7 ms·

My first software dev job was in the 90's writing PHP for a mom and pop ISP that was trying to get into app development. It was originally supposed to be Perl,

My first software dev job was in the 90's writing PHP for a mom and pop ISP that was trying to get into app development. It was originally supposed to be Perl, the job interview was something like: Me: demos CRUD app for keeping track of my record collection, hosted on a free site Owner: You wrote this? Me: Yeah. Owner: This is in Perl? Me: Yeah. So I got hired. The day I got there, he told me they were going to use PHP instead of Perl. Sure, cool, whatever. He told me that I had to start being productive in the first couple weeks or he would have to let me go, couldn't afford to keep people that weren't working out. I was down with that. He had some HTML pages that he had created in a WYSIWYG editor, I think it was Dreamweaver, and I was going to add some PHP scripting to those pages. How hard could that be? So I get to work and open these HTML files and I don't even remember exactly, I think like the login page HTML was 20 pages of code long, maybe I'm exaggerating, I've blocked most of it out of my memory but I seem to remember nested tables inside of nested tables inside of nested tables with spacer GIFs and  s all over the place and I remember looking at it and thinking: What. The. Actual. Fuck. But I did it! I managed to get the guy to take a look at what the editor he was using actually created and get him to simplify some things, I fixed a few bugs and was working on features and he came in around noon and told me you know what I said about being productive in the first few weeks? Forget about that, we're good. The week before I was doing manual labor in a factory. It was like going from the 1800s to the 2000s over a weekend. I made $9 an hour, less than I was making stacking boxes on pallets, but of course totally worth it in the long run. Good times.

chrisweekly 5y ago
At my first webdev job (1998) I built websites for seafood companies. Microsoft FrontPage was the tool my boss handed me. I was appalled at the HTML it was producing, and succeeded in convincing him to let me use Dreamweaver instead; for a 20th century WYSIWYG editor, it was pretty good.
ilrwbwrkhv 5y ago
I wish interviews were like this. Show them something you built and you get hired instead of the nonsense of leetcode.
- irrational 5y ago
  I got hired on at a Fortune 500 company in the early 2000s. One of the reasons I've stuck around (besides the great pay and benefits) is that I've read all the horror stories of leetcode interviews. I have zero interest in participating in that nonsense. One benefit of this is, when I am interviewing people to fill development position, I never do any of that leetcode nonsense.
  - oblio 5y ago
    You should still check out to see if your pay is competitive for your role, level, etc. Even an awesome environment might be worth moving away from if your pay goes up 50-100%. Especially if you're not super frugal or have expenses due to other reasons.
    - irrational 5y ago
      The problem is I don’t want to move (great house, low mortgage, great area, etc.). There really aren’t any other major companies within 300 miles and all the smaller companies in the area don’t pay anywhere close to what my company pays.
    - Aeolun 5y ago
      But is it worth doing leetcode? I find I can’t bring myself to do it even if it would guarantee me a FAANG position and probably triple my salary overnight.
      - mr_toad 5y ago
        Overengineering starts with the interview.
      - oblio 5y ago
        It's probably not worth it on its own. But if that tripled salary enables you to do things you love you can't do now and it enables them both today and long term... then it might be worth it :-)
  - 5y ago
lelanthran 5y ago
I hear you - the 90s were insane. In the space of six months I went from a factory worker (12 hour shifts, all night-shift, 7 days a week) to a computer lab assistant to a entry-level software developer. First day on dev job, the owner displays a hodgepodge of Perl code that was originally an open-source thing called MRTG (before network admins heavily modified it), tasked me with porting it from Solaris to Windows NT and using MSVC 5.0 to build the CGI binaries. Good times were had by all due to the boom money floating around everywhere[1]. [1] Well, until the bust came in late 90s :-)
- karlshea 5y ago
  Oh my god you made me remember getting MRTG set up at my job in high school so we could get per-port graphs from a managed switch.
agumonkey 5y ago
the most difficult people are the less knowledgeable it seems
trilinearnz 5y ago
Great story. So often these end in the person throwing up their hands and walking away, but I'm glad you were both able to work it out :)
- rufus_foreman 5y ago
  Well what was I going to do, go back to the factory? I was all-in.
thelittleone 5y ago
Great story. Sure sounds like Dreamweaver. My go to back then was Hotdog Pro from Sausagesoft.
- CRConrad 5y ago
  > Hotdog Pro from Sausagesoft IIRC, one of the early marketing "Built in Delphi!" examples.
- mark-r 5y ago
  I did the customized splash screen for the version of Paint Shop Pro that was bundled with Hotdog Pro.
  - thelittleone 5y ago
    Holy crap, paint shop pro. Memories. I supposed that was about version 4 or 5?
    - mark-r 5y ago
      It was PSP 4. Everybody else was heads down working on PSP 5, and I was the new guy, so I got the grunt work.
matwood 5y ago
Great story. I feel like many of us from the 90s have similar stories. I was a CS undergrad, and was introduced to someone who needed a software person. Got hired at $8/hour part time to write VB, Access, and MSSQL software - none of which I had ever touched. Same deal, either I figure it out or he would let me go. Couple weeks later my boss came in, loosely described an application, and then asked if I could have something demoable in 2 hours. He had a client meeting and need to show something to get partial payment. Got it done and almost immediately got a raise to $12/hour. Obviously the place had a lot of issues and was out of business in the next couple years, but it gave me the mentality early on of execute and ship. Good times indeed. And yeah...I was waiting tables in a fine dining restaurant a month before...
kstrauser 5y ago
Back in the day, HTML usually came with its own built-in version control. You could view source and see exactly what thought process the web designer (read: the person who figured out HomeSite first) had gone through, like: Hi there because the editors didn’t actually understand HTML beyond what was required to wrap a tag around a block of text.
- GekkePrutser 5y ago
 I bet this is what a word doc looks like under the hood. Especially if you see what kind of crap code something like frontpage produced. Lots of boilerplate muck and stuff cancelling each other out. We used to call it Strontpage at a place I worked. Stront means shit in Dutch. Dreamweaver was so much better and it embraced CSS instead of trying to avoid it. Though I liked coding in just an editor, for me as a non-graphics person it was nice to have WYSIWYG. Of course soon after that actual graphics people started doing that work but in the beginning it was all techies.
 - TheJoeMan 5y ago
 Funnily enough you can see what a word doc looks like because the x in .docx is “XML” so save the word doc as .html and bask in the flaming dumpster fire of the font definitions at the top inline CSS.
 - fault1 5y ago
 Yes, versus the old school .doc format, pre-xml, which was a proprietary format, but was reverse engineered by most of Microsoft's rivals. at least wordperfect had pretty good support. I think Microsoft introduced .docx in what? Office.NET.
 - jazzyjackson 5y ago
 I was in a class where week one was “create a blog to keep track of the rest of the projects this semester” and for many of us, no big deal, static site generator, pick a theme for a wordpress, whatever. One of my classmates tho had never touched HTML and was super stressed about the assignment until they stumbled upon the fact the Word can export HTML - and its easy enough to highlight text and add hyperlinks to other html website so, bingo, whole semester’s work published in Word. Yes the auto-generated markup is horrendous but it gets the job done, full marks.
MisterBastahrd 5y ago
The best was when they wanted you to throw a curved border around something in an age before floats or border radii. You could do it multiple different ways, but usually it just involved slicing up an image and throwing the image elements into a table which wrapped your content.
brightball 5y ago
I remember being so excited when I figured out how to hide the borders of frames and do a layout with nested tables. Probably the one trick I learned back then that I still use today is naming the target in links. I remember noticing Yahoo doing it on their Fantasy Football setup so that if you clicked on the news beside a bunch of different players and clicked the same one more than once, it would only load the player into its specific window. Since I’ve always been a person that opens tons of links as I’m going through a page and then reads each of them after, it was nice to not have duplicate windows (tabs) everywhere. Still works and to this day I never use target=“_blank”.
- herbst 5y ago
  This is amazing, I never heard of that but will make sure to do this in future. Small gimmick, big use :)
ehnto 5y ago
Love your story, it reminds me of my first long term software gig, where I was actually stacking boxes and writing software. I was managing an eCommerce site for a local gym! Best of both worlds? I think everyone should get some grassroots software work under their belt, it's a really different experience working as a team member in an unrelated industry and providing a unique value to an otherwise non-software company. I don't want to soapbox too much, but it is part of my hope for the eventually reduction of software salaries, so that software can become a more integrated and boutique part of life. There are so many problems that would be better solved with small scale software instead of impersonal SaaS.
- JohnBooty 5y ago
  Yeah. I'm enjoying the current inflated salaries but this is not sustainable, and it really shuts smaller, non-software companies out of having inhouse fulltime developers. it's a really different experience working as a team member in an unrelated industry and providing a unique value to an otherwise non-software company. This can be the best thing ever, or the worst thing ever. It all depends on whether or not management is willing to learn about how the software development process works and adapt to it. I remember the days from 2000-2015, I worked at a few places like this. Doing "revolutionary" things like actually introducing source control, offsite backups, etc. to places that had never heard of such things. At some places this was challenging, but rewarding. At other places ownership was constantly aghast when they had to shell out for some random software licenses or SaaS subscriptions. I view it as a part of my job to explain and justify expenditures, but going to war with management over every rando $100 "what the FUCK is 'git hub???'" purchase gets old fast. Overall though, I am now a little nostalgic...
  - withinboredom 5y ago
    Heh, I remember an owner coming into my office (doing warehouse picking software at a warehouse company) asking wtf was this $300 charge. I told him “yeah, that’s a license to use this software for a year.” He went “oh, for the year. That’s only $25 a month? Carry on!” the nostalgia is real.
  - 5y ago

chrisweekly 5y ago

At my first webdev job (1998) I built websites for seafood companies. Microsoft FrontPage was the tool my boss handed me. I was appalled at the HTML it was producing, and succeeded in convincing him to let me use Dreamweaver instead; for a 20th century WYSIWYG editor, it was pretty good.

ilrwbwrkhv 5y ago

I wish interviews were like this. Show them something you built and you get hired instead of the nonsense of leetcode.

irrational 5y ago
I got hired on at a Fortune 500 company in the early 2000s. One of the reasons I've stuck around (besides the great pay and benefits) is that I've read all the horror stories of leetcode interviews. I have zero interest in participating in that nonsense. One benefit of this is, when I am interviewing people to fill development position, I never do any of that leetcode nonsense.
- oblio 5y ago
  You should still check out to see if your pay is competitive for your role, level, etc. Even an awesome environment might be worth moving away from if your pay goes up 50-100%. Especially if you're not super frugal or have expenses due to other reasons.
  - irrational 5y ago
    The problem is I don’t want to move (great house, low mortgage, great area, etc.). There really aren’t any other major companies within 300 miles and all the smaller companies in the area don’t pay anywhere close to what my company pays.
  - Aeolun 5y ago
    But is it worth doing leetcode? I find I can’t bring myself to do it even if it would guarantee me a FAANG position and probably triple my salary overnight.
    - mr_toad 5y ago
      Overengineering starts with the interview.
    - oblio 5y ago
      It's probably not worth it on its own. But if that tripled salary enables you to do things you love you can't do now and it enables them both today and long term... then it might be worth it :-)
- 5y ago

lelanthran 5y ago

I hear you - the 90s were insane. In the space of six months I went from a factory worker (12 hour shifts, all night-shift, 7 days a week) to a computer lab assistant to a entry-level software developer. First day on dev job, the owner displays a hodgepodge of Perl code that was originally an open-source thing called MRTG (before network admins heavily modified it), tasked me with porting it from Solaris to Windows NT and using MSVC 5.0 to build the CGI binaries. Good times were had by all due to the boom money floating around everywhere[1]. [1] Well, until the bust came in late 90s :-)

karlshea 5y ago
Oh my god you made me remember getting MRTG set up at my job in high school so we could get per-port graphs from a managed switch.

agumonkey 5y ago

the most difficult people are the less knowledgeable it seems

trilinearnz 5y ago

Great story. So often these end in the person throwing up their hands and walking away, but I'm glad you were both able to work it out :)

rufus_foreman 5y ago
Well what was I going to do, go back to the factory? I was all-in.

thelittleone 5y ago

Great story. Sure sounds like Dreamweaver. My go to back then was Hotdog Pro from Sausagesoft.

CRConrad 5y ago
> Hotdog Pro from Sausagesoft IIRC, one of the early marketing "Built in Delphi!" examples.
mark-r 5y ago
I did the customized splash screen for the version of Paint Shop Pro that was bundled with Hotdog Pro.
- thelittleone 5y ago
  Holy crap, paint shop pro. Memories. I supposed that was about version 4 or 5?
  - mark-r 5y ago
    It was PSP 4. Everybody else was heads down working on PSP 5, and I was the new guy, so I got the grunt work.

matwood 5y ago

Great story. I feel like many of us from the 90s have similar stories. I was a CS undergrad, and was introduced to someone who needed a software person. Got hired at $8/hour part time to write VB, Access, and MSSQL software - none of which I had ever touched. Same deal, either I figure it out or he would let me go. Couple weeks later my boss came in, loosely described an application, and then asked if I could have something demoable in 2 hours. He had a client meeting and need to show something to get partial payment. Got it done and almost immediately got a raise to $12/hour. Obviously the place had a lot of issues and was out of business in the next couple years, but it gave me the mentality early on of execute and ship. Good times indeed. And yeah...I was waiting tables in a fine dining restaurant a month before...

kstrauser 5y ago

Back in the day, HTML usually came with its own built-in version control. You could view source and see exactly what thought process the web designer (read: the person who figured out HomeSite first) had gone through, like: Hi there because the editors didn’t actually understand HTML beyond what was required to wrap a tag around a block of text.

GekkePrutser 5y ago
I bet this is what a word doc looks like under the hood. Especially if you see what kind of crap code something like frontpage produced. Lots of boilerplate muck and stuff cancelling each other out. We used to call it Strontpage at a place I worked. Stront means shit in Dutch. Dreamweaver was so much better and it embraced CSS instead of trying to avoid it. Though I liked coding in just an editor, for me as a non-graphics person it was nice to have WYSIWYG. Of course soon after that actual graphics people started doing that work but in the beginning it was all techies.
- TheJoeMan 5y ago
  Funnily enough you can see what a word doc looks like because the x in .docx is “XML” so save the word doc as .html and bask in the flaming dumpster fire of the font definitions at the top inline CSS.
  - fault1 5y ago
    Yes, versus the old school .doc format, pre-xml, which was a proprietary format, but was reverse engineered by most of Microsoft's rivals. at least wordperfect had pretty good support. I think Microsoft introduced .docx in what? Office.NET.
  - jazzyjackson 5y ago
    I was in a class where week one was “create a blog to keep track of the rest of the projects this semester” and for many of us, no big deal, static site generator, pick a theme for a wordpress, whatever. One of my classmates tho had never touched HTML and was super stressed about the assignment until they stumbled upon the fact the Word can export HTML - and its easy enough to highlight text and add hyperlinks to other html website so, bingo, whole semester’s work published in Word. Yes the auto-generated markup is horrendous but it gets the job done, full marks.

MisterBastahrd 5y ago

The best was when they wanted you to throw a curved border around something in an age before floats or border radii. You could do it multiple different ways, but usually it just involved slicing up an image and throwing the image elements into a table which wrapped your content.

brightball 5y ago

I remember being so excited when I figured out how to hide the borders of frames and do a layout with nested tables. Probably the one trick I learned back then that I still use today is naming the target in links. I remember noticing Yahoo doing it on their Fantasy Football setup so that if you clicked on the news beside a bunch of different players and clicked the same one more than once, it would only load the player into its specific window. Since I’ve always been a person that opens tons of links as I’m going through a page and then reads each of them after, it was nice to not have duplicate windows (tabs) everywhere. Still works and to this day I never use target=“_blank”.

herbst 5y ago
This is amazing, I never heard of that but will make sure to do this in future. Small gimmick, big use :)

ehnto 5y ago

Love your story, it reminds me of my first long term software gig, where I was actually stacking boxes and writing software. I was managing an eCommerce site for a local gym! Best of both worlds? I think everyone should get some grassroots software work under their belt, it's a really different experience working as a team member in an unrelated industry and providing a unique value to an otherwise non-software company. I don't want to soapbox too much, but it is part of my hope for the eventually reduction of software salaries, so that software can become a more integrated and boutique part of life. There are so many problems that would be better solved with small scale software instead of impersonal SaaS.

JohnBooty 5y ago
Yeah. I'm enjoying the current inflated salaries but this is not sustainable, and it really shuts smaller, non-software companies out of having inhouse fulltime developers. it's a really different experience working as a team member in an unrelated industry and providing a unique value to an otherwise non-software company. This can be the best thing ever, or the worst thing ever. It all depends on whether or not management is willing to learn about how the software development process works and adapt to it. I remember the days from 2000-2015, I worked at a few places like this. Doing "revolutionary" things like actually introducing source control, offsite backups, etc. to places that had never heard of such things. At some places this was challenging, but rewarding. At other places ownership was constantly aghast when they had to shell out for some random software licenses or SaaS subscriptions. I view it as a part of my job to explain and justify expenditures, but going to war with management over every rando $100 "what the FUCK is 'git hub???'" purchase gets old fast. Overall though, I am now a little nostalgic...
- withinboredom 5y ago
  Heh, I remember an owner coming into my office (doing warehouse picking software at a warehouse company) asking wtf was this $300 charge. I told him “yeah, that’s a license to use this software for a year.” He went “oh, for the year. That’s only $25 a month? Carry on!” the nostalgia is real.
- 5y ago