I’m a sucker for origin stories. Stories about a series of events that has led to who someone is today.
It is an exciting time I think to be a dev...
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My lifetime jobs in order, I may be missing some stuff along the way:
Whoa...I love the transition from salad maker to bouncer/security.
I quit (or was fired) from making salads because they wouldn't give me time off to go to my track meet. I sometimes worked with some shady characters as a bouncer but they were so much better to work for than my jerk grocery store manager!
Ha! So interesting.
Here's hoping the characters you're working with these days are better than both the folks from the days of making salads and bouncing shady characters.
Also coming from a non-traditional route. I haven't had much work experience though, so here's a list of everything 🙊:
Now I get to leave comments like this one for (some of) my living. 🙃
Ha, this was basically how I ended up in NYC. Bro's couch, age 23 (or 24 I forget).
I worked as a geologist studying groundwater quality and later on with soil and groundwater investigation and remediation in industrial areas. After moving to a different country across the ocean I took a coding bootcamp and learned to code!
This is so cool! With a background in geologist do you see yourself now thinking about ways to solve problems you had in the past with code?
I was taking classes for some COMPTIA certs. There was this nagging curiosity about how electrical signals on copper wires were translated into information we view in a web browser. This turned into a degree in electrical engineering and DSP. The DSP end showed me how much fun programming can be, so now I just do that.
Jobs held during this process (in chronological order):
-Dishwasher
-Line cook
-Flower Delivery
-Network Admin
-Groundskeeper
-Webmaster
-Janitor
-Applications Engineer
-Software engineer
-Software developer
Hey hey Matthew! Thanks for sharing :) What is DSP? I'm digging how electrical signals on copper wires led you on the path to see how it ends up to information that we see via a web browser. I had never thought about that and now you've got me curious. Could you expound on your findings? Perhaps in a DEV post?
DSP is digital signal processing.
That would be a HUGE DEV post -- but I could certainly break it down into more digestible pieces across a series of posts. That's actually a pretty good idea.
That would be awesome. I think that would be excellent.
If you'd like to keep it shorter and concise there's also #explainlikeimfive which might be neat too. But I could totally imagine you taking a deep dive in this topic and folks totally geeking because of the depth of knowledge you have in this.
I was a CNA working in memory care, then a chef, then a dining room manager. During a period of unemployment, I started to feel strongly that I needed to change my career, and give my family a better life than we had. I started programming based on nothing but a gut feeling that I should, and I was hooked. A couple months later, I built a CLI application that scrapes music articles off of a website, and I was in love. I'm in a coding bootcamp now and looking forward to learning new skills.
That is very cool! Was the CLI for something specific or did you just want to see if you could make a scraper?
Also how's the coding bootcamp going?
Oh the CLI was my first bootcamp project. Sorry, I wrote that comment before coffee. But I also wanted to see if I could do it. It was sort of the turning point for me because previous to that I had been doing a lot of exercises, and it was the first time I built something from empty file to finished application.
The bootcamp is going great! Thanks for asking. I love spending so much time programming, and I really like doing it with a group of people, rather than solo.
Started my dark journey as a kid in the 70s. Got to turn a hobby into a career.
So, while I have coded throughout my hobbyist and professional life, I don't really consider myself a "true" coder. It's more functional/means-to-an-end oriented. My forays into coding is likely more a symptom of laziness and desire not to manually do repetitive tasks if there's a way to avoid it. As a result, much of the content I post through Dev.To is more oriented towards integration of information technologies than development of said technologies.
"My forays into coding is likely more a symptom of laziness and desire not to manually do repetitive tasks if there's a way to avoid it."
That's the central theme of ALL programming. :-D
When people ask what I do, my first answer is, "I make computers do boring stuff really fast."
In no particular order:
You can imagine I’m quite grateful to be a software engineer now.
The first job I had was yard work.
Then during college I worked most of the school years and one summer watching computer labs (making sure users checked in/out, helping with using software, etc). For other summer jobs during college, I worked fast food one summer and did data entry from fingerprint cards for another.
After I graduated (with a BS in CS), I did random temp work for a while (at one place I did some more data entry in Excel, and at another I gave surveys to people in a mall). Then I got a job doing phone-based customer service for a bank. Then finally I got a job doing tech support where there was some chance of moving into the "R&D" department where the coding happened, and eventually I did. I worked as a developer for 11 years or so, and now am on a sabbatical, after which I'll probably work as a developer some more (but remotely this time) or possibly try to sell a software-related product of my own.
Before I decided to go to school for CS, I was considering a career in music, and I'd like to get serious about that again, though probably not as my main source of income.
I was a professional distance runner for 15 years. During "rest" time, I studied development and built wp themes for ThemeForest. Now I'm a developer Emerson Stone in Boulder, CO (where I originally moved with my wife to train at high altitude). I have an degree in Philosophy from Butler University.
High school
College
Post college
It's definitely interesting to read the stories and the things people have done in their lives. While I have had my fair share jobs that fall squarely into the "Other" category, I have been far more focused on tech throughout my life with most of my non-tech stuff happening during high school and a little bit of college. I started working on and with electronics as a sophomore in high school and pretty much knew I wanted to work on with technology from then on.
So, something like this:
Wow, so many interesting stories in the post, and I used to think I wondered around for a bit before coming back to software development. Thanks to OP and to everyone else for sharing. Here's my story too - dev.to/jumpalottahigh/how-i-got-in...
Starting from early employment
Overall self-taught, dealing with whatever tools and languages I need. I've touched so many that they are fairly easy to pick up
Hawaiian Shaved Ice snow cone maker
Clean up crew at a bar / concert venue
Mammography Clinic office helper / misc duties
Stocker at Target / Big Lots
Med school Petri Dish Washer / Cat Brain Cutter-Upper / Oh you do website stuff?
Marketing Agency Junior Web Dev
Marketing Agency Web Dev / SysAdmin / Network Admin
Marketing Agency Geek In Charge and Board Member
Marketing Technology Lead at Fortune 500 company
Marketing Technology Lead at large private company
Director of Emerging Technology at large private company
Sprinkled in there are tech co-founder of two startups that never failed, but never truly succeeded either (though one is still passive income).
100% self taught. Went to college for Religious Studies and Philosophy. I consider myself a hacker, and not a computer scientist. Because of my journey mostly solo, my favorite thing to do is mentor other developers.
My Bachelor's and first Master's degrees are in Classics (i.e. Latin & Ancient Greek). I never wanted to be anything other than a professor of Greek, but the Real World™ got in the way and made me pick a career where I could actually make money, so I parlayed that into a Master's in CS with a focus on natural-language processing and made a career out of that that's lasted 20+ years so far.
If we're listing pre-professional jobs, then I've been a
I've had a lot of different jobs but I'll list a couple.
-16yrs old I started working for a moving company called 2men and a truck
-18yrs started working at warehouses
-23yrs worked doing upholstery
-24yrs old worked as a problem solver for amazon
-late 24 - 25yrs old started doing odd jobs and landscaping
Throughout those years I also would work a lot of warehouse jobs doing general labor or forklifing along with some construction jobs. I also worked for BNSF railroad at one point
I was pre-med in high school (Was taking dual credit courses). Was a gamer, and started my own Garry's Mod servers and was interested in add-ons for my server and of course I was curious as to what went on behind the scenes and started learning LUA. Ended up falling in love with this process and changed my major to comp sci right before college. First year in college went to a local university and just did odd jobs (Yard work, cutting grass, etc.). Ended up not liking the university and realized that I did not receive the scholarship money so I went to a different university where I received these things but was 2 hours away. Ended up applying for a position at a cell phone repair shop. Worked there for 3 months and got promoted to an assistant manager and stayed there until my 1 year anniversary came around and ended up getting recommended an internship at a local software engineering company. Bit the bullet and switched and worked there. After a while I got recommended for two projects through the NASA space grant (Might do a post on those, not sure yet). But one was for the solar eclipse that was last year. Ended up getting to stream a high altitude balloon onto NASA's website. Other one was a star detection system on a rocket that went into orbit for a few minutes.
Senior year of college (fall 2017) started and I started looking for positions and one of my professors recommended I sent in an application to where I am working now. Ended up getting a full-time position offer that what I felt like was the right career move over the offer from the place where I had my internship and have been here for a little over 2 months and I am loving it so far.
I was in limbo after graduating from high school, and spent six months at home. I couldn't decide what to study, as I found business majors too boring and I wouldn't glance at engineering majors because I was done with math and physics.
After getting yelled at by my older sisters to get off my butt and enroll in university, I went again and took a look at all the majors and thought that software engineering sounded awesome.
Two days later, I was a software engineering student.
Still not in the developer role I would like to be in but here's what I've done so far:
Definitely Hoping to get into a more code based position and less in the marketing side of things. Been making websites since I had a single HTML page on NeoPets.
I started coding at age 11. We had just gotten new computers in the town I grew up in. They are at the library. I had always been in to games on the atari and my tandy 1000 computer. So when we got new computers, I was stoked!
So I started surfing the net which wasn't much of one back then. I was amazed by how the web pages were built. So I learned what made them work... html.
Sure people say HTML isn't programming, but it was for me back then. I got in to web design, then in high school taught some classes along with my science teacher.
He encouraged me to goto college for it.
2002, I learned about PHP and MySql. I was obsessed!
Fast forward to today, I'm 35, been coding professionally for 15 years now.
I've coded in PHP, JavaScript, Python. I've built some multi-million dollar apps for business and I have about 30 unfinished projects of my own :P
Still love to learn every day, and other than the 3 months of class on PHP in 2002, I'm fully self taught.
Such a great thread, thanks. Here is mine:
Oh, how time flies. Really interesting to read about everyone's progress through life. I'm probably forgetting some parts, but here's mine:
Swept floors at my folk's office.
Moved to a new city, swept floors and helped out at my folk's new shop/office.
Swept floors at a supermarket.
Started making basic websites for locals
Waited tables at a Dutch pancake house (in Denmark, what?).
Got into Wordpress development for clients with a friend for a year.
Assistant at a print shop for a year before university.
Started to really get into freelance frontend development during uni. Lots of Shopify shops and Wordpress sites.
Started a SaaS startup as a technical co-founder with 2 buddies, which failed
Pivoted and started a new SaaS startup helping startups, students and businesses with pitching.
Helped out a bunch of larger companies with getting up to date with new technologies.
Freelance frontend/UX/UI developer/consultant/something who builds new digital tools and products for large companies. Currently developing tools for improving workplace happiness.
I think a CS degree is not needed for a dev career either, but it helps to shape your skills more like a T.
hmm i started right into software development. before that i was student 😎
Electrical engineer who got fired for doing personal dev work while on the engineering clock.
Couldn't find a job, so I started a business for dev.
8 years later, here I am.