This is the second of a five-part series about my horrible career: how it started, how it’s going, and what I learned from making every mistake imag

Not a real developer — Bitfield Consulting

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2024-11-14 16:00:06

This is the second of a five-part series about my horrible career: how it started, how it’s going, and what I learned from making every mistake imaginable.

In the first part of my chat with the reliably on-point Zack Proser about my horrible career, we heard how a degree in computer science was the easy option for a coding-obsessed geek, but it didn’t translate into a lucrative software engineering job (well, that sucks).

Instead, I toiled in the word mines for a few years as a tech writer, cranking out user manuals warning people not to dunk their personal digital assistants in water. Over to Zack:

John, tech writing is important work, as we all know. But it must have seemed a little unsatisfying to someone who always really wanted to be a programmer. And you’d already been writing code for a long time at this point.

I had: I’d been a hobby programmer all my life, as well as mixing with lots of professionals over the years: that is, people who actually had “software engineer” on their business cards. In many cases, I had as much as two decades more programming experience than they did, which made it all the more frustrating that I couldn’t get anyone to pay me to do it.

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