My first position was through a friend of my dads. Being an engineer, my old-man became facinated with computers when they first came out. The only thing I could work out to do with these things involved a screwdriver and a stanley knife (I was extremely young and curious). Games just did not interest me. I would much rather ride my bike or something. One day I found a simple program that, with a few very simple instructions, could tell a small turtle where to go on the screen - anywhere you wanted with a bit of thinking. This facinated me so I explored it further... A programmer is born. Back to my first job... I left university to start this job - with a start-up. Back then in Australia, a uni computer degree involved knowing how to operate a mouse! The whole computer industry was about to explode and I didn't want to get left behind. I have since used agencies, word of mouth, and any means I could find. Agencies have to be the worst, with a few issolated exceptions. Word of mouth is by far the surest way to land a position. You pretty much know you have the job. Agencies lead you on, lie, cheat, steal... whatever they can do to earn a living. They just don't know how to communicate anything. For them its a matter of procedure. There was an instance where an agent asked on behalf of the company what 'VBS' was. Not hearing him properly I answered him with 'Bulitin Boadrds' (BBS). He just didn't care if I was right or wrong and recommended me to the company only because he had noone else with the right qualifications (Assembler/C - for an new AV product). I got the job anyway but, never met the agent - who picked up around 20K. This position was for a company called vCIS (which were later aquired by Internet Security Systems, ISS). ISS have since closed our development department here in Australia (after all that hard work - so if you want dirt on ISS...:~ ). Most of my work has been through word of mouth. I have just been shrouded in secrecy for so long now that I have lost touch with most of my old clients. Or the people I had been dealing with had moved on. I love programming, so "moving on" means finding out about the next technology and learning it. We have now decided to try and start our own company, slowly.