Why I Didn't Become a Programmer Until Now

Prepare yourself for a tragic tale of wasted potential...

As a child, I loved computers. We were a ZX Spectrum family, and my parents both took the time to learn BASIC and write programs for it. They even had listings published in magazines (and my mother these days is referenced on World of Spectrum, thanks to one of her programs being in an issue of 16/48's tape-based magazine). So the groundwork, the opportunity, was there. I dabbled in learning BASIC myself, thanks to an Usborne book or two, though at that age I was mostly content to just type in listings or play commercial games. By the time I was old enough to really consider coding, the Spectrum was already obsolete (sob).

That's not to say I didn't still dabble. I recall, in my first year of secondary school, writing some code on an ancient BBC Micro for a technology project. Something about helping new students to find their way around, if I remember correctly. Coding was an option, so while other people were cutting up wood to make signs I was joining forces with another kid to write a program that would give you directions based on the room number you entered. Fairly simple stuff, though it would have been truly unwieldy if we'd ever tried to write it to handle more than about four rooms.

And then we got to GCSE, and the ill-fated Information Systems course. We were told in advance that this was a hard course; that we needn't think it would just be two years of 'messing about on computers'. It wasn't a course for lazy students looking to muck around. That's what they told us and so, being a diligent, bright student who liked computers, of course I signed up for it.

What I got, sadly, was two years of messing about on computers. The school didn't have any dedicated IT teachers, so the course was taught by Maths and Chemistry teachers in their spare time. That didn't help, but I'm not sure having a proper IT teacher would have made much difference. There wasn't a single piece of coding in the course. We learned instead about how to use ClipArt and snazzy fonts to jazz up a poster for a school fête. We learned about how a computer system could help a supermarket with sales and stock control, but might not be so helpful for a small corner shop because of the costs involved. We possibly learned about the SUM formula in Excel, but no macros or pivot tables or even any of the more interesting formulae.

Looking back, I can see that this wasn't the sort of course I was expecting or even a very useful one to have been taught. At the age of fifteen, though, I lacked that sort of awareness. All I really knew back then was that I'd signed up for a computer course and spent two years utterly bored stiff. I blamed computers for that boredom, rather than the course, and turned my attention to other things at A-Level and at university. Computing was not for me, I decided.

By the time I realised my mistake, while hanging out with CompSci students at university, it was too late. I was already deep into a Philosophy degree, with a minor in Creative Writing, and there was simply no way of altering things. I took a unit in Formal Logic as part of Philosophy, the one unit I received a First for, but that was as close as I got. The door was closed and there was no reopening it.

It didn't entirely stop me trying. I applied for a couple of 'trainee programmer' roles after university, but without success. I dabbled in the odd bit of programming at home, but the trouble with trying to learn code by yourself is that you need an idea of what you want to achieve. I picked up HTML because I could use it to make silly websites with Lego minifigs doing ridiculous things, but I never had the same options available in other languages. There are only so many business reporting exercises you can do out of a textbook before getting bored and going to do something else, if you don't have a teacher standing over you waiting for your results.

And then this opportunity at the COBOL factory came up. And somehow this time I was successful in my application (twelve years of real work experience and a better interview technique may have had something to do with that). So now I've finally been taught to code, in the way I never was before, and I love it. It comes easily to me, somehow, and as happy as that makes me it also makes me sad for what might have been. What might have happened if I'd been given a proper course at GCSE, or if I'd recognised the weaknesses in the course I did do and looked at doing something coding-related at A-Level or with my degree? Have those twelve years of working, frequently in retail jobs for various reasons, been a complete waste of my potential?

Somewhere, there's a parallel universe where I went a different way. And maybe in that universe I minored in CompSci at university and got put off by the mouthbreathing geeks who didn't know how to react to an actual female person in their midst (unlikely, given that I dated a few in my time as it was). Maybe I still failed to get a job in programming and ended up on the same career path anyway. Maybe by now I'd be earning a comparative fortune writing ground-breaking software (something that will never happen while I'm working in COBOL, I know). Sadly, it's the nature of the world that I'll never know what might have happened. But I can be happy to be here at last, and I can certainly learn from my mistakes. I'll be watching Small Girl's interests and potential closely, whatever they may be, to make sure she doesn't get put off from something for the wrong reasons.

And in the mean time, I've got code to write.