I live in the same town you were born. Conditions are still hard. Unemployment is through the roof. The few programming jobs available pay around $10/hr. And they are mostly doing maintenance on old C#/Visual Basic systems.But that's better than what most of the population gets. Minimum wage is the norm. People make around 12K per year, and have to deal with very high costs of living. Plus the shitty infrastructure.
I had it rough, too. Grew up in a barrio. Where most of my childhood friends are either dead, in jail, or crackheads. Few ever managed to make it into college (I did not). I'm the only one who has actually made something out of himself. But not without a lot of hardships. Not long ago (less than 5 years ago) I was completely broke, no transportation, no job, nothing. But somehow I kept moving forward. Throwing punches whenever I could. Like you, I was lucky. My parents got me a computer ( a C64) early on. No one else in a radius of 5 sq. miles had a computer. It was the best thing to ever happen to me. It gave something for me to hold on to when all my friends were busy learning how to sell drugs. It kept me safe at home when drive-by-shootings started to happen. It also helped me not get a young lady pregnant (which was the norm).
Nowdays, I am an accomplished engineer, marketing consultant, and entrepreneur. I work remotely, with a great team, building a very tough system (that has me writing code like crazy in different languages). Also help great people build their businesses into powerhouses. Best of all, I get to build my own businesses, which I find extremely fun (to the point of even doing some as a hobby). Who knows what would have happened to me had I not discovered my love for code? I know that I would not be able to say how proud I am of reading about a fellow puertorican who has made it. Good luck, and let me know if you ever visit. I know a place who makes great frituras.
I grew up in Chambersburg, PA -- tiny town, very poor overall -- but was lucky enough to have an uncle that built PCs (so we always had one in the house) and an Apple II in my classroom. I can't remember a time when my dream wasn't to "go to MIT to be a programmer"; thankfully, I happened to start gaming at a local computer shop, and they turned me onto Perl and PHP. Started doing contract work around 14 or 15, and then got a job in the field at 17, out in San Diego. Bounced around from place to place since then, never landing in the valley for more than a couple days. Now residing in suburban CT, and splitting my time between here and Barcelona in a few months.
I didn't want to go into programming after I got my CS degree mostly due to the terrible job market where I lived in 2000 after the dot-com crash.
I had a year where I traveled and had jobs like handing out fliers, picking pears, and pruning vines. Then I moved to the US, spent six months living on a sofa while working as a mechanic, then as a part-time computer repair guy.
It's liberating working blue-collar jobs because you really don't have to care, and certainly don't think about the job out-of-hours. I learnt that there were two kinds of jobs--those that you shower before work and those you shower after.
The real lesson was that you really can't have a decent living on minimum wage. I ended up calling every local web design firm in the Yahoo! Directory and begging for a job. I feel privileged that a decade late I'm earning nearly eight times minimum wage and that I can enjoy the trappings that come with that.
Thanks for sharing this. I saw myself so much on your comment talking about the sandwich that I decided to share my story too.
I was born in a Latin America country, middle class family, 375 USD monthly income for a house of 6 people.
Although I never went a full day without eating at least two meals, it wasn't rare to go sleep hungry.
My mom still managed to buy a PC for us, and that alone changed everything: I discovered programming in my early teens through a MMO game and learned web development, and since then I never stopped.
I'm now on my mid-twenties, but because I started so early with programming, I kinda hacked my career growth: to this day I already have 10 years of experience with JavaScript, as I was still a teen on my first internships. Started a CS bachelor but dropped as it was waste of time for me.
Today I work as the principal software engineer for a US startup remotely, and make 40x of my country's minimum wage.
Living through this gave me an empathy that I believe it's really hard to develop if you were born rich (definition of rich here: >upper middle class). There are so much things people take for granted, and they aren't available for people in lower classes at all. Geography is the biggest inequality in the world by a large margin.
I grew up poor, in the projects of NY. My father died when I was five and I was raised by my mother alone. I think that constitutes as "poor".
I'll give a 10,000 foot view of my younger years. I learned how to program on my own in the 90s because my school had no books or anything. I got my first computer when I was in college. I didn't study computer science or anything technical.
I kept programming/hacking after school/work. I did eventually get a programming job and I kept hacking after working. I eventually got a brilliant idea to charge money for something I made (after having made hundreds of open source projects).
People started paying for my tool. I was making $500,000+ USD per-year from my tool alone. I quit my "full time" job and kept doing what I always did, hacking on stuff.
Do I regret anything? No. Would I do anything different? Probably not.
I guess the only advice I have is "charge for it".
I also grew up dirt poor, had a C-64, etc. I'm a little less than a decade younger than you.
I taught myself to program, but very poorly. I had a reasonably good education through high school, but nothing that helped developed my tech skills. I could not afford an education beyond that.
My older brother was a sys admin, so I got good at that. Started my tech career in support and languished for a decade or so of low (progressively higher) paying tech jobs.
It wasn't until I knew developers in my personal life that I was able to identify exactly what I was missing to turn my programming hobby professional. I filled in all of those gaps over about 3 years of brutally hard work. I quit working and ran through my savings + some debt just to study and build a portfolio. It wasn't until I was in my 30s that I could change careers and do what I'd always wanted.
Yes this is me, I am self taught and from a small and poor town. Other than freelance I was 27 when I got my first high paying, full time programming job (in the Bay Area.) While the other couple of self taught people from my home town work in factories (and the one I know who went to school for it works at Boeing.) It was definitely not easy and I’d be further ahead had I went to school, but I probably wouldn’t work in startups and I don’t think I’d be anywhere near as good (and the people I’ve interviewed with seem to concur.)
I've been all over the place programming language wise. It's no longer meaningful for me to list them off other than to say what my current specialty is. (Web app dev)
I grew up fairly poor, but my Dad built the computers using parts he begged/borrowed/haggled. Eventually I started working (My first full-time job was at age 13) and taking care of my own hardware since I'd been building with my Dad long enough.
Hi there I am 45 years old. Been out of work since 2002.
In my prime I earned $150K/year as a programmer analyst writing business software for mostly Microsoft Windows platforms. That was before the Dotcom bubble burst and the market got flooded with younger cheaper labor developers who only studied in hacker school for three months how to become a developer with no college degree and high school dropouts. They work for like $20K/year and write sloppy code with security flaws and poor quality.
I've been programming since I was 12 in 1980 learning BASIC on 8 bit microcomputers, and learning COBOL and FORTRAN on mainframes using punch cards. At first I made mistakes and failed like any other person learning how to be a programmer. I learned from my mistakes and kept getting better. Over my life I learned over 37 different programming languages on countless different platforms. But none of that matters anymore.
Many people I worked with at my age, most of them did suicide because of the stress of working or not being able to find a steady job. Those who stayed in the computer industry became software consultants and got ripped off by broker agencies and in most cases not paid for their work or even being given credit for it, some ended up homeless, others ended up disabled from the stress like me.
This industry can eat you up and spit you out.
I was able to earn money as a 'super debugger', a phrase made by Rear Admiral Grace Hopper when I heard once of her speeches on programming and debugging and how using less code is faster and better, etc. She used to carry some copper wire on her wrist as a bracelet, when they decommissioned some mainframe core memory it was wire wrapped. She would show it to young people like me to teach me that wasting code is wasting memory and resources, and that if you can do the same thing with less code, it runs faster, uses less resources, and less memory.
But nobody seems to want to take her seriously anymore, even if she is a pioneer into computer science, and had invented a lot of the tech we still use today. In her time they claimed it was not possible to have a programming language, they also claimed women could not do computer work, and she proved them wrong on both counts.
Anyway some of my friends who survived, ended up working in fast food and retail and clerk jobs, because nobody wants to hire a person over 30 these days for programming work, and even if they do it is software contracting and they get ripped off.
One of my friends Michael David Crawford who was a Senior Engineer at Apple and Drobo and other places wrote this in his email response:
Dear Friends,
I was until quite recently out of work for three solid years despite
my having for well over fifteen solid years received ~35 software
engineering employment or consulting inquiries from recruiters - also
known as "headhunters" as well as "brokers" - ...
... While at the same time I found it Damn near impossible even to
_find_ the kinds of software publishers I hoped to work for, let alone
any actual open job opportunites, due the quite common lack of street
or postal addresses on corporate websites.
I rsolved to take matters into my own hands by once and for all
putting a permanent end not only to my own chronic unemployment but
that of a half-million of my colleagues in the engineering
professions.
I recently read at Soylentnews (http://soylentnews.org/) that there is
expected to be by 2020 a shortage of one million software engineers in
the United States alone.
I remain dumbfounded, given that there is presently a _surplus_ of
500,000 software engineers as well as that chronic unemployment - the
kind that creates large, unexplainable gaps in one's resume, therefore
rendering one largely unemployable - is quite steadily growing worse
over time.
It Does Not Have To Be This Way.
Behold:
Local Jobs, Local Candidates:
The Global Computer Employer Index
http://www.warplife.com/jobs/computer/
Note that my _entire_ site consists of naught but static hand-coded
Valid XHTML 1.0 Strict as well as Valid CSS2. There has never been
any software of _any_ sort behind any of the many commercial websites
I've operated since 1994, nor - quite likely - will there _ever_ be.
My Global Computer Employer Index is built _entirely_ by hand, through
careful, diligent and patient online research, as well as offline
literature research in public and University libraries.
I learned all about how to do that when I majored at first in Optical
Astronomy then later Physics at Caltech - the California Institute of
Technology in Pasadena, as well as at the University of California
Santa Cruz, where I obtained my B.A. in Physics in 1993.
You could really help a vast quantity of hungry, hurting people out
were you to lay this mail into the hands of _anyone_ you genuinely
feel would benefit from or would be interested in it.
When I was 10 years old I sat next to a guy on a plane who sold linoleum tile. He said he used to be an aeronautical engineer, but lost his job when the bottom dropped out of his industry.
I've always remembered that, and try not to take the good times for granted. But damn it's been going on 25 years now, and except for little hiccups in 2001 and 2008, demand for programmers is still white hot.
From anecdotal experience my father abandoned us I used to be a NEET in my late teen years. (but I also used to and still live in a very dangerous place, where I could regularly see people being killed or botched, something that could have contributed to me staying home)
What saved me was that I had a big interest on computers and learned at the time to do basic stuff like toying around with php (when it used to be big) and html.
One day on going through the neighborhood park I met a guy who told me he was a software developer and his company was looking for inexperienced people in exchange for the minimum wage and so my story as a developer (although I'm a very SUBPAR one) started
I grew up poor, was homeless at 16 for a year while still trying to go to HS, eventually had to drop out and climb up the career ladder with no formal education, now make well into 6 figures and I'm more than happy to help people NOT have to go through my situation. You should be as well. I am beyond lucky that I dug myself out of that hole and I know other people will not have my luck. If I didn't start programming as a kid because my school got computers early I would probably be in retail still.
In 1999 I was a college "drop out" (financial aid probation due to poor discipline and depression, and I was too poor to pay for school for a semester), so I got my first "real" job doing ISP tech support in the little Oklahoma town I lived in. Had already learned basics of web dev (HTML via Notepad on Geocities) and some basic languages (Turbo Pascal, TI-BASIC, QBasic, Javascript, etc). Got into a little Perl, some heavy experimentation with ASP, and eventually, ColdFusion (learned via reading the manuals they shipped in the box).
Within 15 months of starting that job at $6/hour, I had my first development job in Houston at $30/hour. No degree, and there were no coding schools then. Just a hunger to learn.
Today there's resources like Stack Overflow, great open source editors like Atom and VS Code, and frameworks like Rails. I'd like to think it's easier, but maybe there's a greater depth of knowledge needed that makes it tougher.
I'm old (57), so this happened back in the 1980s, and isn't very relevant to current market conditions.
I started out in amateur radio, and made connections through a friend with a Man who had a small computer repair shop. I started fixing things while still in high school. One day he got an EPROM programmer, and there was a program that talked to it written in Turbo Pascal. The next thing you know, I was programming in Pascal, having already done things in BASIC.
I went to College, but I picked poorly, and couldn't afford it, coupled with bad time management, ended up dropping out. I eventually got a job as a programmer. I wrote BASIC code that talked to Industrial Programmable Controllers (PLCs).
For about a decade I ended up writing, then supporting in the field, a system that used portable computers to record inspections of fire protection equipment. I loved that job, because I had written the software, and could definitely fix ANY issue that arose.
After that I went to work for a small firm that repaired Industrial electronics, and ran an Internet Service. I did both of those for a few years.
Eventually I ended up as a system administrator for a trade show marketing firm for 15 years. I fell into a trap, there was less and less work over time, and they didn't want to risk the running systems to phase in improvements I had written in my free time. Don't repeat my mistake... if you find yourself with more than half of your time free, it's time to move jobs.
Next I took a job making gears, it paid less, but was interesting.
Then Covid hit, and now my programming skills are old, and I've been sick for a year.
It felt bad because our dot com hopes were dashed, but life for a regular programmer wasn't too bad. I was about 4 years out of college then and it just meant I had to take boring jobs at big companies like Home Depot writing database front ends. I was still able to pay the bills though.
We have similar backgrounds in a way. I started coding as a kid too, at age 9. First Basic, then Pascal. Picked up C in my teens. Also tinkered with electronics and was part of an online robotics mailing list that was a lot of fun. It was very hard for me to get parts, living in the middle of nowhere in rural Southern Brazil, but some folks in the mailing list were super cool and shipped me parts from the US. I live in the US now.
I'm a CS major but took electives in embedded systems in college, and those were some of the most enjoyable classes I took. I'm now working on recalling some of that. Ordered some PIC parts and I'm currently taking an edX course on ARM programming.
My only problem right now is, I have no idea how I'd get into that space having a whole career built on server-side software.
I had it rough, too. Grew up in a barrio. Where most of my childhood friends are either dead, in jail, or crackheads. Few ever managed to make it into college (I did not). I'm the only one who has actually made something out of himself. But not without a lot of hardships. Not long ago (less than 5 years ago) I was completely broke, no transportation, no job, nothing. But somehow I kept moving forward. Throwing punches whenever I could. Like you, I was lucky. My parents got me a computer ( a C64) early on. No one else in a radius of 5 sq. miles had a computer. It was the best thing to ever happen to me. It gave something for me to hold on to when all my friends were busy learning how to sell drugs. It kept me safe at home when drive-by-shootings started to happen. It also helped me not get a young lady pregnant (which was the norm).
Nowdays, I am an accomplished engineer, marketing consultant, and entrepreneur. I work remotely, with a great team, building a very tough system (that has me writing code like crazy in different languages). Also help great people build their businesses into powerhouses. Best of all, I get to build my own businesses, which I find extremely fun (to the point of even doing some as a hobby). Who knows what would have happened to me had I not discovered my love for code? I know that I would not be able to say how proud I am of reading about a fellow puertorican who has made it. Good luck, and let me know if you ever visit. I know a place who makes great frituras.
reply