35 years. Tech support, programmer, systems administrator, occasional supervisor. DBA, sysadm, programmer. How has it not changed? The first customer site I

35 years. Tech support, programmer, systems administrator, occasional supervisor. DBA, sysadm, programmer. How has it not changed? The first customer site I went to on my own had a minicomputer with a storage component consisting of a 25-MB drive and an 8" floppy that held 1.x MB. Shortly before I was planning to head to the airport, there was a "spang" and the system panicked. The belt drive of the 25 MB drive had fallen off the spindle. That unit was the size of crib (without legs), and who knows what it cost? My first semi-real programming was in MV/Eclipse assembler. I don't know how I'd change tech today. The negatives seem to me those that have been around a long time. Fifty-five years ago, I heard my father grumbling about a professional association that had given Union Carbide an award, when everyone knew how miserably it treated its technical staff. Union Carbide then, IBM, etc. now. Positives? You can start developing on amazingly cheap hardware with freely downloadable software, you can deploy applications to amazing cheap VMs. The resources are amazing. Advice? Go back to your old code (last week's, last month's), see what you did right, what you did wrong, and what you wished you had documented. Learn different sorts of languages. Use version control. My two cents, anyway.