"Roughly how long did it take you from day 1 of learning to day 1 of being paid?"
First I had to graduate from grade school, then do the middle school thing, then sit thru the high school thing. I guess 14 or so years?
(Edited to add, at the time there was a moral craze about credentialism; thou shalt not hire a programmer without a BS degree. At least if you didn't live on the coasts. And this was about a decade before the dotcom craze)
There are also some moral questions, like I was being paid to test impaired telecom circuits for an end user financial institution, but I saw I could replace 90% of my labor with a "telix" script (like the procomm terminal program but arguably better, or kind of like an inferior version of "expect") of moderately short length. So, seeing as I worked alone second shift, I was somewhat less productive for about one night as I wrote my script, and the for the next ... long time ... I read magazines and did my college homework (for the kids out there, magazines are like a static website, only updated monthly, and they print it out for you... like another obsolete technology, the "newspaper", but updated monthly rather than daily) and eventually graduated and got a "real" job, etc.
So my first gig was automating my job for about one day and then maintenance of legacy code, and monitoring the automation for performance.
My boss eventually caught me because I got bored and started rewiring things and generally going "above and beyond the call of duty" and I figured I was about to get fired or promoted; turns out he wanted to promote me but there were no job openings between the time I got caught and when I graduated college. Which is how I dodged the bullet of maintaining stock trading COBOL code for the rest of my life.
First I had to graduate from grade school, then do the middle school thing, then sit thru the high school thing. I guess 14 or so years?
(Edited to add, at the time there was a moral craze about credentialism; thou shalt not hire a programmer without a BS degree. At least if you didn't live on the coasts. And this was about a decade before the dotcom craze)
There are also some moral questions, like I was being paid to test impaired telecom circuits for an end user financial institution, but I saw I could replace 90% of my labor with a "telix" script (like the procomm terminal program but arguably better, or kind of like an inferior version of "expect") of moderately short length. So, seeing as I worked alone second shift, I was somewhat less productive for about one night as I wrote my script, and the for the next ... long time ... I read magazines and did my college homework (for the kids out there, magazines are like a static website, only updated monthly, and they print it out for you... like another obsolete technology, the "newspaper", but updated monthly rather than daily) and eventually graduated and got a "real" job, etc.
So my first gig was automating my job for about one day and then maintenance of legacy code, and monitoring the automation for performance.
My boss eventually caught me because I got bored and started rewiring things and generally going "above and beyond the call of duty" and I figured I was about to get fired or promoted; turns out he wanted to promote me but there were no job openings between the time I got caught and when I graduated college. Which is how I dodged the bullet of maintaining stock trading COBOL code for the rest of my life.