Thread:JaimeMA/@comment-29954643-20180307234500/@comment-29954643-20180309200130

Wow, I started this monologue about my careers and just didn't stop. Please just smile, roll your eyes, and move on to a less self-aggrandizing post elsewhere. LOL. Having written all of this, I figured I might as well just post it and roll my own eyes while smiling with pride. - El

I often think of my programming career being my third career after college. As I was ROTC (AF) in college, my first was to complete my AF active duty commitment which ultimately brought me to Los Angeles from New York (with a short stop in Dover DE and Biloxi MS). Once my commitment was completed, as an Exec, I thought that the best civilian counterpart might be personnel mgmt, so I first took a position as the Director of Personnel for a mid size building services company (5000+ employees). Since our product was our people, that was a daunting task. Being female and far too young in a male dominated company didn't help.

Turned out it was most certainly NOT my bag, but I did realize that I exceled at two things. Litigation and systems mgmt. Since I did not have a law degreee and knowing how many more years in school that would take (I had a master's degree at that point in public mgmt), I decided to take some programming courses (COBOL and dBase III) and first got my foot in the door of a small VAR (value added retailer) of HP's mini computer (they called the 'mouse'), but we wrote our own screen drivers so that the less expensive dumb terminals could be acquired along with the HP computers. We also wrote and sold Financial (including Payroll (my specialty) systems as the value added component of every deal. Since I had no real education in programming, nor any experience, I was paid peanuts as a trainee, but I also was able to take over the mgmt of their in-house payroll customers and account mgr for all sales that included Payroll in the sale.

I advanced quickly and after a few years I moved on to a large software vendor (Fortune 500 mainframe customers only). After after a 1yr certification to teach  program was completed, I began teaching out of their education centers located in many major cities in the the U.S. (LA, San F, Chicago, Atlanta, Boston, NJ, Dallas and Huntsville AL). They soon learned that I was a programmerr too, so I continued teaching for them but became a member of their SAG (Systems Advisory Group), and began going out on site (all over the country) to resolve complex business problems through intense systems analysis followed by programmatic bug fixes and/or solutions. I was paid my salary plus a commissions percentage for both formal teaching and for on-site work.

Both of those early company's software was written primarily in COBOL, so that is what I mostly programmed using, but after a huge and ugly merger, I left that large company, did not sign the non-compete agreement and was able to continue working directly for my clients. I never returned to an on-staff position and sold my services to old and new clients for the next 20+ years. During the first 5 years I mainly continued with the system that I knew, but soon realized that I would need to generallize and became a mainframe applications systems specialist primarily programming in COBOL and Assembler but often found a need to tackle front end problems using Visual Basic and MQSeries software and other relational database code such as SQL. All in all I was in computer for over 30 yrs till I retired in 2015. As a freelance software engineer, I still get some client requests from time to time but am really mostly retired now.