What was your first programming job?

Coastal States Life Insurance Company, based in Atlanta, GA, in 1977. Programmer trainee coding Cobol on a Sperry Univac 70/45 and a 70/35, having 256K and 128K of core (ram) respectively. Yes, I meant "K" of core. 80cc card in, print out, tape drives, and a string of 8 disk drives whose capacity is a cruel joke now, but was pretty damn good at the time.

 

Fall of 2004
Software Analyst
Healthcare Informatics Industry
Austin, TX

Programming mostly C and Fortran, and eventually Perl.

-Lee

 

What was yours?


My first paying gig was in 1988 writing Pascal for the first time on small Digital VAX systems. We wrote software to track paper roll creation, storage and shipping in paper mills.

Paper mills are an interesting and dangerous place. A interesting side note is that the mill near Snow Flake AZ was a practice run for U.S. bombers. No, they didn't actually drop anything near by.

 

1989 in a UK Local Government Authority, writing DOS programs with Turbo Pascal and the awesome B-Tree Filer (the finest database engine known to man, RIP TurboPower). I still have a bit of the code we did back then, including a cluster analysis engine for finding cluster sites in georeferenced data.

Then onto Turbo Pascal for Windows, Borland Pascal, Delphi, then learned Java, then a couple of years ago started on .NET and C#. Now I'm coding ObjC and Cocoa in my spare time for my own business. And I've loved every damn minute of it...

 

Started out with learning iOS Development in Munich Germany in a company called Jenomics. this was in 2009

 

I haven't actually accepted it yet, but I have my first programming job offer... A start up in Cambridge, MA is offering me $1400/month to write an iOS app that will allow iOS devices to communicate with a digital assistant via Bluetooth.

Two questions:
1 - What is everyone's thoughts on $1400/month for a first programming job? It sounded really low to me... I was expecting it to be $2000-$2500/month. I have been using cocoa/cocoa touch for 4 or 5 years now, I've been selling stuff on the app store for just over a year now, and I'll be graduating with a BS in Computer Engineering in two years.
2 - Is it possible for a non-jailbroken iOS device to communicate with a non-iOS device via Bluetooth? If so, can anyone direct me to some good docs for it? If not, how should I explain that to the person offering the job...?

 

I am answering the matter of the money. I don't know how exactly it works in America with taxes, but if they are offering you 1400$/month, does it still need tax deduction or not? Let's say here in Europe, you can get 2400 Euro/month, but you only have 1550 after taxes (so in your hands). Therefore, I can't really make an exact point yet .

 

My first programming job was actually underpayed, but they gave me the chance to study (because I didn't went to school), and still 'survive'. In the meanwhile I grew alot, and changed companies. but if it's 1400$ in the hand, that's a tad low with your current experience.. (towards art).

 

The offered amount is before taxes, but as I recall from my prior, unskilled jobs, the amount I lose to taxes is just under 10%. (So I'd take home about $1250 after taxes.)

I'm thinking I'll counter propose $1680/month (that's an amount my job advisor at school suggested... assuming $14/hour and 120 hours/month... after taxes it would be about $1500/month.)

 

My first paying job was in 1982 with a game for the Sinclair ZX81 (Timex TS1000 I think it was called in the states)

 

My first paying gig was in 1989. I worked at NASA for Rockwell writing AP101-B assembly. The AP101-B was the space shuttle on-board computers - as far as I know, the only other place these computers were ever used was on the B1-B.

 

Flometrics Corporation, Fluid Dynamics Engineer.

Specializing in Computational Fluid Dynamics and Flow Visualization.

 

In Apple, '95 or '96. As a (paid!) intern, doing internal testing/validation tools, not exactly the sexiest thing. But at the time I thought I'd be re-writing the OS within a few years.

"Hah!"

 

1500$ is 1200 euro, which is "okay" for a starter job, so for that i'd take it to start Good luck though

 

- 1992
- Turbo Pascal for DOS
- in-house design software for a company making conveyor belt pulleys for the mining industry

 

1993 - Radar work with Ada and I started out at $30,000 per year.

Boy, was I excited to buy my first car!

 

Started out on a Data General Tape driven system...I can't quite remember the response time of the thing, but it was measured in hours. From there, a Dec PDP 11 running mumps (no, not a joke a coding language) From there some nifty Texas Instruments mainframes with disk drives the size of washing machines.

My how times have changed...

 

What! I saw on the news a couple weeks ago that in Washington they had to let 10% of their asparagus crop go because they could not find enough workers to pick it at $10 per hour or $1600 a month.

So now you can make more money pick asparagus then being an app developer

 

Yeah man, $1400/month,,,, you better find our how many hours or ask for additional compensation. That's really, really low. I hire unskilled labor and pay $10/hour, which is more than you'll make.