I remember when I was told about COBOL school by a guy in 1982 I said to him (and these are my exact words), “I thought I missed the computer revolution.”
It’s been my career ever since, bringing me a six figure income with no college, started by a ten month, four night a week, $2,300 class.
This is one reason I’m not a big fan of going to college.
Back just before Y2K I was able to get into the IT department because at that time they were looking for anyone willing to learn programming. I’ve been programming in RPG ever since. There is no shortage of American programmers.
Your COBOL remark.
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Same here, but AS400/RPG. School was 9 months long, couple thousand. Got a job before I graduated. We learned Fortran, Cobol (3 month class), RPG (two week class), DOS, etc...
The owner of the first company I worked for told us all in a meeting that if you stick with this, you will all be retiring coding RPG. He said there is soo many lines of code out in the world today (1989) someone will need to be around to maintain it.
I now work from home, in FL(tax free state), 7 figures (MD salary), still coding and maintaining RPGLE. Yesterday the company was closed because of snow. I’m in FL so I had a snow day. Life is good.
Same path traveled as you and I’m still doing development work today. I think we got lucky in that we jumped in at the beginning of the computer revolution. 40 years in IT and Dev work for me this year.
That was me in 1967. I thought, "Well, I've got four years to dig in before the colleges flood the market." Retired from the game in 2000 - never made six figures, but nearly did (high fives).