Originally posted by Tim Stirling:
… However it is a gardening job and I don’t have a clue about gardening but I think it is mainly cutting the grass and some general manual work which shouldn’t be too bad.
Hey, dont knock it, my first ever job was a gardening job. Was a bit on the lame side, but it sorted out enough coins to get a few sly beers in at the weekend… (ps, if you’ve got a center parting, make sure your careful when combing your hair after being in the sun all day - I still remember the pain…)
Out of curiosity and sorry for being personal but how old is the oldest person here and how young is the youngest.
I’m 21, and got into programming at an early age on a spectrum 48k. My uncle gave my family one because he’d been involved in tooling up the factory for production.
I then went on to amiga, and found the technical stuff more intersting, I seem to recall shunning the idea of a console, mainly because you could only play games and not doing anything else on it. (ahh, the playground arguments of why a speccy was better than a master sytem…).
I kinda ignored computers for ages (they moved too fast, my paper-round wouldn’t pay for the latest stuff).
I did A-Levels in art, physics & maths, and was pondering what to do after school. I found a little entry in our UCAS book (for those outside UK, a list of all degree courses) that listed a degree in computer animation. I decided to do that, applied, was accepted, started it, and I’m now about to finish.
We do C, C++, Java, & openGL as part of it, as well as animation, film techniques etc. We had to do a group project in the second year, for which a bunch of us decided to do a computer game (www.boonaracer.co.uk - it is rubbish by the way, but you gotta start somewhere… ). For that I was doing modelling, and was very unhappy with editors and methods we had to use to get stuff into the game. From then on I’ve been doing programming, and getting other people on the course to do the animation & modelling etc for me.
Getting to the point where I am now, I was very worried about the standard of programming needed to get a job, so I went to see the software engineering degree people.
It became very apparent that I actually knew more than is required to pass one of those degree’s.
I’m now applying to some games companies for work when I finish, and I’m somewhat more confident of my abilities. I will say though, that it is probably a good idea to work with some artists to put together something that is artistically cool, as well as technically coll, you get a lot more out of it.
Basically the moral is, if you want a job in programming, it doesn’t really matter when you start, if you are into it, you’ll get a job becuase you’ll spend 12 hours a night doing what you enjoy. Some bloke on a programming degree, will feel as motivated to do some programming, as you did(would) in a french lesson…(nothing against the french, just my french teacher and my lack of ability in the subject)
[This message has been edited by Rob The Bloke (edited 04-17-2001).]