Life and where you end up is not a straight path. I just read the post by Semi-Rad about him chatting with college students about his career. This caused me to reflect upon my own journey from college to a "real job."
After graduating in spring 1993 with my BA in History - I was married with one kid and a bit lost about what was next. I was leaning towards getting a PHD but still unsure. I actually visited a military recruiting center and thought about joining the Army; I applied for a manager position at Sbarro’s in the local mall but didn't get the job. Eventually I applied to graduate school and pursued a masters in Asian Studies where I worked 10 hours a week as a Teaching Assistant for a history professor - and part time taking orders at Nu Skin International over the phone. In fall of 1993 while in graduate school : Mosiac the first browser for the World Wide Web was released. My world, like everything else was transformed by the internet and the web. I started building a website for my professor at school that used server side image maps to show the progression of the Assyrian Empire. After finishing my course work I got a full time job at Nu Skin - working on their internal knowledge base built on a Folio Views, a proprietary hyperlinked text application that was a pre-cursor to what would become an intranet. From there at Nu Skin - I helped define the requirements for an online website - since I had so much experience taking orders on the phone.
That job at Nu Skin ended up becoming my first "real job"; where I learned on the job and went from a phone order taker to eventually becoming a software developer. While working there we had to wear a shirt and tie each day to work. I worked with Hank Humphreys and Mark Warburton, two guys I still stay in touch with. One memory of that time I had recently was trying to remember the name of this “old guy” – Joe Ruffalo – who would read the trade tech magazines (this was pre-internet boom and all tech were print magazines) – and he kept telling us about this great new multi-threaded operating system that Microsoft was building : Windows NT – it had the old Windows 3.1 interface – not the new Windows 95 interface but it was a multi-task based OS and not single threaded like Windows 95 (and Mac's at the time) and was much better. Joe managed to lobby getting us WindowsNT Desktops (at that time – no one had cell phones or used laptops – your computer sat under your desk and you only used it at work). Us 3 would often talk to Joe about the trends in the world of computing, I don't think we ever worked for him but we worked around him a lot.
Last year at Amazon, where I have now worked for 19 years - as I wrote a note to my department congratulating promotions, some of which included recent college grads starting out as software engineers - some in their early 20s : I suddenly realized that to many of them – I AM NOW JOE! I AM THAT OLD GUY. 😉
Strange the twists and turns our career takes us on. I'll have to finish my career story at some point but for now - just call me Joe.