I made the huge mistake of deciding that C was all I'd ever need back in the early 90's. I quickly found out that there were new technologies (HTML, Unix/Linux, awk, Perl) that I needed to learn, and pretty damned fast if I wanted to land another job.

That's a mistake I'll never make again. (I think that was also around the time that I put off procrastinating about getting a home computer, and got a Windows 95 box that I could dual boot to OS/2.)

When I was hired by my current employer two years ago, the lead interviewer was one of the senior developers. He was born two days before I got accepted into University.

Fortunately, the age difference didn't matter to either of us. They were doing some cool stuff and needed great developers; I was really interested in working with a bunch of motivated, bright folks. A good fit.

Well, of course, I do more than write Perl. Been doing that for over ten years.

I also deal with web stuff, like explaining to a co-worker that it is actually possible to do an HTTP re-direction while including a cookie in the request.

And I deal with the usual database CRUD code. I'm using DB2 now, before that I spent five years each on PostgreSQL and then MySQL.

And I know enough about SysAdmin stuff to set up an NFS server and configure Apache.

And before forex, I worked in finance, pharmacy management, robotics and data communications. And before Perl I wrote C and assembler for 15 years.

I'm still *way* too fascinated in solving technical problems and writing great code to think about doing something else.

Dudes, get it right. This is an edit #fail.

It's the University of Waterloo, not Waterloo University, just like it's University of Notre Dame, not the other way around. The top Google search comes up with the correct name. Although, given the topic, feel free to mod this #ironic.

Alex
Yep, a UW grad.

And I get 'http://www.alexa.com/hoturls?q=exercise bike clearance' which links to 'http://www.goodroi.com/why-google-allows-target-com-to-spam-results/', a post dated December 10, 2009 (thirteen days ago).

No biggie.

And the boss of the bosses is called the Head of Engineering (Operations and Development), but perhaps the company I work for is unusual.

We do have an IT team: it consists of about five people who take care of managing the hardware, the development containers, the networking, speccing hardware, and doing capacity planning. Operations is about a dozen people who take care of managing the application software that we use to provide forex trading. Then there are several dozen developers just doing development for the web site and the trading platform.

I find the term IT a little out-dated, personally. It makes me think of white shirts and ties, salesman from IBM and the hallowed machine room with the God-like mainframe.

My experience with OpenSolaris has been great. I set up an OpenSolaris NFS server with a RAID 1 array using two 300G drives under ZFS, and it's been rock solid.

A few months ago (I'm not that great of a SysAdmin) I decided I'd better check the health of the server, and discovered that my Secondary IDE channel was gonzo, and that OpenSolaris was reporting that my RAID 1 array was 'degraded', and running on only one drive. (Each drive is on a different IDE channel for redundancy -- guess that was the right decision.)

I now have a new chassis that I'll be putting that system's three drives into .. Real Soon Now.

I'd have a chance to do some of the projects I've put aside over my career.

[] AI research
[] Robotics (I did that at my third job and loved it)
[] Writing my very own full screen editor (reinventing a wheel, but it intrigues me)
[] Music notation software
[] A few device drivers (because writing assembler is hard, but great fun when it works)

What a blast that would be.

Well. All this talk of speed. Are we talking speed of execution, or speed of development? I would be willing to bet the speed of development under COBOL would be relatively poor, compared to just about any other scripting language you can think of. *Any* language, in fact.

Can you imagine doing *anything* with an associative array in COBOL? Even (shudder) OO-COBOL?

In 2000 or so I managed to install SuSE 6.2 on my spare P400 box, and somehow made a connection through my ADSL modem thanks to Roaring Penguin's scripts. I was absolutely thrilled, and ftp'd into my web provider, tried Alt-F2 to start other sessions, the works. I shut it down, and the Internet connection never worked after that.

I then battled with X-Windows, fiddling with the contents of the configuration script, all the while very wary of blowing up my one CRT with the wrong Sync values. The system wasn't usable, and I had no idea what I was doing, so I shelved it, and remained a Windows 98 guy running VanDyke Systems excellent ssh and ftp clients into my employer's machines.

Really, I knew so little when I set that original SuSE box up, I'm amazed that I got it working at all. I do plan to install SuSE 6.2 again, just to see if it's as clunky as I thought it was. Should be amusing.

I purchased Wendin's XTC editor when I first started doing PC development on an IBM PC AT -- 640K RAM, 40M hard drive. It was slow, and didn't let me shell out to run make. Support was only available on The Well, a BBS in San Francisco.

Eventually I gave up on that product and tried Boxer, from Underware, which was lightning fast and *did* allow me to shell out to run make. It even parsed the error log and opened the appropriate source file, putting the cursor on the offending line, which was nothing short of magic.

From TFA: "Note, most projects used more than one language and these results are based on the number of projects using a given language, not the number of lines of code created."

There, I fixed that for you. :)

A good friend of mine worked construction back when we were in our 20's. He talked about the task of setting up scaffolding:

Can you imagine the disaster that would follow if the same plan was followed in IT? SysAdmins wouldn't be able to write any scripts -- they'd have to wait for the Developers; web guys wouldn't be able to do any database work; and project leaders wouldn't be able to touch any running system.

At my current employer, we moved an office of close to 150 people over a weekend, and some of us volunteered to come in over the weekend to hook up the office networks -- connecting about six dozen switches (one for data, one for VoIP for each five person pod) and connect CPUs and flat screens at the various pods. About 95% of the systems were wired up and ready to be powered on the following Monday. I can't imagine what a union would have cost us in time and money for that project.

Finally, I sing in a men's chorus. A few years back we did our annual show (a matinee and evening show) at a union hall. We had to pay a fully licensed electrician $1000 for the day. His only job? To plug in a guitar amplifier for one of the performers when it was on stage. Insanity.