I became a software engineer a little later than most of you, probably. I started out as a hardware technician back in the '70s after a 6 year stint in the Army but had a serious interest in the software side of things. Especially since I could see that I wouldn't be "fixing" computers too much longer as everything started to become more modularized. All I was was a highly trained "board swapper" at the end. So, in 1980 I made the big jump to becoming a programmer. My first job was as a hardware diagnostics developer. A natural beginning for someone who was hardware-centric for over a decade. I gradually moved to being a firmware developer (another natural progression) until the late '90s when I made the jump to more business-related programming, which I am still doing today. Along the way I migrated from assembler to Clipper for dBase to C to HTML to Classic ASP to VB6 to .NET VB and C#. So I'm basically a jack of all trades (and master of most!!) And with the data side of things, from dBase II to Microsoft Access to SQL Server and Oracle.