I was once a car mechanic :-|
And this is the truth , i am not joking , and if i read this hole thread , i
see some people that in my opinion understand what it takes to be a true
programmer , and i see some people only focussing on degrees .
I program in basic since 13 years of age , and i could and can learn pretty
good ( autodidact ) , so after a career in the automotive ( last three
years , management level , and got all my certs to be a qualified mechanic
on the highest level ) i decided i wanted to make from my hobby my work .
So i got employed as a software tester , at a company who makes automotive
cataloging systems , as a person coming from the actuall business i was
perfect for the job of reviewing there software ( as i had also lots of
computer knowledge ) at some point they asked me if i could also do the
second line helpdesk , cause they noticed that i could solve lots of
installation errors .
In this position i also had access to computers with a dev environment ( VB
4 - 5 ) so in the silent hours i wrote a helpdesk program , in a later stage
i ported this program to the web for our european offices ( Classic ASP )
after a few years while these programs were even beeing sold to third
partys they asked me if i would like to join there development team .
The team existed out of 2 proggers and a designer , these university
skilled proggers never shared anny knowledge, even better they did there
best to make me feel bad as i was not a true progger cause i did not have
the formel education , i was just a "Hobbyist" who could not write a true
application in the way it was intended , so i started buying books from
Amazon and studyed ( i have a whole library by now ) i signed up with VUE
and started to study for my MCP`s
In the meanwhile it was noticed by the management that :
1. My customers where verry statisfied with me ( i could deliver what they
asked )
2. My programs where the most stable of the company with userbase of 20000
throughout Europe but the helpdesk lines were almost silent for my progs (
in contradiction to those of my co workers
)
At a certain stage in my career at this company i was asked to create a
hughe web project with the designer ( VS.Net ) , however as this project
was so hughe the customer had rented a German firm to review all sources ,
when these people arived and started with there questions , i noticed that i
could verry easy give all the right answers ( and believe my i was verry
afraid of this encounter ) , when they reviewed and tested my source codes
( mainly the Business Logic components ) they were verry impressed and
certified everything without anny noticable problems . i did not have to
redo anny work source level at all ( only needed to change some
documentation )
I have written dozens of Winforms and Web applications commercial with a
userbase of 20000 users throughout europe ( only in germany the userbase was
already 6000 ) in VB 6 and VB.Net i did them all alone from scratch
inclusive installation routines .
My co workers now had a new one ,,,,, " You can only program so good
because you know the business so well , you have a unfair advantage opon us
, if you would have to make a program outside of the automotive you would
have been lost " .
Well i see why my good knowledge of the automotive branche would have made
my programs more as how the customer wants it , however i do not see why my
programs were more stable as there`s
However i never go away from a challenge so , last year after almost 8 years
deployment at this company i decided to quit this job , i currently work
internally for a big international firm , and work in a three man team on a
new internall production system, this firm relates to the energy sector i
got a contract for a half year
but after three months my manager wanted to talk to me ( i thought i was
going to be sacked ) however he offered me a new contract , one that is
valid until my retirement .
So i guess i am doing something good ??
In my opinion a good programmer is someone who is eager to learn and never
stops learning
I have once thought about getting my degree , however here in the
Netherlands these educations are verry expensive , and take a long time ( 4
years , for your BCH ) , and on the other hand if i need to explain to new
co workers who have these degrees what is BCNF and how a object preferably
should be constructed
i guess i do not need it .
But as i said i never stop learning , i am still a good customer of Amazon
and i buy all the self pacerd traing kits and the advanced topics books of
MS Press
i guess it is time to get some MCTS , MCPD certificates this year ( if i
can find the time to attend them ) .
i still do multiple disciplines of programming winforms , web ,
distributed ( remoting , COM , webservices )
so i have really gone from mechanic to enterprise developer
In the end the person makes the programmer not the paper
Michel Posseth
"Spam Catcher" <
[email protected]> schreef in bericht
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