Turning points 2: Choosing to become a software professional

In late 80′s I got another summer job at Neste Oil, the national oil company. That was the time when Ethernet came mostly in thick and thin varieties, serial cables were plentiful, TCP/IP was considered waaay too heavy for any practical use and when most of the computer issues always seemed to be somehow related to CONFIG.SYS. My job was the fundamental rite of passage for practically everybody in this field: IT support. I went around and talked to people, plugged in and out cables, replaced memory chips, installed software and yes, also tweaked that notorious CONFIG.SYS in attempts to coax out a few more kilobytes of the precious 640 KB. And did some programming, too.

What made this a turning point was the advice from my boss. At that time I was pretty convinced I was going to study astronomy after high school. As you might guess, he suggested (ordered, really) I’d reconsider and apply to Helsinki University of Technology to study computer science. Well, what the heck, I thought, and did that. After all, I was a high school kid with two dear hobbies, but realized I couldn’t make a living of both of them. So I thought I’d make living of the one that seemed more likely to actually provide a living and keep the other one as a dear hobby. And here we are. (Instead of some cool observatory in the Andes, Canary Islands or Hawaii…)

I continued to work at the same place on and off during my studies and learned many good things in that lowly IT support position. I think the most important lesson that dawned on me was that this whole thing was about solving other people’s problems. Many think, especially early in their careers, that the problem is the wrong operating system, wrong hardware architecture, wrong software originating from wrong Evil Billionaire’s empire or something wrong with the user in general. But no, the problem really is that Jim from sales in the 6th floor cannot finish that quote because the server is acting up again. And your job is to fix the server to get Jim’s job done.

Turning points 1: How it all started

After 25 years in software profession I thought it would be nice to start a blog with a couple of posts to describe the turning points of my career. Here’s the first part to describe how it all began, the gig that I count as the starting point of my career.

Sometime in mid-80′s I had already some experience of computers: I had one at home (a VIC-20) and used it of course mostly for playing games, but also writing some programs of my own. Then one day my Mom (really…) offered me a small gig at her place of work, a clothes factory, long gone now, where she worked as an accountant. She had got this crazy idea that a computer might help them to calculate the salaries for a couple of hundred workers and she had sold that idea to management as well. And me as the programmer.

Well, what the heck, I thought, let’s do it. That was my first summer job. It took two weeks to cook up a few hundred lines of GW-Basic on an archaic CP/M computer to calculate salaries and print the output. I probably earned two or three hundred euros of it, so it was a great success for a teenager. But perhaps even more satisfaction came from the realization that the folks actually used my program. And they were happy with it, too, although it was a very simple program. See, the salary calculation was not all that easy: there were different kinds of salary categories, hourly rates, absences, regulations, taxes and whatnot. They had been pounding all that manually from timesheets into their desk calculators, worker by worker, but now they just input the data into the program and it calculated it all for them. Magic.

When you think about it, you don’t get that kind of job satisfaction quite that easily these days, do you? A small and simple program made a tremendous difference and productivity leap in those people’s daily work. That was possible because the whole concept of a computer at office was quite new and there were so many gains yet to be made. That was a revolution.