If my career was just starting out? Short answer… no!
I am so thankful for my career working with computers. But today and for a while now… it totally doesn’t fit my personality. When I got out of High school, I had no idea what I wanted to do. I liked animals. So maybe something to do with that. One thing I did know was, I was more concerned with being happy than making a lot of money. I was a loner… still mostly am. I gave serious thought to being a forest ranger. Being outside away from the masses. I went to the local community college and got a catalog. I looked through it trying to decide on a major. Wow there were so many science classes and “ology” classes to be a forest ranger. So I looked on.
I saw “Business Data Processing”. The “Business” part didn’t really appeal to me, but I liked calculators and electronics. So I decided to give that a try. I almost gave up during the intro class. It just wasn’t clicking. And then half way through… it did. I made a A in the class, and every computer class after that. I didn’t have to socialize to do my work. I could just sit and code. However I did socialize some, because there were other people there with the same interest. You could write logic using flowcharts at home, and I did. However to actually translate logic to code you had to be… on campus. This was the late 1970s. These were mini and mainframe computers. For the most part, people didn’t have any type computer at home. You had to be on campus to write code.
The job was perfect for me at the time. I could just code without a lot of human interaction. This is not true today. Programming is all about teams and collaboration. Tools such as git are made for this purpose. I could go on, but I have a feeling I’ve already talked about this.