rsp@pbhyf.PacBell.COM (Steve Price) (06/22/88)
On my 30th birthday I became a computer programmer. I have always loved languages, poetry, philosophy, and music. I enjoy talking with people. I am energized by helping someone learn new things. For various reasons I won't bore you with I was terrified of mathmatics (Algebra I) in school, even though I loved Science. I was (and am) bored by professional sports. I happen to be male and as a child always seemed to feel that there was something wrong with me -- my dad and teachers all seemed to think I had a "female" orientation. (Now that I am 37, happily married, a father twice over, and feeling good about my career, I laugh at them and their narrow-sex-role world view. But that is another tale.) I studied English and German literature, got a BA in English, an MA in English Literature and became a High School English teacher. After 2 years I became a college lecturer and eventually an assistant professor of English. I taught Freshman Composition, American Literature, British Romantic Poetry, Public Speaking and Rhetoric. This I offer as brief personal background to establish my premise that one who is educated in the Humanities, may indeed find happiness and success as a programmer. My reasons for leaving the teaching which I love are mainly financial -- apparently society doesn't think the things I love are worth much cash. (I suspect that this is somehow because teaching is nuturing and commonly thought to be "women's work". Yet another tale.) My path into programming is not typical. I found a start up software house whose founder believed that a good liberal education was the best preparation for software problem solving. He offered me a programming probation if I would "get trained". I hired a senior CS major at the college at which I was teaching to tutor me in Basic and Pascal daily for 3 months. Thereafter I quit teaching, started programming, and am very happy at it. I improved my skills on the job at the start up company by writing screens and reports in Pascal. This experience enabled me to qualify for placement in a UNIX training position at PacBell. Today I write lots of UNIX shell programs, SQL and 4GL programs. Even though some of my math and CS trained friends are better at the grubby low-level stuff than me, I find that there is more than enough valuable coding that I can contribute. As Marla pointed out recently, much, if not all, of software work involves the very same problem solving skills taught in every department of college, science through history. I find that the designing and building of code is astonishingly like the designing and building of an essay or speech. Strip away a lot of arcane techobabble and one sees problems that a clear thinking, hard-working Liberal Arts major can indeed solve, and with pleasure. I don't mean to imply that there is no need for engineering rigour or CS. (I have to admit that English majors didn't build the first computers and software.) I just mean that there is more to software work than that. I hope there will always be room for Humanities devotees in digital land. And I hope more women (and men) of that orientation will join the ranks. Steve Price pacbell!pbhyf!rsp (415) 823-1951 "There is a deeper world than this, that you don't understand. There is a deeper world than this, Tugging at your hand."