Consider this beyond wealth, but to include family/friends/vocation/recreation/everything, you may wish to consider something I read off of one of the front wall in a house-of-worship I attended many years ago.
"Who is rich? He who is satisfied with his portion."
| Ravings en masse^ |
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| "The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits." - Albert Einstein | | "If you are searching for perfection in others, then you seek disappointment. If you seek perfection in yourself, then you will find failure." - Balboos HaGadol Mar 2010 |
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I totally agree with that. I'm much happier wanting what I have than what I don't.
My friend didn't pursue material wealth either. It landed in his lap by way of a software contract with Mastercard.
Real programmers use butterflies
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Well, my story is a little boring, I also grew up, went to school and university.
I am always glad that I learned at University a lot about mathematics, I am using Fourier transforms quite often and even Laplace.
Wrt computers (computer science?) I learned about the PDP-8 and PDP-9, programming in assembler code, using DECtapes for storage. While I am not using PDP-8 or PDP-9 instruction sets nowadays, I really believe that it helps me in my programming.
What I further learned was some language theory (type X grammars, 2VW grammars, attribute grammars etc etc), typical things you best learn when you are young. Now from time to time
I even use these formalisms to structure my programs.
I am fully aware of the fact that after my university education I could write programs but essentially could not program. In the early 70-ties I wrote some parser generators (LL and LALR) and a few compilers (one for Algol 60) and to put it mildly: with my current experience I would have written it differently. Nevertheless, for writing these programs I needed some
math, though not calculus. But these programs had a size such that one starts to think
about structuring the code and the development process (the language of the 70-ies was for me BCPL). After the 80-ties with Unix and C, I ended up as manager. The last 20 years of my working career I was involved in management, and there were days that I did not use a fourier or Laplace transform of though about formal verification of program (fragments) .
After my retirement I started programming again at a level that - at least what I think - would have been impossible without some formal training and some experience in my younger years. My current domain is software defined radio, and there is quite some math in my programs.
Summarizing, writing good code is not something you learn from a book, but a slightly more formal training may make it easier to understand what code is good, why it is good, and what code smells
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I have degrees, but most of the top notch programmers I know do not. Being self taught does wonders for your confidence and although coding styles, standards and protocols are often missing, the skills and understanding are what matter most.
When I interview, most of the interviewers are impressed enough by a degree to call you in, but the questions fall along lines of what you know and what you can bring. They are most often concerned with key things in the technologies they consider tough to do and less on what lies behind the paper. Only Chemical Abstracts demanded a degree and then only because they advertise their degrees as a way of selling their product.
Truth be told, I would rather have someone easy to work with and go to lunch with than a degree in the cubical next to me. Sometimes a second set of eyes is all you need. Other times, you need to share technical expertise or receive technical expertise, but it works better if the person is a good communicator.
Having a degree got me the opportunities, but I don't even think about it when working. Unless someone hung their shingle in their cube, I wouldn't know or care.
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