your first programming gig
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Were you fairly compensated at your first programming job? Wwhat year was it?
That's called seagull management (or sometimes pigeon management)... Fly in, flap your arms and squawk a lot, crap all over everything and fly out again... by _Damian S_
2009, worked on a program to strip out the headers of a TS video stream and forward the payload to a video encoder and was paid $10/hour. Which for being straight out of high school pretty decent, especially when I was only supposed to be an intern. :laugh:
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I was more than fairly recompensed. It was about 1983/85 and COBOL.
Henry Minute Do not read medical books! You could die of a misprint. - Mark Twain Girl: (staring) "Why do you need an icy cucumber?" “I want to report a fraud. The government is lying to us all.” Why do programmers often confuse Halloween and Christmas? Because 31 Oct = 25 Dec.
It is impossible to be fairly compensated for having to write COBOL.
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Were you fairly compensated at your first programming job? Wwhat year was it?
That's called seagull management (or sometimes pigeon management)... Fly in, flap your arms and squawk a lot, crap all over everything and fly out again... by _Damian S_
1988, writing games for the Apple II using 6502 assembly and was royally shafted, especially considering how much money the company made for our work. (Turns out they originally paid us overtime--we were working 60-80 hours a week--then claimed they shouldn't have since we were "contractors." They were wrong [we weren't contractors by IRS definition], but I needed the work and lived with it.) (I don't count prototyping a database in 1987 using Clipper since my official title at the time was "office manager" or some such nonsense. I also don't count a prototype done in Apple Basic in 1982 for church accounting software that never went anywhere since I was doing it my spare time.)
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It is impossible to be fairly compensated for having to write COBOL.
Distance lends enchantment. :)
Henry Minute Do not read medical books! You could die of a misprint. - Mark Twain Girl: (staring) "Why do you need an icy cucumber?" “I want to report a fraud. The government is lying to us all.” Why do programmers often confuse Halloween and Christmas? Because 31 Oct = 25 Dec.
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Were you fairly compensated at your first programming job? Wwhat year was it?
That's called seagull management (or sometimes pigeon management)... Fly in, flap your arms and squawk a lot, crap all over everything and fly out again... by _Damian S_
Heck yeah. It was 1979, the language was Cobol on an NCR minicomputer, and I thought, "All this, and every two weeks they hand me money. Life is good."
My other signature is witty and insightful.
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Hummm...I worked part time for the CalPoly Engineering Dept from 1970 to 1975 as a lab tech and was paid whatever the minimum wage was at the time - I thought it was more than $5 / hour though - so long ago and I seem to have picked up a few parity errors in my memory recall :sigh:
Steve _________________ I C(++) therefore I am
When I worked briefly for the Cal Poly Engineering department, I think the wage was about $6 an hour - well above minimum wage for the time. That would have been about 1975 - 1976. But they only let me work around 10 hours a week or so, and that $5 an hour for forty hours looked awfully attractive. Of course, it was a little easier and cheaper to drive to LA from Pomona then... ;)
"A Journey of a Thousand Rest Stops Begins with a Single Movement"
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Roger Wright wrote:
At $5 an hour, I suppose it wasn't really fair, but it was only one task of many I did as a lab tech for a university, and lab techs are typically paid very poorly. Writing an OS and Assembler for the Altair 8800, after rebuilding it from a botched job by my predecessor, then designing and building interfaces to an ASR33 Teletype terminal and a Varian minicomputer that was, itself, emulating an IBM 1103 was interesting and fun, but not very profitable...
That sounds like some serious fun!! :-D
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^^ ^^
Moose.It was Great Fun! Few things since have been as challenging as that task.
"A Journey of a Thousand Rest Stops Begins with a Single Movement"
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Were you fairly compensated at your first programming job? Wwhat year was it?
That's called seagull management (or sometimes pigeon management)... Fly in, flap your arms and squawk a lot, crap all over everything and fly out again... by _Damian S_
The year was 1973 and I thought the compensation was fair. I learned IBM assembler on that job which provided steady jobs for the following 18 years before I branched out into the growing PC market.
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Were you fairly compensated at your first programming job? Wwhat year was it?
That's called seagull management (or sometimes pigeon management)... Fly in, flap your arms and squawk a lot, crap all over everything and fly out again... by _Damian S_
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Were you fairly compensated at your first programming job? Wwhat year was it?
That's called seagull management (or sometimes pigeon management)... Fly in, flap your arms and squawk a lot, crap all over everything and fly out again... by _Damian S_
wolfbinary wrote:
fairly compensated
How I view that compared to others will probably be different, but for me I'd say sure. I had just "retired" from the military (US Navy) after 22years, where we never made much money anyway (I don't think I got even close to $30K a year), and I realized that I was lacking "true" programming experience. So one of the first companies I interviewed with wanted to bring me on at $20K a year, reasoning that since I was already drawing retirement pay and they were a "small" company, it was the best they could do and was a "great" opportunity. Luckily, I declined the generous offer and kept looking. Found a job a week or so later making $47K salary, and that was 12 years ago.
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Were you fairly compensated at your first programming job? Wwhat year was it?
That's called seagull management (or sometimes pigeon management)... Fly in, flap your arms and squawk a lot, crap all over everything and fly out again... by _Damian S_
1986, COBOL and dBase2. Yes, *I* think the Marine Corps paid me pretty well. :)
Currently reading: "The Prince", by Nicolo Machiavelli
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Were you fairly compensated at your first programming job? Wwhat year was it?
That's called seagull management (or sometimes pigeon management)... Fly in, flap your arms and squawk a lot, crap all over everything and fly out again... by _Damian S_
1984 - The Nasdaq Stock Market. It was a fairly unknown company back then dealing only in penny stocks. The pay was actually just about right for the area. Most of the work was in Univac 1100 Assembler and some COBOL. :rolleyes: Give me ambiguity or give me something else!
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Were you fairly compensated at your first programming job? Wwhat year was it?
That's called seagull management (or sometimes pigeon management)... Fly in, flap your arms and squawk a lot, crap all over everything and fly out again... by _Damian S_
wolfbinary wrote:
Were you fairly compensated at your first programming job? Wwhat year was it?
I guess that depends on what first job you want. After tech school my first official job was at Bar-F gasoline, an office that owned 22 gas-stations. I was hired at $5.25 an hour and 4 years later I got a "big" raise to salary.... of course it required 40-98 hours of work a week.... on the 98 hour week I made 3.75/hr.... I was hired in January of 1986, I was the only employee who moved when the office moved because I had nothing holding me there. However, there were two other jobs in high school that were complete failures for compensation (hey we were kids, you're supposed to take advantage of us right?). The first was the birth and death of "Keyboard Warrior Enterprises." One of my friends whom I taught programming to, bought a game for the TRS-80. That game was a real time scrolling text scrolling game. My friend called up the company who made the game with a great idea. How much would they give us to write a graphical interface for it? Since it was a bombing air-craft, complete with radar sweep and a few major controls (no cockpit view, just the heads down console). The company offered us half of what the original author made if we could follow through on ALL the things we mentioned, that would be 5% royalty. So Keyboard warrior Enterprises was formed. We had two programmers and two managers (and people are surprised I ended up in government work). Of the two programmers, since I taught my friend, I did over 75% of the programming. When it was done the radar display even had an animated sweeping arm and a zoom-able map. We offered it to the publisher, they said they approached the original author about it and the original author said all derivative works belong to him, there would be no compensation. The author demanded we hand over all copies of the game we had improved as they were now his property. We hung up the phone. We were later contacted by his lawyer who repeated the demands, we said all copies were destroyed by "accident" he said the word "sue." Some how I doubt he was referring to his significant other's name... so we were frank.... You can do what ever you want, just remember the headlines of the paper: "Author of Popular Game Sues Teenagers for Improving His Game." The lawyer hung up. :) The year was 1981, the summer between my freshman year and sophomore year in high school. A couple of years later in my senior year the first com
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Were you fairly compensated at your first programming job? Wwhat year was it?
That's called seagull management (or sometimes pigeon management)... Fly in, flap your arms and squawk a lot, crap all over everything and fly out again... by _Damian S_
Not at all, probably half of the going rate for an entry level programmer. I took the job just to get experience so I guess that would have been all the compensation I was looking for. Unfortunately the company I worked for was an internet start up in the year 2000, so when the bubble burst, so did that company. I was notified by a note on the door from the building owner that had confiscated everything for non payment of rent. The owner even tried to screw me by re-classifying me as a contractor because he didn't have the money to pay my taxes/deductions. The government didn't agree with him after he got audited because I complained (this was after the company went bust). I moved on to greener pastures after that however.
modified on Wednesday, June 2, 2010 10:25 AM
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wolfbinary wrote:
Were you fairly compensated at your first programming job? Wwhat year was it?
I guess that depends on what first job you want. After tech school my first official job was at Bar-F gasoline, an office that owned 22 gas-stations. I was hired at $5.25 an hour and 4 years later I got a "big" raise to salary.... of course it required 40-98 hours of work a week.... on the 98 hour week I made 3.75/hr.... I was hired in January of 1986, I was the only employee who moved when the office moved because I had nothing holding me there. However, there were two other jobs in high school that were complete failures for compensation (hey we were kids, you're supposed to take advantage of us right?). The first was the birth and death of "Keyboard Warrior Enterprises." One of my friends whom I taught programming to, bought a game for the TRS-80. That game was a real time scrolling text scrolling game. My friend called up the company who made the game with a great idea. How much would they give us to write a graphical interface for it? Since it was a bombing air-craft, complete with radar sweep and a few major controls (no cockpit view, just the heads down console). The company offered us half of what the original author made if we could follow through on ALL the things we mentioned, that would be 5% royalty. So Keyboard warrior Enterprises was formed. We had two programmers and two managers (and people are surprised I ended up in government work). Of the two programmers, since I taught my friend, I did over 75% of the programming. When it was done the radar display even had an animated sweeping arm and a zoom-able map. We offered it to the publisher, they said they approached the original author about it and the original author said all derivative works belong to him, there would be no compensation. The author demanded we hand over all copies of the game we had improved as they were now his property. We hung up the phone. We were later contacted by his lawyer who repeated the demands, we said all copies were destroyed by "accident" he said the word "sue." Some how I doubt he was referring to his significant other's name... so we were frank.... You can do what ever you want, just remember the headlines of the paper: "Author of Popular Game Sues Teenagers for Improving His Game." The lawyer hung up. :) The year was 1981, the summer between my freshman year and sophomore year in high school. A couple of years later in my senior year the first com
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Were you fairly compensated at your first programming job? Wwhat year was it?
That's called seagull management (or sometimes pigeon management)... Fly in, flap your arms and squawk a lot, crap all over everything and fly out again... by _Damian S_
Back in 1974 - summer job for Cdn dept of Agriculture - statistic and research services. Programmed a Univac 11 in Fortran to do matrix calculations subroutines. For Operations research programs. It paid my next years tuition and most of my living expenses and confirmed that statistics was NOT what i wanted to do and programming was much more fun. Plus it was a hell of better way to spend the summer then making rotors in a plastics factory. The office was air conditioned!
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Were you fairly compensated at your first programming job? Wwhat year was it?
That's called seagull management (or sometimes pigeon management)... Fly in, flap your arms and squawk a lot, crap all over everything and fly out again... by _Damian S_
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Were you fairly compensated at your first programming job? Wwhat year was it?
That's called seagull management (or sometimes pigeon management)... Fly in, flap your arms and squawk a lot, crap all over everything and fly out again... by _Damian S_
My first programming project was in high school in 1998 or 99 developing a program in VB6 to parse a text file exported from a database which was then used to create student and teacher accounts in a Novell Directory Services tree. You could also use one of the exported files to edit user accounts or delete user accounts. Along with creating accounts, it would create a directory structure and set up permissions for teachers and students where students could submit papers to an inbox and receive graded papers from an outbox. It took me about 3 weeks and I was paid $15/hr, a free hotel stay, and free steak dinners every night. Considering my programming skill then, I can say I was actually probably overpaid... I didn't complain about it though :)
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Were you fairly compensated at your first programming job? Wwhat year was it?
That's called seagull management (or sometimes pigeon management)... Fly in, flap your arms and squawk a lot, crap all over everything and fly out again... by _Damian S_
My first job was while I was still in college. I got a job as a "Software Tester" and as soon as I graduated, they made me a programmer. I was paid well enough at the time and was happy to join the programming team as an equal. I learned more about the programming process (design spec, test procedures, code reviews, etc.) then I ever expected and this was (and still is) worth more then the salary.
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I was more than fairly recompensed. It was about 1983/85 and COBOL.
Henry Minute Do not read medical books! You could die of a misprint. - Mark Twain Girl: (staring) "Why do you need an icy cucumber?" “I want to report a fraud. The government is lying to us all.” Why do programmers often confuse Halloween and Christmas? Because 31 Oct = 25 Dec.
It was 1988 and I was programming on a VAX/VMS in Fortran. The application was a lease/loan financial system. It was really fast on VT420 green screen terminals ... Those were the days.