25. Funny, that. Since I've been writing code on a daily basis since I was 7 years old. But the thing is, before around 1996, "Computer Programmer" was a kin

25. Funny, that. Since I've been writing code on a daily basis since I was 7 years old. But the thing is, before around 1996, "Computer Programmer" was a kinda lame job in quite low demand with no real career prospect that fat bald guys did in the basement of some Fortune 500 company making a sad corporate salary and basically not having anywhere near as much fun as, say, a Mechanical Engineer. So that's what my degree is in. Of course, anybody who's Engineered his way out of a paper sack will know that even in the early 90s that took several thousand lines of code and (back then) quite a few hours queued up on the VAX waiting for your models to run. Now imagine you're living large in your felt cube, several floors up from those poor programmers, then suddenly somebody shows up with a ten billion dollar sack of cash saying "Hey, anybody want to double your salary?" and that the only requirement to do so was to be able to cobble together a Hello World program that output a few angle brackets. So yeah, hey, sign me up. I'll work with technology. Pretty smart move, looking back on it nearly 20 years later.