Hey, Devs! We want to know: what was your first job in the tech industry? And what advice do you have for new developers entering the workforce? Share your experience and how it helped shape your career.
Let's inspire and encourage the next generation of tech talent!
Oldest comments (30)
My first job was as a games programmer - mind you this was 1985... Ugh. I built a game called Storm which sold around 400,000 units by the time it had been translated to multiple different platforms - this was big news in the mid 80s and so I quit education and pursued that as a career!
I built games for EA for a bit and took a real salaried job for a while in France working for UbiSoft - that was my first job where someone else paid me. (Since then I've moved to commercial software and been a founder in a number of businesses).
I think I had this game!
In the cover that barbarian looks like Conan wearing a pleated skirt 😂
The first unpaid gig was writing Assembly code for ZX Spectrum (or was it a ZX 81 ?) controlling 24 projectors at the Laser theater in the planetarium of Budapest, Hungary around 1984-85 when I was still in high-school.
The first paid job was test automation at DEC for the fast Ethernet processor in Jerusalem, Israel in 1993. That's the only time I had the luck of working on VMS.
I don't know what advice to give. I enjoyed it back then and I keep enjoying tinkering with software.
I started my career in 1999 as an intern and then became a full-time employee January 2000 at the same company. They hired me as a Web Developer and I created classic HTML pages with tables. Macromedia Dreamweaver and Fireworks, Adobe Photoshop, that was my beginnings. The websites were the company's websites, not for customers.
Getting coffee ☕
Well, it depends. Either it was my job at a call center as first level supporter for the large data networks of a major telecommunication company. Learned a lot about routers, network nodes, network and routing protocols, and more.
Or, it might be my first web development job I got around 1998. I pokered high and just said I know PHP during the interview. When I started 2 months later I actually knew how to code in PHP. :-D
My first paid gig was a project with a friend - converting some commercial kids maths software from STOS on the Atari ST to AMOS on the Commodore Amiga. I was maybe around 14 years old - late 80s / early 90s.
I was a van drive in a small tech company. I couldnt get a job the typical route as I did not have the needed qualifications, but I was just as good as the technical folk in the company. One day I got a break, was able to show my tech skills and they looked after me from that moment.
Oh Jesus. It was was the heady days of 1998, I was fresh out of college. I was regretting my switch from Comp Sci to an English degree, and I had spent most of the past 4-ish years building websites. I landed at a small web design/dev shop. Two owners, three underpaid college-age kids that were grossly underpaid ($15/hour) figuring everything out on the fly. The owners wouldn't pony up for real servers, so most of our sites lived on second-hand PCs that sat in what we sarcastically called the "server room" and each one of those backup-free gems hosted multiple sites using pirated software, that were built with pirated software. The owners had collected several hundred $5000 deposits on sites and then just kept us plugging away at these things. Most of the work was done in ColdFusion 4 (all inline tagging based crap), and we spit out site after site after site. Bicycle shop website, adult toys e-commerce site, flat brochureware site for a crappy Thai food place in downtown, smoke shop e-commerce site, etc., etc., etc. After about six months, my attitude had taken a giant shit, and a chat with the majority owner about the state of things resulted in me getting laid off. It was actually a blessing. I moved to Philly in February of '99, landed at a VC-backed dot-com, and built some interesting shit and made really good bank until the bottom fell out in October of '01.
more please ....our story ends in 01....and then what else....tell us also what you said to the boss back and forth before you got laid off... we want more
Technically first tech job was Retail Macintosh Sales at a Non-Apple-Owned franchise store which specialized in Apple products. I was an apple fanboy at the time.
Actual first programming job was a continuation of my college practicum project translating CGI C executable into PHP as part of a re-write the college's internal data-driven website.
It kinda depends, because my very first job was as embedded system tester.
I was freshly graduated, asked for a C++ programming job, but the company said that I don't qualify. They suggested a tester position.
After the boss asked how much money do I want, I felt that I don't understand anything in testing embedded systems, so I said that reasonable would be to start from minimum salary and then increase as I learn more and can do more (oh, those naive times...)
However, after a few years I wanted to get my hands on actual programming stuff, so I started diving into programming more seriously and learn linux.
It took me almost a year to find a job and it was super adventurous journey.
If You're interested, I wrote it up here. :)