Quote:
Originally Posted by anomie
I studied C++, Java, VB, and Cobol in college.
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Upon graduation in 2001, after the US tech economy meltdown, I managed to find work as a legacy systems (read: IBM mainframe) programmer.
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...but for the last couple years I have been picking up sysadmin (FreeBSD / Linux) side projects, and attempting to slowly steer my career in that direction.
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Dude, while I was in Afghanistan the company I work for was bought by an Indian company. We're now in the process of "downsizing" and sending a lot of our jobs to the "Indian HQ". The company is championing this as "globalizing our delivery model" and making it sound good for our customers. But anyway, the point is, the two jobs that they absolutely are not getting rid of are AS/400 administrators, and Mainframe programmers (read: COBOL). There just ain't enough of them here in the US, and apparently there are none in India. Apparently not too many people are interested in COBOL and REXX these days.
Now, back on topic. I learned similar to everyone else... when I was 10 years old using BASIC. I messed around a bit in Pascal, Visual Basic 1 (for DOS), and other things. Didn't really pick up C until I was in High School with a TI-89 graphing calculator. Sure, I could attempt to learn M68k assembly... or I could use TI-GCC, the port of GCC for the TI graphing calculators.
Unfortunately I haven't done much programming since high school (short of helping the Network team write a program to help them automatically scan the logs of the hundreds of routers and thousands of switches we support). And lately all I've been doing is shell scripting. But, I would like to get back into it. If only I had the time...