The Bits Go Marching By – Part 2

I hope you weren’t holding your breath for this…if you haven’t already, go read Part 1.

As I prepared to go to college, I took and passed the Advanced Placement (AP) test in Computer Science. I thought this would mean I could skip the “Intro to Computer Science” classes. Unfortunately, the Computer Science AP test wasn’t honored by the college I chose, so I couldn’t get credit (which I earned.. dang it). However, I was able to skip the first two CS classes and take advanced electives instead.

Everything seemed to be fine. The CS program was transitioning from focusing on a wide variety of programming languages (Fortran/Pascal/Assembly/Cobol) to focusing primarily C/C++ with some emphasis on specialty areas such as Assembly and Cobol (pre-Y2K). This meant I was able to jump right into learning all about C from my very first class until I hit the upper-level classes where the curriculum tried to broaden your horizons into different areas (aka weed out the weak ones).

Then it happened. I learned to hate programming. IBM 360/370 Assembly programming taught me how to hate programming. The second semester of Assembly was centered around writing an assembler, a linker, and a loader. In assembly language. On a mainframe. The professor was one who never compiled or ran your program. He just read the source code and knew if it worked or not. Seriously. The class was setup that if you finished the assembler you got a C. If you finished the linker you got a B. If you finished the loader, you got an A. I believe I got a D. That’s right, I never got the assembler to work correctly. The D was a gimme, I should have failed I think.

It was at this point I decided that maybe programming as a career wasn’t for me. I told myself, “who wants to sit in a cubicle for 12 hours a day anyway?”. Besides, I was exposed to Unix in my summer job and Linux was in its early stages of development (I spent weeks downloading it onto dozens of 3.5″ floppy disks to install on my 386 PC). So, my new goal was to work as a Unix System Administrator and lucky for me the dot com boom would later create tons of sysadmin (short-lived) jobs.

Unfortunately, my remaining classes didn’t help to change my mind. Let’s see.. Cobol. Yeah, we all hated Cobol and our professor used to say, “everyone of you who is complaining about Cobol will be the ones who have no other job offers at graduation but a Cobol job”. Turns out she was right. More on that in a minute. Next was a compilers class. Nope, too much like writing an assembler (summer classes are easier to get good grades). Windows programming in C.. Not too bad, but hard to keep everything straight in my head. Really, I think the only classes I did enjoy was an elective hardware class and an Operating Systems class.

As I was preparing to graduate, I was working as a “tape ape” for a large insurance company whose disaster recovery data center was in this small west Texas town. Instead of using robots to retrieve tapes from the library and load them into a tape drive we had an LED display which told us the tape number and the tape drive to mount it in. This was on the night shift so several hours would go by with nothing and then the board would completely fill up within seconds as a particular job kicked off. Statistics were kept on how many tapes we loaded as well as how long it took us. The point is that this was obviously a temporary job until my post-graduation ship came in.

So, graduation comes and goes. I get married. Go on the honeymoon. Come back to the tape ape job. I seriously need a real job. I get a call from a trucking company in a nearby, larger town and they are interested in converting their computer systems and need someone to maintain their old system while their current staff does the conversion. Guess what the old system is written in? Cobol. Yep, my Cobol professor was right. I had to tell them, “Can I have until Monday to think about it?”. Mostly it meant we’d have to move and they weren’t offering much more than the tape ape job paid.

Fortunately, I received another call Friday morning as I got off of the night shift. Drive 6 hours to Dallas, interview, and drive back same day with no sleep? Sure! Sign me up. The job paid a lot more, we didn’t have to move, and it wasn’t Cobol programming. Not quite as bad, but almost. Level 2 PC support. Desktop Support. Whatever you want to call it, it’s fixing computers for whiny users who never know as much as they think they do.

I spent 2 1/2 years doing Desktop Support and did such a good job that I was no longer needed. Towards the end, I had one call a week for a six-story building full of users. It mostly involved LARTing anyone who tried to change anything they weren’t supposed to. So, off to the big city and a bigger client with bigger PC problems.

Another 2 1/2 years later, I finally get the opportunity to realize my goal of becoming a Unix System Administrator. The only problem was the hours and the pager going off at 3am. You can only take so much of it before you need a break. Fortunately, I had quite a bit of interest in the performance and capacity planning aspect of managing the systems and an opportunity as a full-time capacity planner came up.

What I find most amazing is how much of the work I’ve done over the years (desktop support, sysadmin, capacity planning, and system architecture/design) is how much of it is translating between what the business people want and what the developers/technical teams can deliver. So there you go. Full Circle. The technology has changed, but we’re still either programmers, electronics engineers, or systems analysts.

I’m in a happy place. I hope to graduate in 2008 with a Master’s degree in Information Technology. I was informed that a paper I wrote for the Computer Measurement Group (CMG) was accepted and I’ve been invited to present at CMG 2007 in San Diego in December. At the same time there have been a few changes and reorganizations that may open up new opportunities for me.

The real point of this trip down memory lane was to help me get back to my roots. I’ve avoided programming like the plague based on a bad experience over 10 years ago with a dead programming language on a dead piece of iron. I will save the details for another post, but I’ve started an exciting new project which I hope will not only help me satisfy an idea I’ve had rattling around my head for a few years but which will rekindle my interest in programming. Well, if not professionally then maybe as a hobby.