scruffbags

Blimey, my father, who's now in his mid-70's was a COBOL man with IBM in the very-early 60's; so pre-hippy days. More beatnik, perhaps. I too, erm, used COBOL, as my first language in DP, as it was then. That was a long, long time ago...

Do I smell? Possibly. Actually, I suppose if I did smell *badly*, my daughters, who don't care if they offend me, would let me know in no uncertain terms.

HTML? I can't even spell it!

Originally Posted by Daimo

I looked at SQL and databases, but again, nothing really to show and boring.

that's what I do

... well have done, and will do, but it still involves big databases (Teradata, Oracle, MS SQL Server)

but you're so right!

It's not the most exciting job (only exciting thing I've done in "Business Intelligence" is fraud investigations).

Yeah thats what I mean. You code a lot, you sort out a systems database, but your not really "seeing" anything for all your work.

Im liking this Website stuff as i can flick back and forth, spot mistakes, work out where im going wrong, then its all pretty and im happy again.

I startee with SQL with some basic select code, then started my own little DB, but realised to understand it all, i had to take aobut 10 steps backwards, understand the relationships between the DB etc... I lost interest.

Originally Posted by MiniMatt

It's an interesting one, I've seen three generations of IT "professionals". The first generation is the "aging hippies", these are the ones who learnt COBOL the first time round, are frighteningly intelligent, who still wear jesus sandles and long gray pony tails but get away with it as their age and weathered features makes it somehow look cool in an aging hippy kinda way. Their social skills are perfectly normal, and generally pretty chilled.

Second generation is "rise of the nerds", these are the kids who had ZX81s as kids, who figured out how to make a Ping-Pong program on their casio scientific calculator. They were the nerds at school, but history placed them at the job market just as the IT explosion took off, therefore their complete lack of social skills was no hindrance to an economy crying out for more IT skills. This is the generation who give the profession a bad name. This is the generation to which I belong Some of this generation did finally realise that pony tails didn't quite work any more, that washing occasionally helps, and yes, some of us even got laid. Many of us are managers these days, and we find ourselves hiring the third generation...

The third generation are actually completely normal, they've grown up in a world that has always had computers and complex networks, they practically learn subnetting IP networks as they're learning to read and write. Everyone in this generation knows about computers, some of them take that further and become IT people, some go other routes, it's just a career choice like any other.

Excellent description. I'm second generation, though I always wanted to be one of the first generation aging hippies. I was just born too late. I must confess to still having the ponytail, but people tend to assume that I'm much younger than I really am. I have no desire to become a manager, but would rather get out of IT and do something different.