Today was my last day of more than 30 years in corporate IT software development work!
My first gig was writing Pascal and x86 assembly language at a nuclear fuel plant called Combustion Engineering. Fun and interesting job with ironic company name given all safety rules to avoid a criticality accident. From there I spent a few years at a railroad doing mainframe assembly (and bit of COBOL). Wasn’t prepared for that job, I remember first day asking why there were two enter keys. Eventually moved into client-server systems written in C.
After that worked for the “local phone company”. Early on I worked on a cross-platform, message-oriented middleware tool that ran on PCs, mainframes, and every flavor of Unix. It was over 30 years old and still running in a few places when I beat it to company retirement. One of my favorite projects from that era was a VOIP prototype. PC client and a phone-line interface card initiating voice calls over the regular phone network before we all used the word “Skype”.
Later I moved into enterprise architecture, rolling out Java-based tools and teaching web development classes I really enjoyed. I’d love to teach again, but that space is shrinking due to AI. I also helped build an internal collaboration platform – including the odd experience of watching legal shut it down one Friday evening, and couple years later helping the CEO start his own blog.
The last few years started to feel like a dark “Black Mirror” edition of Dilbert with knee-jerk culture changes, relocations, and general silliness. In the book The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Earth is doomed because it’s in the way of a hyperspace bypass. The dolphins know it’s coming and try to warn humanity, unfortunately their warnings get mistaken for tricks performed for fish. Eventually they leave Earth with a farewell message: “So long, and thanks for all the fish.”
Time to swim off toward something more self-directed. So long, and thanks for all the fish!