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earl, I'm right there with you... but I don't think any one would hire me now. Been out the door for over 10 years now after they made me an offer I couldn't refuse.
tom
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Earl Truss wrote: I don't feel that I'm that out of date but I certainly don't feel like learning any new languages any more.
Why not? Unless you are learning something very exotic (like Prolog), it shouldn't take you more than a month to learn a new language.
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Nemanja Trifunovic wrote: Earl Truss wrote:
I don't feel that I'm that out of date but I certainly don't feel like learning any new languages any more.
Why not? Unless you are learning something very exotic (like Prolog), it shouldn't take you more than a month to learn a new language.
I agree that it shouldn't take much time to learn a new language. I just choose not to unless I have to. My current job is probably my last one and in my next life I will probably have more interesting things to do.
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Rob Philpott wrote:
IT has always been a young man's game because the skill is so new, and I've been concerned for a while what I'll do when I get into my late 40s, it's incredibly ageist, and I suspect getting employment however good you are or how well your CV reads is going to be difficult (or low paid). Most of the people I work with are quite a bit younger than me generally. That said, I do know people who look for those in at least their 30s, who have done some heavy duty stuff like C++ in their past before everything became Mickey Mouse and everyone jumped on-board.
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Just stay current and you'll find that age doesn't make any difference. I retired at age 62 and they're still calling me to see if I can come back to work on this project and that project. I've been in "the business" since 1966; the '70s were a boom for IT people and it's still the best career you can have. It's a big city business unless you're satisfied maintan
ing legacy Cobol or RPGIII apps. After a brief tour as a manager in a small telephone company in rural Georgia, at age 55, I finally responded to some of the calls I had been getting and came back to Atlanta, happy as a bird.
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Started in 1968 with OCR programming, and have never looked back. I loved COBOL because it paid a lot of bills, and besides, none of the new kids want anything to do with it. I would love to just work a couple of months fixing some problem and then go back to relaxing..
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"Now you are 35 years old. In case you get the job, you would be the oldest man in the company. How do you think you could cope with that?"
I did not get that job - that was in 2003, already a couple of years ago...
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In college, my co-op job. VAX BASIC, system management, and operations on a MicroVAX 3600.
I had to use BASIC because that's what the boss knew.
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I'm the same, but I wasn't being payed until AFTER college.
Panic, Chaos, Destruction.
My work here is done.
or "Drink. Get drunk. Fall over." - P O'H
OK, I will win to day or my name isn't Ethel Crudacre! - DD Ethel Crudacre
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Same here, except it was SABRE and REBATE2 (proprietary test languages used with automatic test systems). That said, I was employed as a systems engineer at the time (I jumped to a pure software career in 1996) so back then I actually spent more time working on hardware or writing technical reports than doing software. In some ways that was a blessing as the software environment there at the time was primitive compared to what I had access to at home!
I finally succeeded in introducing C to that department (on a 6809!) in 1993, and C++ in 1995.
Anna
Tech Blog | Visual Lint
"Why would anyone prefer to wield a weapon that takes both hands at once, when they could use a lighter (and obviously superior) weapon that allows you to wield multiple ones at a time, and thus supports multi-paradigm carnage?"
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My first programming job was developing software on an HP-1000 minicomputer in FORTRAN 66.
Software Zen: delete this;
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I remember those.
My first development job was in 1979 on a IBM System34 using RPG.
Those were the days!
if (ToErr == Human.Nature)
{
Forgive = Divine;
}
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Ah yes, I remember my first back in '79. This cute little PDP-11 only knew FORTRAN-77 and she had her way w/ me!
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I startet programming in 1984 ... Osborne 1.
I cannot remember: What did I before google?
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'78, Apple II
'85 moved to the amiga and C++
why'd they stop at 20?...Is that age discrimination?
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maybe they think there where no programmers before the 80´s
I cannot remember: What did I before google?
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Yes but was it already your job at that time?
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yes ... full time job, meaning: earning money for it.
I cannot remember: What did I before google?
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1976 - Data General Nova. PC was not invented yet!
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1982. Intel emulators and PL/M and ASM-86, then VAX and lovely octal.
Amazing to realise I worked for years without a mouse.
A.
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LOL...
It was black and white mostly. No graphical environment to speak of....
Me...
TRS-80 Model I .... as a young kid with my father.
A Tandy computer from there .... actually updated the processor and added a RAM disk, with battery backup.
History from there.
Somewhere along the way, I got a job and soon started programming for a living.
I've always found the environment FUN and EXCITING to work in. Especially with all the changes over the years.
James
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1979 direct after graduating: Fortran - ugh...
Since then it just gets better.
------------------<;,><-------------------
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what is wrong with fortran?
some citations from ... experienced developers:
real programmers are writing fortran. in any language.
if it cannot written in fortran, it is not worth to be written.
I cannot remember: What did I before google?
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>what is wrong with fortran?
IMPLICIT NONE
(:
------------------<;,><-------------------
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First paid job in 1977 on DEC PDP-11...
Worked with DataGeneral mainframes at college -
Input by punched paper tape created on a mechanical teletype.
At the risk of sounding a bit Monty Python:
"Kids nowadays, they don't know they're born!"
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