Re: For The Gamers

On 1/11/25 5:50 PM, chrisv wrote:

CrudeSausage wrote:
 

chrisv wrote:

>
I've often thought that I should have went into programming as a
profession.  I programmed a lot when I was young, and really enjoyed
it.  The only times at work when I felt that I was having so much fun
that I didn't want to go home for the evening was when I was
programming.
>
But I had my safe, and tolerable, niche in electronics manufacturing,
and I was too cowardly to risk the career change.

>
Even if I had learned to program more than I did, I was always worried
that there would be faster and better programmers out there. As a
result, I was worried that if I had gone into that field, I would never
have been able to hold down a job for long. There's a chance that I
would have fallen in love with it and done everything to get much
better, but I have to admit that I was never that enamoured with it either.

 I was concerned about the stability of the programming job.  A project
gets axed, or completed, and the programmers might be let-go. 

Back in the 80s/90s; AT&T some others were quite notorious about treating their programmer staff as extremely fungible - the rule of thumb was 5 years on a big project, then an 75% purge.  Pay was good but short-lived, as the odds of making it through two cycles were pretty low, as Quality of Life suffers because they expected overtime too.

In my job, I'm well embedded into the system, helping to explain my 30+ year tenure.  Now, as the "OG", I know a lot of stuff that no one else does.

Old bench technicians & lab rats are always great because of their depth of expertise in their specialty area.  One just needs to be careful to not push them out of their comfort zone.  Had one such oldtimer retire this past summer & move to Texas .. he's already having second thoughts on the whole "moving south for better weather" - and this week's ice/snow probably has them wondering if they escaped any of that too.
-hh