This is the fourth post in a series about how I got into computers and how my career has unfolded. When I was in school my relatives would often ask me what I was going to do when I graduated. I had no idea. I had zero experience first, second, or third hand with office jobs. I grew up in rural Minnesota, where pretty much everyone had jobs working with lumber, steel, construction, farming, more farming, and yet more farming. I had zero concept of office life, cube-land, or anything like that.
I also had no comprehension of what people actually did with computer programming. Of course, I had no answer to the awkward follow-up regarding what such jobs actually entailed! As a result, my future was this big empty field of endless, but totally undefined, opportunity. All I knew was that I really enjoyed programming, and had discovered that I was pretty good at it. Sadly, I graduated near the end of the Ronald Reagan era, and trickle down economics had created a nasty recession.
In Minnesota, thousands of software developers and engineers were being laid off by some of the biggest computer companies at the time. This meant that I, as a newly graduated student, was competing with lots of experienced folks.
I rapidly realized a few things. First, the vast majority of jobs were in cities, not in rural areas. Second, it was virtually impossible to run a job search from a remote area remember, this is , all pre-Internet. Third, living in the Twin Cities for example was way more expensive than living in any rural area. So I moved in with a college friend to split the costs of rent, and got a temp job doing data entry work to try and make enough money to cover rent and food while I searched for a real job.
But after spending all that time and money on a Computer Science degree, my goal was clearly to leverage my degree to get a job doing what I loved! That data entry job turned out to be valuable, not just because it allowed me to have a roof and food, but because it was my first real exposure to using mainframe computers. It turns out that the terminal experience pretty much sucks. This temp job also exposed me to real cube life. The life so many people have every day of their working lives.
