Tell me something funny about your first DEV job

I was a Psychology student and was looking for a summer job...
I wandered by the college job board and saw they were looking for a second year CS student...
I told myself "I can program, I know some basic Turbo Pascal" so I applied for the job...
I was the ONLY one to apply so I got the job!

Never went back to Psychology after that.
Switched degrees and 30 years later I am still happily coding away :)

My first job was with a business who's whole model was based on referrals. The app I was working on was for reps to submit their referrals.

As you can imagine, the main table in the database was the referrals table. It had almost a million rows and every other table had a referral ID column to join it.

The table was spelled referalls.

What's worse, it was such an old legacy app, it was written before ORMs were popular, so all the DB queries were in the actual code, so references to the table were EVERYWHERE!

There was also no uniform way to spell the Referral ID columns. Some tables had them as referral_id and others as referall_id.

It was a mess!

I had no idea about React, I've been studying it for 1 month non stop, and then, first day my boss asked me if I could program in python, scraping porn.

FML hahah, anyway I really learned a lot.

i got fired because they calculated how long we had been married after i said im having a son. They came to the conclusion that we had sex before marriage

All I remember is my old boss playing entire experimental jazz albums at very high volume, poking the ire of nearby offices, and adding “challenge” to work.

First professional website gig, sales guy wants to know what to do next for his client.

"We need pictures," I told him.

"How should I send those?"

"Just put some pictures into a folder and send it to me."

A couple of days later I got a manila folder full of catalog cut out pictures that all fell out when I opened the envelope. Not what I expected, but I'm pretty sure that site got done eventually.

I completed my higher diploma in software engineering course in 1996 and landed a data entry job in a forex investment company, taking calls for stock quotes.

Duh!!! Then I quit after a month to get out of the cell.

And yet, I am learning Dev!!!

In the first place I worked, there was a nice coffee table which, except coffee, also had something like Nesquik cocoa powder. I loved it and used to drink it instead of coffee when thinking.

Once I was sitting at my place behind an amazing huge new white 19” LCD screen (long ago it was), made a good sip of this great cocoa drink, but - it went into a wrong place. After few minutes I still could not stop coughing, partially because my place looked gorgeous now, and laugh was going out of me uncontrollably. Everything around, including the beautiful new monitor, was covered in this magic drink.

Drops were still there even when I left the company about a year later: nor me this day, not even the cleaner were able to wipe them.

My first dev job wasn't even a dev job. I was a hobby programmer since aged 11, and I got a job in a computer centre in my mid-20's. With 3 other folk we were looking after the mainframes, networks & installing these new fangled PC things ;) The boss was discussing a new software they were looking to purchase & I said we could do it in the department. One of my colleagues was also a keen programmer. My boss pitched it to his boss and, well, we ended up writing it :-)

We used outlook tasks, and the company owner would create tasks and assign them to his employees every morning. One day my tasks were:

1. Buy a replacement battery for the owner's electric toothbrush
2. Fit a new speaker in the owner's car

I moved on fairly rapidly.

When I got my computer there was a sticky note on it that read "For Sale" & I was like good because it was an older MacBook pro but it turned out that the laptop was for me! The name that was given to the IT department to create all my accounts was "Sale Hernandez". 😭 Once they realized their mistake they had to recreate all my accounts. To this day I can't unsee my name when I see "Sale". 🙃

In a one of the interviews at a company, the interviewer asked do you know anything about this company ? I confidently said yes and started explaining, and after 5 mins into it he cut me to say- what you are explaining is entirely different company (I got confused between the names of the companies).

I didn't know I was actually hired as a dev.

About 10 years ago I had originally applied for a graphic design position. During the interview it came up that I built my website. So for the second interview I met with the dev lead and got the job. But I wasn't fully aware that the second interview was for an entirely different department and position.

It all clicked in the first few on-boarding meetings, I didn't want to let on I really had no clue what I was doing, so I started winging it.

And I guess you could say I've been winging it ever since. I'm now the lead dev for a different agency.

When I started my first DEV job, I really did not like programming or coding.
My friend said that his company was hiring some junior web developer, and he thought I could pass.
My test was completed with a lot of help from my friends ( 90 % 😅 ).
I was also naive at that time. My expected salary was only about 250$ when the manager asked me.

And now, this job is my second life. It helps me have enough money to take care of my family. And it opens a new future with my family in Japan.

Lol several times 😂 oooooooopsie