My first computer job was for the County utility dept.
I took a knitting needle and pushed it through a slot and it pulled out the punchcards for all the bills to mail that day.
Looking around there’s still a big demand for COBOL and FORTRAN.
Mostly seems no one wants to spend the money to update huge old programs to new languages.
Yep, that’s a big problem in state government. Legacy systems are a rich niche. The wise programmer will not only learn a good programming language, but they need to look for the best match of what skills they have to what someone with money needs to have done.
Peace,
SR
Alot has changed since I first became a programmer in 1982. I would recommend taking an aptitude test like I did. I was naturally suited to it.
If I was going to recommend a start for a young person I’d have them buy one of these Raspberry Pi 3 things and see if you can get it to work. It’s basically a computer on a single board. Much different than the mainframe computers we punched cards for when I learned COBOL and FORTRAN.
Programmer competence is a huge problem in the industry because of the assumption that “anyone can code”.
I worked for a company that spends several million $ per year for software that has never worked properly. This in part because the company failed to write a contract with enforcement provisions. Possibly an inside job.