Software hasn’t eaten the entire world! There’s so much more than the craze du jour. Crazes follow a hype cycle, made famous by Gartner. Basics always serve yo

Software hasn’t eaten the entire world! There’s so much more than the craze du jour. Crazes follow a hype cycle, made famous by Gartner. Basics always serve you. Many things in life are easy to start and difficult to master. You can’t skip basics and getting experience. People think they can. My example is a degree in applied physics, which opens the door to almost everything. Since I got it in 1970, there were 4 years in the service, but I started out thereafter in aerospace, mixing electronics and optics through several jobs, until computing took over, whether coding, I.T. support or even sales engineering. I got so interested in the sales process, what worked and what didn’t, that I got one of those unofficial “personal MBA” degrees. I was obviously a generalist. I couldn’t have coded without knowledge of the problem spaces, whether that involved data management as a department sysadmin, knocking out scientific problem solvers, reducing data, compiling open source to run on Solaris, “coding” SNMP system monitoring packages [1] and so on. But I didn’t get that first entry-level engineer job until I was 27. [1] Funny thing, the system monitoring used perl as an extension language. I recall that it was a descendant of netlabs software, which Larry Wall worked on. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NetLabs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NetLabs