A Career

[Slim]

I graduated with BSc (hons) Computer Science as a mature student a couple of weeks before my 29th birthday. I'm retiring a bit earlier than is usual for many. Although I'd had a summer job in 1980 at my dad's place and a year-long placement at ICI on the third year of my degree, those were always temporary arrangements. I never had a proper job until I turned up at the imposing gates of Rolls-Royce and Associates in August 1989.

So it was a relatively short career. Nonetheless, thirty-five years is a long time however you cut it.

When I was about eight years old, my mum told me that a mile was the distance from the top of Grange Road in Hartlepool to Christchurch, a church in the town centre. Grange Road leads there in a straight line (almost), so it was easy for me to visualise.

Well - if, fancifully, I were to represent the 12,736 days of my career as a mile long walk along Grange Road, through the town centre, ending ultimately at the church - I'm about 14 feet from the front door now.

I thought I'd have a thread to reflect over what was, in truth, a patchy career. I'm not saying I'll never work again but certainly my days of working all day five days a week on an indefinite basis are over next month.

By the way if you feel that I treat this site like a personal blog site, sometimes - yes I do, but everyone here is welcome to use it the same way, should they wish. Nor am I doing anything I wouldn't do on someone else's server.

[Fishy]

Enjoy your retirement ...  I'll be putting  my letter of notice in end of June and will packing in end of Feb 25

[David L]

About nine weeks or 36 days (not that I'm counting)

[The Picnic Wasp]

I enjoy the tales folk tell on here. Probably not enough of them in my humble opinion. It would be safe for me to also describe my career path as patchy, and one which I definitely wouldn't follow given a second opportunity. Retirement was forced upon me but I wasn't disappointed about that as having discovered a couple of years before that one of my private pensions was reasonably decent, I was obsessed with the thought of getting out of the harness. I must put up a diary of how things unfolded during those 42 years or so. Might help anyone suffering from insomnia.

[Thenop]

Woohoo, enjoy James!
Me I'm 54 so I am at best 13 years away.

I don't mind the personal touch. Message boards are a bit antiquated anyway, showing our age here 
The older we get, the more need to reminisce. I can only hope to read more of your life, and that of others.

[Nickslikk2112]

I think I managed 36 years in the workplace, starting in January 1986 and finishing in May 2022. There was a year and a bit of unemployment in there, the second bit being about a year - ageism when I was still only 47!

Not regretted a day of retirement.

[Slim]

So: I turned up at Rolls-Royce and Associates (usually known as RRA) in Derby in August 1989. This was a company that had been set up in the '50s as a joint venture between Rolls-Royce, Vickers and other partners with the purpose of designing and procuring nuclear engines for submarines. It still exists today, now wholly owned by Rolls-Royce, as "Rolls-Royce Marine Power".

I'd moved into a flat in Leicester with my girlfriend Sara a few days earlier. We'd graduated at the same time. Sara was just starting a job with British Gas in Leicester. This was the reason I moved from Hartlepool to the East Midlands, where I still live today.

At my interview with RRA in April, they'd promised me a job if I got a 2:2 or better. I got a 2:1. So here I was!

To my dismay, after undergoing the usual company induction rituals, I was introduced to my desk in the business computing department. I was to work on the company's mainframe databases, as an analyst/programmer.

I knew I was embarking on a role as an analyst/programmer, but in April I had told my interviewers that the one topic that turned me off in computing, that I'd found boring as fuck during my degree course and that I definitely didn't want to be involved with was: databases. Nonetheless, the folks in my new office were a friendly and welcoming bunch and my manager (known as "group leader" in the RRA hierarchy) was a thoroughly decent guy. He wasn't well-liked to be honest because he could be a bit old-fashioned and authoritarian, but he was straightfoward, approachable and fair. I reported directly to a section leader, a very funny man called Pete with a dry sense of humour, whom I'm still Facebook friends with to this day.

The office of this particular department or "group" was a large prefab or "hut". We didn't have computers on our desks. There was a terminal room in the same hut, populated by eight or nine dumb terminals to the mainframe. But most of my analysis / coding was done at my desk, poring over large sheets of printouts. And the printers were in another building, overseen by the computer operators.

I can't say I didn't enjoy my time in this group. Just having a permanent, graduate job was a buzz. And there was a relaxed and friendly atmosphere in the office. We had a laugh. But I was singularly unsuited to working with business databases, something I had no affinity for whatever. In late September or possibly early October I asked to have a word with my group leader and I told him, with much humility and regret, that I simply wasn't cut out for the job I was doing. He was happy enough with my work and he was disappointed, but he praised me for speaking up and a couple of weeks later he arranged for me to have a meeting with two group leaders in the other half of the IT organisation, "scientific computing".

That went really well and I was offered a place in what, if I remember correctly, was called the "small computers and research group". Informally, this team was known as "small machines", a term that referred to any computer system that wasn't a mainframe. So in January 1990, I moved to a new desk, in a new office in one of the larger buildings.

OK so this was going to be a couple of sentences to describe each of the jobs I did over the last 35 years but apparently it's going to be a bit of an epic, so: To Be Continued.

[Thenop]

Cliffhanger

[Slim]

Sara and I bought a house in Markfield, next to the M1, just before Christmas. My commute in to Derby was easier now. I could get to work in less than half an hour. And my new teammates in the Small Machines group were a friendly bunch, with an irreverent sense of humour. Their favourite mode of communication was to insult each other for a laugh, in that peculiarly British way.

Initially I was to report to a lady called Julie, who was actually a "base grade" engineer like myself, but was being considered for a section leader role - so she was given me to practice on. Everyone with a technical role at Rolls-Royce and Associates had the designation "engineer", irrespective of what you actually did for a living.

Julie was unassuming, friendly, not very assertive. I think she fancied me actually, although she was married. I remember coming in in a new shirt and tie one morning; she told me quietly that I looked "stunning". But despite an impeccable taste in men she wasn't really a natural leader, and she never did get promoted. Two years later, I was senior to her myself.

But I'm getting ahead of myself.

My first job in that team was to work on a software project, guided by a more experienced programmer. I can't remember his name now, nor can I remember what the software we were working on was for. All I remember is that he was a peculiarly humourless young man in his late '20s, and a stickler for doing everything in the most formal manner possible, including loads of design documentation and methodology - which really frustrated me because I was certain that if I was allowed to just get stuck in and start coding, I'd have the whole job finished in a couple of weeks. Even with the benefit of hindsight and a bit more wisdom and experience, I still think that was probably true.

He wasn't actually one of the Small Machines team, he worked for a development team whom we were collaborating with.

In June 1990, only six months after we'd bought the house, Sara and I split up, or more accurately, she decided to leave. This was absolutely shattering. So much so that, quite honestly, I have never completely got over it. The sense of loss, betrayal and above all disbelief has never left me. As you'd expect this was an awful time. But my work didn't suffer; it became an escape. It was a lot less difficult than driving home to an empty house every night; a lot less painful than the agonising weekends when I wouldn't speak to anyone between Friday evening and Monday morning.

In any case, my stint as an analyst/programmer didn't last long. Some time in the late summer of 1990, there was a reorganisation. The Small Machines group ceased to exist - I can't remember the rationale for this - and I was offered a role in another group, an expanded technical support department. I was to become part of a section of three people led by a section leader called Lorraine, called "Sun Support".

This was the moment that defined my whole career. Here, I was embarking on the profession that I was to pursue for the next thirty-four years - Unix system administration.

I have always regretted this. I was a natural programmer, definitely one of the best two or three coders in my entire degree course and probably - honestly - in the top one. I loved to code, and it was a perfect fit for the way my brain is wired.

I have worked with some brilliant, gifted, natural sys admins. I have never been one of them. I did, if I may say so, get to be a very good one eventually, partly through sheer experience and partly because I worked in high-pressure environments where I had to sink or swim. Three years after I left RRA, I was the lead sys admin for the Equities floor in the London branch of one of the big American investment firms. But it has never been an ideal match for my personality.

Anyway - Lorraine, myself and another refugee from Small Machines called Shaun were now responsible for maintaining RRA's population of Sun computers. I think there were probably about 30 of them at that time, used for computer-aided design and running reactor simulations. Some of them were fridge-sized objects, situated in a server room. Others were "workstations", located under desks with huge screens attached. All of them were attached to the yellow co-axial ethernet cable that snaked through the RRA buildings.

None of us particularly knew what we were doing to begin with. Even Lorraine's skills and experience were pretty modest; I think she'd only been doing that job for a few months herself. But it was mostly fun. I'd get to visit other offices and have a laugh with fellow employees - the physicists, the planners, the mechanical designers, the computer operators, the database administrators, the company library. Technical support was a great way to meet people in those days. In my present, final job, in which I'm contracted to work from home, I haven't met a customer or colleague in person for eighteen months and I miss those long-gone days when people used to stop me in a corridor for a chat.

As our experience and skills grew, so did the number of machines we were supposed to support. The physicists especially seemed to acquire a couple of them every month. Shaun and I mostly got along fine but we were competitive. Shaun had been in the company for a couple of years before I'd joined. He felt he was next in line for promotion to section leader. But I felt I was a bit more capable than Shaun, quite honestly.

To Be Continued

[Thenop]

Quite enjoying this, I am sure there's much more to say about your working life. I am sorry to read you feel your talents were at least partially wasted not being a full time programmer. I am sure most of us are not 100% content with what we do or did. I know I am not. I also know it is not in my nature to just up and leave looking for new horizons. I try to balance it with my personal life and that works.

It looks like you have learned to live with the offered choices you made, looking back would you have done things a bit different? If so, what?

[Slim]

Thank-you, I'm quite enjoying writing it and I appreciate your interest. I was only going to write a few lines about each job but it's turning into War & Peace. I'm still only about a year in so far!

I think it's helping me to have a bit of perspective and sense of closure as my working days draw to a close. Actually I think writing just helps me to process everything. It's why I start those TV series threads, the studio album threads, why I write an account of every bike ride. It's just the way I process my experience. Probably something to do with being neurodivergent.

Looking back after the first year or two I was never going to jump back into programming full time - because I was gaining experience as a sys admin quickly. Experience is something like the currency of your self-worth in a job and eventually, when I wanted to move on, it was quite marketable. But maybe I should have thought about it back in 1990 or 1991 and tried to make a switch.

My job has always had an element of programming to it, mostly in shell script languages (BASH, KSH, Python et al) and that's always been fun. So I haven't completely missed out but I could have had a more rewarding career as a developer I'm sure.

[The Picnic Wasp]

I really thought about doing this but I don't have your courage. It could well be cathartic, but I'm aware it might also just be a bit of a dirge. The lyrics to Headlong Flight haunt me more than a little. My life route took a very curtailing detour in 1980. Others, I know might just have seen my type of situation as a blip and got back on the road to self fulfilment but I obviously lacked the necessary fortitude and gave in to an unrewarding plan B. Or maybe the truth is that the much less steep path suited me and I disguise this by claiming a pile of obstacles. I kind of comfort myself with the knowledge that a couple of early health issues might have derailed a successful career path in any case. I'm quite grateful for where I am now though. Everything for a reason. In Scotland folk say; what's for you will not go by you. Scottish for fate I suppose.