Let's have a little fun with a trip down memory lane: think back to the year that you first started your career in tech:
- What year was it?
- What was that first role?
- How did that role help you grow into who you are today?
- Include a Giphy to symbolize the year
Here's mine:
- My career began in 2001
- My first role was an apprenticeship at my local school district, in a help desk capacity
- Accountability. Ironically, I didn't have much of that as a teenager when I started my career, and eventually I found myself without that first job. It was hard, but valuable lesson early on that I look back at with appreciation.
Top comments (4)
It was a while ago. I am not sure what year
I'd previously been a museum assistant (stores) at the Museum of London and I fixed some database stuff there
Then I was unemployed for a bit and on benefits. After a few months they will start hassling you so I went to the job centre in Stratford London (where the Olympics were years later. I lived on the site of the velodrome for a while) and got a job at North East London Polytechnic selling floppy disks to students. I was on the pay roll for Central IT ( or whatever the dept for IT for the entire place was called) so this is definitely an IT job
Only trouble is, as I knew how to program and stuff within a few months I was on programming advisory telling PhD students how to fix their stuff
I think that was the second summer of love, 1987. There were raves.
There was no Internet. There was no web. I'd learnt C the previous year. I'd only been writing programs for 6 or 7 years
The first day I started on the program, the internet went down. Then word started to filter through that a plane had crashed into the World Trade Center. You can probably insert the date yourselves.
After a few months in the bootcamp we were released into the wild knowing slightly more than we had at the start. The after-effects of 9/11 started to be felt jobs-wise though as a lot of US foreign investment in Northern Ireland software companies started to dry up. I got a job as a junior dev and watched every day as more and more of the offices in our business park started to empty and close down.
Fast forward through a couple of bouts of redundancy and subsequent self-employment and I got a job as a data analyst in a bank in early 2007. Boomtime (pre-crash and pre-Credit Crunch which is a story for another time). And I was right back to building Access databases and Excel financial models, just like I'd started out with back in 2001.