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.
