Hung my diploma today...

I mentioned a few posts ago that I moved and as you know, if you've ever moved, it takes forever to get the little things unpacked and put in their correct place. I just hung my diploma on my office wall and I had a semi-proud moment. "Bachelor of Science in Computer Science and Minor in Mathematics" it reads. I'm pretty good at the computer dealio, but the math... can't say I remember calculus. I can't even balance my checkbook anymore :-/. OTOH, why would I need to? That's what online banking is for.

It's funny how I ended up in the business side of software. I remember (vaugely) all those baloney C++ assignments about calculating how many slices in a 14" pizza or writing a craps game my sophomore year. It didn't get interesting until my junior year when I transfered to a real university and started programming with cool graphics packages on sparc station 10's... which were totally expensive back then. Of course I had all the math down and when I graduated I applied at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory for some geek-y C++ programming job.

Of course I didn't get the job because there were like 1000 applicants. So I took the summer off... practically. One August morning as I was heading out to the jacuzzi my mother found a job in the classifieds that read "Computer programmer. BS in CS required. No experience necessary." So I called, faxed my resume in (litteraly a half of a page) and got a call back for an interview. The company was a small healthcare software company nearby. I nailed the interview and was practiacally hired on the spot.

The first month was basically me learning Clipper (summer 87 -- the cool version). I was too afraid to tell them that I wasn't a CIS graduate and I had no idea what an IDX was so I took the Nantucket book home and learned all about relational database programming. I couldn't believe I spent all that time in college and none of it prepared me for writing business software products. However, within four months I had rewritten their internal office management system and they promoted me from junior programmer and gave me a $10K raise (which let me tell you was a shitload because I was still living at home and driving an 81 LeBaron). I realized that college taught me how to think about programming. Even though they didn't specifically teach me about databases, I gained the skill to be able to make sense out of any computer gobbely-gook. (Granted, later going from Clipper to FoxPro 2.0 was maybe like 5 syntactical differences, but still). But of course I still can't figure out what Math ever gave me.....