Developers, Programmers, or IT Professionals?

[Growley]

I've worked for: Compaq, HP, Xerox, BMC and CA, and now I'm in Digital Media...all in sales though, so only count me as half an IT professional...or less

 

[alfredo_buscatti]

I programmed in Assembler 360 for 10 years. Guess that marks me an old fart. I had the damnedest time learning it. Imagine teaching someone about registers in two hours and then turning them loose in the lab writing a program that demanded register usage. It took me two years to understand a dsect. When I learned that "F" in the high-order nibble was needed to represent a positive number, I almost fainted. It took me two years of on-the-job exposure to be as good in Assembler as it had taken me six weeks in school in COBOL. But after two years on the job it was like programming in anything else. Sadly where I'm located, after the year 2000 frenzy the market for Assembler programming died. Only the banks and insurance companies kept their legacy code and demanded proficiency in their third-party software, which could only be learned working for them.

 

[user 2027]

Still have the original IBM PC in the box it came in. Work for a cloud computing company now as a software engineer. Been writing code, managing folks, doing startups for 25 years.

Currently in favor Linux, Ruby, JRuby, Rails, OS/X

 

[roogles]

I'm a network engineer for small to medium sized ISP in southern ohio, and the linux/unix server guy.

 

[Andy Lowry]

I'm the one-man IT department for a chain of gas stations, trying to figure out how to retire XP gracefully before it expires. :roll: I run Unix, Mac, Windows, and Linux, and write little utilities in C and Ruby. My favorite part of the job is building new computers; there's something about the smell of a motherboard the first time you take it out of the anti-static bag.

Edit to add: All the above talk about old hardware reminds me that I have a working TI-99/4A in the garage-- that's what I learned Basic on. Anybody wanna trade it for a PDP-8?

 

[WarlockBob]

Wonderful stuff! Being as young as I am, I don't have much knowledge of the old beasts in the attics, but I have had to program in COBOL here at my job.... Flat file systems? What were they thinking?

What about favorite OS/languages?

I'm going with Linux and Python right now

 

[Rob_In_MO]

What about favorite OS/languages?

Back in the day: Clipper 5.xx, GW Basic, a little C++, and low-level Assembly.
Today: nothing at all unless I absolutely have to, then it's Visual Basic.

 

[Andy Lowry]

Wonderful stuff! Being as young as I am, I don't have much knowledge of the old beasts in the attics, but I have had to program in COBOL here at my job.... Flat file systems? What were they thinking?    

What about favorite OS/languages?

I'm going with Linux and Python right now

The accounting software used by my employer is COBOL. It can be turned into a database via Liant's Relativity, which then renders everything unreliable.   We've learned to leave it as it is. It might be old, but it's solid, which can also be said of my favorite OS and language: Unix and C.