Your First Job

Question

Share your first job. In year 1997 I started working with Visual C++ 5 on a product called Kruse Continuum and built my very first DLL using Visual C++. There were two options in VC++ - dynamic linking and static linking. I had no idea how to make it sharable with other projects. We had a very tight deadline and were working on nights and weekends. I gave DLL to my project leader and I guess I did not built-it right it took him forever and eventually he copied the code direct in the project. So my very first project was a failure. But we finished the project and went to a beer bar afterwords. My PL was a very nice guy and bought us all drinks.

Mahesh Chand · Answer

Thanks for sharing guys.

Sam Hobbs · Answer

My first job was so long ago that I don't remember the details of the first project. I was in the United States Army and based at Fort Monroe Virginia. There was one computer with 20 to 30 programmers using it. All programming was done using punched cards (young people moight not know what they are) which are peices of cardboard each capable of 80 characters of data. The computer was an IBM 360 or maybe a 370. We got only about one to three attempts a day to compile programs and test them. The programming language was COBOL. I did most of the keypunching (to put the programs onto cards) but I remember writing code on forms and sending the data to keypunch opertors to do the keypunching (data entry). I remember one early project in which I needed to modify an existing program that read in some items and added them to an array durnig execution and also searched the existing entries. The program used a sequential search to search the array and I modified it to do a binary search and it added items dynamically as required. The program ran much faster. How about my first Windows project? I was asked to write a Windows Device Driver to send print data to a HP laser printer (LaserJet 4 I think) through a SCSI host adapter. I knew nothing about Windows programming and very little about Windows. I had to write the code that took the print data from Windows and then it sent the data to the board in the laser printer's expansion slot; the data was sent through the SCSI host adapter and my code did all the bit-twiddling to interface with the host adapter. The data had to be written fast enough to keep up with the laser in the printer while the printer was printing and it had to do it using a 80386 (not a Pentium) processor. I had no help from anyone; this was before the internet. Just as I got it working HP announced a new model of the printer that made the software I was developing obsolete.

Mike Gold · Answer

My first programming job out of school I had to design and program a board that interfaced to a PC and read signals off a centrifuge. The board had wires all over the place was poorly designed and worked intermittently. I fried a few pc boards in the process. Eventually they brought in 2 much more experienced consultants in circuit design. I was very frusterated at first because I wanted to do the project myself but at the same time was very stressed by doing it all by myself. It took me time to realize that when you are starting out its much better to learn from more experienced consultants. I did end up taking on a piece of the project programming the UI for the hardware and thus started my career in client-side programming.