What Drove You Towards a Career in Engineering?

WARNING:  I am loquatious.  That means I talk a lot.  I am not brief.  This reply is not brief.  You have been warned.  If words scare you, please skip.

That's an easy question for me.  The second I discovered that I, a 9 year old kid, could make a computer do things, I was hooked.  It was instant from the moment I wrote and ran the following program:

10 PRINT "I LOVE YOU MOM!"

20 GOTO 10

That is all it took.  I ran it, and the screen filled with a message for my mom over and over and I called her into the room and showed her what I did.  She didn't know anything about computers, neither did my dad.  I just had the 2 books on BASIC that came with the Vic-20.  I started carrying them with me everywhere I went and planned grand text adventure games (with combat!).  From that point on, I would buy Computer Shopper magazine regularly and just pour over the advertisements, imagining what kind of computer I would buy if I had the money.  I found a 1-800 number you could call and they would send you a free disk with shareware on it.  I called and got it.  Mind you, I did not have a computer which I could actually USE the disk in.  The Vic-20 only had a cassette tape drive.  I got the disk and carried it with me everywhere.  I used it as a bookmark and just loved to toy with it, flipping the little metal cover back and forth.

When I was a kid, my family was pretty poor.  I grew up in the northern panhandle of West Virginia.  My dad was a coal miner when I was little, but he got laid off when the mine he worked at closed.  He also worked at a metal stamping plant and some other places, but we never had much money.  When I was 11, though, my parents took out a second mortgage on their home and used the money to do home improvements and buy new appliances we needed (stove, refrigerator, stuff like that).  Part of that money went to buying our first "real" computer.  A 386 SX which ran at 33MHz.  It ran DOS (5.0 I'm pretty sure) and Windows 3.1.  It was the 'family computer', but I spent pretty much every waking hour on it.  I immediately started saving my money and saved the $90 necessary to purchase the retail version of Microsoft QuickBASIC 4.5.  Unlike the QBASIC which came with DOS, with QuickBASIC you got a real compiler with a linker and everything.

I got a modem and got involved in local dialup BBS'.  I started writing a collection of commandline utility programs for DOS.  When I ran into trouble, or when I just wanted to talk about things, I could post on the message forums where I could talk to other people, almost all of them adults but they had no idea I was a kid.  It was fantastic.  Being able to interact with others as an equal was totally thrilling.  Before going into 7th grade, we had to read Huckleberry Finn.  One of the local BBS' (I never called long distance ones because they cost money) had an early copy of the Project Gutenberg collection, and it included Huckleberry Finn.  I got it and tried to read it.  My trusty text file reading program, LIST.COM (I imagine somebody might remember it), barfed.  The file was too big and it wouldn't work.

So, I wrote my own text file reader!  I quickly ran into a problem, though.  It was too slow.  I asked for help on the BBS' and somebody said I should look into programming in assembly.  Looking back on it I'm not sure if that person was joking.  But that is exactly what I did.  Just like when I was 9, I did not know that other people saw this as something difficult, I just approached it as 'if you learn it, then you know it'.  I wrote my own text-drawing and screen-scrolling functions in assembly, linking them to the executable produced from QuickBASIC.  And it was fast enough to keep up!  That made me realize there were big benefits to understanding exactly how the computer was working when I was telling it what to do.

I got Internet access in 1990 when I was 12 and in 7th grade.  We weren't allowed to take the computers class until 9th grade, but there was a BBS run by the Board of Education and you had to get a teacher to send in a recommendation email to get better than hardly-anything access, so I went during lunch to talk to that teacher.  He got myself and a friend of mine, the only other kid I knew who had a computer (computers brought us together, and I was the best man at his wedding and am godfather to his kids now.. dogsitting his dog right now in fact!), the access but he also got us involved in this project he was doing with AT&T.  It connected students at different schools all over the country and let us send batches of questions back and forth.  We let him know that the local prison actually ran a BBS, and put the teacher in touch with the guy who ran that BBS.  Through him and the BBS, we were able to offer the other kids in the project the opportunity to ask questions to be submitted to the prisoners in the penitentiary.  The teacher ended up winning the AT&T Technology Teacher of the Year award for the project and it's actually archived on CD at the Smithsonian.  That teacher also got us Internet access through dialing up to a mainframe at a local college.  Entirely text based.  No web at all.  Gopher, email, usenet, and telnet primarily.  No search engines.  It was FANTASTIC.  The mainframe was a VAX running VMS, a Unix-like OS, so I had to learn that to get around.  My friend and I split the large task of downloading a very early release of Slackware Linux onto DOZENS of floppy disks.  It probably took us a month or more before we had the whole thing and copies for each of us.

From that initial rush at 9 years old I have never wavered.  I got my first job when I was 15 years old, being sysop for a dialup BBS a local businessman ran for realtors.  Then I did some web development for him.  His brothers owned a remailing company that used a lot of computers, so I got hired by them once I was 16 and able to drive, doing various computer things from writing utilities to help the secretaries report the mail sorting machine MICR numbers to the postal service to producing a newsletter for their customers, but mostly doing data format conversion and data cleanup on mailing lists that their customers would give to them.  I worked there part-time until I finished high school.  I even ended up being talked about in an article in the New York Times.  It was an article about kids who were getting jobs in technology really young.  That was pretty cool.

There was never any doubt that I would go to college and study computer science.  My grades weren't great in high school, because I rarely did homework.  I spent most of my time programming and learning how to do more advanced things.  I learned trigonometry a year earlier than it was taught in school because I wanted to do some 3D graphics stuff.  So when I went to a school whose computer science department had a competitive scholarship which tested a persons aptitude for programming-esque thinking skills, I aced the tests and won the scholarship easily.  It was a school nearby, so I commuted.  I also worked as a mainframe operator at a datacenter for a bank in the evenings the whole time I was in college.  My family wasn't as poor as they were when I was young, but we still weren't rich by any stretch.  I never would have been able to go to the college I went to, a decent private school, without the scholarship and working while attending.  I actually studied computer science and philosophy.  Unfortunately I was not able to complete my philosophy degree because the final required course was scheduled at the exact same time as my final required course for my CS degree.  That was very disappointing.  And yes, I got weird looks all the time for studying that combination of subjects.

Right after graduation, I got hired by a contracting company to work at the FBI's Criminal Justice Information Services office in Clarksburg, WV.  It's the place where they run IAFIS, the system that processes background checks and fingerprints.  I got hired on a software engineer and went to work on part of IAFIS, eventually ending up working on the billing system which produces bills for around $40 million worth of transactions a month (criminal background checks done by law enforcement are free, but commercial companies can do background checks for employers and stuff and they have to pay).  Was a very interesting job working on one of the biggest systems in the nation in terms of data volume.  It's also always interesting when some of your system requirements, including things like response times, are literally federal law!  I worked there for 15 years.

About a year and a half ago, I quit my job.  I did not have another job lined up, nor do I intend to ever pursue one.  I struck out on my own and do custom software engineering jobs on contract.  I work almost entirely from home over the Internet, and thanks to the low cost of living here in West Virginia I really don't even have to work very much to be able to make ends meet (I still do though, I was just surprised to find how little was necessary to just cover the necessities).  This is the future that was promised to me by the technology evangelists when I was an adolescent in the 1990s.  It is real, and it is only going to spread.  Computers and the Internet are what I do, and a large part of who I am.  Technology empowers us in ways that society has a hard time dealing with.  It's pretty insane that the introduction of computers to the workplace resulted in wages basically freezing (and they are still frozen), the death of fiscal mobility in the US, etc alongside skyrocketing productivity increases and profit multipliers for companies.  When the companies and the employees start to realize that the employees don't NEED the companies any more... things are going to get quite interesting.

WARNING:  I am loquatious.  That means I talk a lot.  I am not brief.  This reply is not brief.  You have been warned.  If words scare you, please skip.

That's an easy question for me.  The second I discovered that I, a 9 year old kid, could make a computer do things, I was hooked.  It was instant from the moment I wrote and ran the following program:

10 PRINT "I LOVE YOU MOM!"

20 GOTO 10

That is all it took.  I ran it, and the screen filled with a message for my mom over and over and I called her into the room and showed her what I did.  She didn't know anything about computers, neither did my dad.  I just had the 2 books on BASIC that came with the Vic-20.  I started carrying them with me everywhere I went and planned grand text adventure games (with combat!).  From that point on, I would buy Computer Shopper magazine regularly and just pour over the advertisements, imagining what kind of computer I would buy if I had the money.  I found a 1-800 number you could call and they would send you a free disk with shareware on it.  I called and got it.  Mind you, I did not have a computer which I could actually USE the disk in.  The Vic-20 only had a cassette tape drive.  I got the disk and carried it with me everywhere.  I used it as a bookmark and just loved to toy with it, flipping the little metal cover back and forth.

When I was a kid, my family was pretty poor.  I grew up in the northern panhandle of West Virginia.  My dad was a coal miner when I was little, but he got laid off when the mine he worked at closed.  He also worked at a metal stamping plant and some other places, but we never had much money.  When I was 11, though, my parents took out a second mortgage on their home and used the money to do home improvements and buy new appliances we needed (stove, refrigerator, stuff like that).  Part of that money went to buying our first "real" computer.  A 386 SX which ran at 33MHz.  It ran DOS (5.0 I'm pretty sure) and Windows 3.1.  It was the 'family computer', but I spent pretty much every waking hour on it.  I immediately started saving my money and saved the $90 necessary to purchase the retail version of Microsoft QuickBASIC 4.5.  Unlike the QBASIC which came with DOS, with QuickBASIC you got a real compiler with a linker and everything.

I got a modem and got involved in local dialup BBS'.  I started writing a collection of commandline utility programs for DOS.  When I ran into trouble, or when I just wanted to talk about things, I could post on the message forums where I could talk to other people, almost all of them adults but they had no idea I was a kid.  It was fantastic.  Being able to interact with others as an equal was totally thrilling.  Before going into 7th grade, we had to read Huckleberry Finn.  One of the local BBS' (I never called long distance ones because they cost money) had an early copy of the Project Gutenberg collection, and it included Huckleberry Finn.  I got it and tried to read it.  My trusty text file reading program, LIST.COM (I imagine somebody might remember it), barfed.  The file was too big and it wouldn't work.

So, I wrote my own text file reader!  I quickly ran into a problem, though.  It was too slow.  I asked for help on the BBS' and somebody said I should look into programming in assembly.  Looking back on it I'm not sure if that person was joking.  But that is exactly what I did.  Just like when I was 9, I did not know that other people saw this as something difficult, I just approached it as 'if you learn it, then you know it'.  I wrote my own text-drawing and screen-scrolling functions in assembly, linking them to the executable produced from QuickBASIC.  And it was fast enough to keep up!  That made me realize there were big benefits to understanding exactly how the computer was working when I was telling it what to do.

I got Internet access in 1990 when I was 12 and in 7th grade.  We weren't allowed to take the computers class until 9th grade, but there was a BBS run by the Board of Education and you had to get a teacher to send in a recommendation email to get better than hardly-anything access, so I went during lunch to talk to that teacher.  He got myself and a friend of mine, the only other kid I knew who had a computer (computers brought us together, and I was the best man at his wedding and am godfather to his kids now.. dogsitting his dog right now in fact!), the access but he also got us involved in this project he was doing with AT&T.  It connected students at different schools all over the country and let us send batches of questions back and forth.  We let him know that the local prison actually ran a BBS, and put the teacher in touch with the guy who ran that BBS.  Through him and the BBS, we were able to offer the other kids in the project the opportunity to ask questions to be submitted to the prisoners in the penitentiary.  The teacher ended up winning the AT&T Technology Teacher of the Year award for the project and it's actually archived on CD at the Smithsonian.  That teacher also got us Internet access through dialing up to a mainframe at a local college.  Entirely text based.  No web at all.  Gopher, email, usenet, and telnet primarily.  No search engines.  It was FANTASTIC.  The mainframe was a VAX running VMS, a Unix-like OS, so I had to learn that to get around.  My friend and I split the large task of downloading a very early release of Slackware Linux onto DOZENS of floppy disks.  It probably took us a month or more before we had the whole thing and copies for each of us.

From that initial rush at 9 years old I have never wavered.  I got my first job when I was 15 years old, being sysop for a dialup BBS a local businessman ran for realtors.  Then I did some web development for him.  His brothers owned a remailing company that used a lot of computers, so I got hired by them once I was 16 and able to drive, doing various computer things from writing utilities to help the secretaries report the mail sorting machine MICR numbers to the postal service to producing a newsletter for their customers, but mostly doing data format conversion and data cleanup on mailing lists that their customers would give to them.  I worked there part-time until I finished high school.  I even ended up being talked about in an article in the New York Times.  It was an article about kids who were getting jobs in technology really young.  That was pretty cool.

There was never any doubt that I would go to college and study computer science.  My grades weren't great in high school, because I rarely did homework.  I spent most of my time programming and learning how to do more advanced things.  I learned trigonometry a year earlier than it was taught in school because I wanted to do some 3D graphics stuff.  So when I went to a school whose computer science department had a competitive scholarship which tested a persons aptitude for programming-esque thinking skills, I aced the tests and won the scholarship easily.  It was a school nearby, so I commuted.  I also worked as a mainframe operator at a datacenter for a bank in the evenings the whole time I was in college.  My family wasn't as poor as they were when I was young, but we still weren't rich by any stretch.  I never would have been able to go to the college I went to, a decent private school, without the scholarship and working while attending.  I actually studied computer science and philosophy.  Unfortunately I was not able to complete my philosophy degree because the final required course was scheduled at the exact same time as my final required course for my CS degree.  That was very disappointing.  And yes, I got weird looks all the time for studying that combination of subjects.

Right after graduation, I got hired by a contracting company to work at the FBI's Criminal Justice Information Services office in Clarksburg, WV.  It's the place where they run IAFIS, the system that processes background checks and fingerprints.  I got hired on a software engineer and went to work on part of IAFIS, eventually ending up working on the billing system which produces bills for around $40 million worth of transactions a month (criminal background checks done by law enforcement are free, but commercial companies can do background checks for employers and stuff and they have to pay).  Was a very interesting job working on one of the biggest systems in the nation in terms of data volume.  It's also always interesting when some of your system requirements, including things like response times, are literally federal law!  I worked there for 15 years.

About a year and a half ago, I quit my job.  I did not have another job lined up, nor do I intend to ever pursue one.  I struck out on my own and do custom software engineering jobs on contract.  I work almost entirely from home over the Internet, and thanks to the low cost of living here in West Virginia I really don't even have to work very much to be able to make ends meet (I still do though, I was just surprised to find how little was necessary to just cover the necessities).  This is the future that was promised to me by the technology evangelists when I was an adolescent in the 1990s.  It is real, and it is only going to spread.  Computers and the Internet are what I do, and a large part of who I am.  Technology empowers us in ways that society has a hard time dealing with.  It's pretty insane that the introduction of computers to the workplace resulted in wages basically freezing (and they are still frozen), the death of fiscal mobility in the US, etc alongside skyrocketing productivity increases and profit multipliers for companies.  When the companies and the employees start to realize that the employees don't NEED the companies any more... things are going to get quite interesting.