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.
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.