Funny reading this... Including myself, I know a handful of friends who ran BBSes and were all about this age. I'm pretty sure that we're all now in some form of IT job as well.
I worked at BBB in the mid-90s, before I considered "computers" as a career. The experience really opened my eyes to how "scammy" the world can be. BBB is a for-profit company that, above all else, serves itself.
I remember my first day on the job when I was introduced to the sales team. "Wait. What? 'Sales team'?"
And this is exactly why I am making sure I keep this skillset (I am relatively young). Not that I am one of those people that is all in for on prem and anti cloud - both have their place. But knowing hardware I think will eventually become a more valued skill once all of the people your talking about finally do retire.
I've been trying to figure out just when tech offices switched from outcast ugly nerds hunched over a server to tea sipping hipsters getting ready for a sack race before hitting the gin bar. Does anyone with a family over age 30 work at these places?
How old are you now? When I was 14 there were no certs -- I got a job in a local PC shop as a stock boy. I am convinced I worked for Korean gangsters now; However back then I thought it was a kick ass job (Since nobody I knew was working.) I still own one fried 8088 mobo (black to black wha?) and the three surfboards I managed to buy whilst working. In reality it was one of the worst jobs I have ever had, as I had to work in an attic sorting PC parts and fetching orders in 100+ attic heat with a 4ft ceiling (I kid not) and had to get to work Sundays @ 5am to unload "orders" from Mexico from the meanest people I have ever met. I learned more about life in that year then I have in the last 20.
Back in High School I wanted to get a bit of IS experience, so I volunteered in the IS dept of a nearby hospital. Turned out, my job was to format all 10-20K of the old Windows95 installation floppies they had sitting around (this was 2000-2001).
At first I almost just left. But the guys in the IS dept were actually really nice and let me use the spare parts they had just sitting around. I ended up making a setup with 3 screens, 3 towers and each tower with 4 floppy drives. Plus an extra tower & screen to browse the internet while I would swap disks in and out of the other three.
My hidden back corner behind all the ancient, noisy tape drive towers (it was a Hospital... need to be HIPPA compliant and anal about recouds) became the cool place to hang out and I ended up learning a mountain of information from those guys/gals.
Did they supervise you too closely? My first job while still in school was being a network operator with maybe 5 hrs a week of real work (most of which I automated away or was just grunt labor install/cabling jobs) and maybe 5 randomly allocated hours of stark terror handling outages and disasters. I was instructed to look busy and professional the other 30 hours per week.
1) I "apprenticed" under the PBX operator and helped out with MACs and cable pulling and learned how to terminate and test ST fiber connectors. I had more formal telecom/EE training than the PBX op which was a little weird. I also apprenticed under our IBM customer engineer and he had be do all kinds of crazy stuff, which was kind of cool. The IT director got a little greedy about my "volunteering" for him, although if I had a better attitude about it I might have ended up working for him.
2) IBM manuals laying everywhere, taught myself some BAL from the books although the sysops wouldn't give me access. Also learned all about ATM. IBM mainframes had this weird crypto subprocessor with great manuals. IBM manuals, at least professional level pre 1990, were awesome, I'd suggest checking out bitsavers.org and reading some.
3) Taught myself motorola 68HC11 assembly, procomm/telix scripting. I read a lot of programming books.
What industry are you in, and how long have you been at it? I tend to think the parent post is objectively correct after 25 years of doing everything computer related.
I have a tiny handful of friends in IT older than I whose careers are still thriving in the UK. Most are specialists of some kind. I wish them well.
For the first >50% of my career, my speciality was that I wasn't a specialist. I can work anything with a keyboard and a display, fix it, tune it, make it talk to anything else, or at a push virtualise it.
But that's an obsolete skill in the near-monoculture of today, when IT means Unix, Windows and nothing else, talking Internet protocols. It's all boring now.
Usefully, though, I also write, so I changed course and became a tech writer. That's working out OK so far.
I encountered such a person. Her parents were both mainframe nerds and she was a true believer. I think the shock of working as a 23 year old in a group of geezers that had been fighting each other since 1975 was traumatic.
We stole her and she was a pretty awesome DBA last I knew.
The BEST part was that some years later, the cops busted a coke ring that was operating out of the cafeteria. Lots of cafeteria workers and IT folks went down. Not me--I was at my desk with Campbell's Soup every day. I realized my post made me sound a pathetic loner. I actually made some friends there who I still lunch with today, though they are of course pushing retirement age now. Business IT was very different from now in the 1980's. At 24 I was by far the youngest on the mainframe team. I kept that distinction on into my early 30's at different employers, before "youngsters" in their late 20's started showing up. The mainframe IT guys/girls (at least in bank IT departments) of the 1980's tended to be older than 30, very much relics of the 60's and 70's. This means I also witnessed the Y2K bug being crafted. I was zapped quite a few times for carelessly allocating 8 bytes for date fields. "You're wasting 2 bytes carrying the century." My bad! I worked on the same system (for a different company) 20 years later and made good money helping upgrade all the dates. Things changed over the years, but in my experience, I have never been at a place that has any kind of food culture aside from ad hoc lunch groups that form outside the office. Certainly never any company-funded food.
As a teenager I was working in IT department of a mid-sized industrial company. Which meant helpdesk jobs, assembling server racks, manually installing software on dozens of PCs when it was difficult to automate, maintaining industrial PCs (mostly removing dust or replacing cards), manually wiping HDDs and all kinds of assorted jobs that were tedious but not very difficult with basic understanding how computers worked.
My first tech job was with a Vogelback computer with punchcards for programming. Who knew about side jobs in computers then? Thank goodness you grandkids came along and straightened us out!
PCBoard and PPE for life!
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