What Was Your First Job in the Tech Industry?

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).

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.

Well, I started as a web developer. Just what I'm doing right now. But not because I was expecting it.

I was actually expecting to work in a computer shop. Little I knew that the shop owner forwarded my resume to a software house, because I had some programming experience, gave a couple of uni exams and participated to a couple of coding contests in the meantime. I remember this bit of the interview:
(My soon-to-be) boss: "Do you have any questions?"
"Actually, yes. Why did you ask me so much about my programming skills?"
(Puzzled) "It's for the job."
"... As a computer shop worker?"
"I think there has been a misunderstanding..."

I was hired nonetheless. I struggled at first, but in a couple of weeks something clicked and throughly enjoyed the role.

I always dabbled in programming since I was, like, 8. I only dreamt of doing it as a professional. After the uni, I didn't expect it to become reality!

The paths life makes you follow...

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.

I did "co-op" education in high school at a local computer shop as an assistant technician. The main guy always had a cigarette going and clients would joke about finding ashes in their computers when they opened them up at home.

My first real gig was over the phone support for Gateway computers. Remember the milk cow boxes? I met a life long friend there.

Fun times.

I started a company while running a commercial BBS called Netropolis. This was 1992, I was 22. It was running BBS Software Major BBS / World Group. I wrote bbs doors for my Board. From there I went into Web Development (Hot Dog Editor anyone?) and from there I jumped to Computer Animation, mostly handling Manta Ray and Renderman, I eventually ended up as a client platform engineer, which is what I have been doing for the last 20+ years. Some people say I should be managing a team by now, but nah, I'll be forever an Engineer.

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.

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.

While studying computer science in a local CEGEP I had a few summer jobs in IT as a student :

• one summer it was with a federal department (Health Canada) updating BBS
• one summer it was working on a learning system about accounting for a local teacher
• one summer I was building an application with my dad to manage electrical equipment (got the copyright on it here in Canada)
• one summer I was working for a development agency with IT support and coding in VBA for Access After that I went to the university, while in my last year I started working full time in a local hospital while studying part time. I was coding using SMS and Meditech. I did some 24h support a few times a month. After almost 3 years, I was let go with 2 other employees. That was a non-unionized job. A few months later, I started working in a federal department where I'm still working right now. I've worked on several different web applications all in Java with Struts. Since November 2023, I'm now helping creating our first few web applications in PHP one with Joomla and another with Laravel. None of them are yet in production. That`s a first for me as I always was involved with working on existing web applications. I've been in this department for 20 years now. We are working from home since March 2020. I will be getting a full pension after 35 years of service.