When I joined Accenture, also as my first IT job out of college, we did training in a hotel room just of i35 in Austin.

I had never touched Java before, we did C at college, and became a Java developer after 3 days holed up with 10 other people doing coding challenges on a laptop.

I didn't get to go to any of the training centers until I'd been there for a year.

Ah. Well, believe it or not, Andersen's six-week programming boot camp in St. Charles was still in COBOL... in the '90s. That was mainly because their biggest customers were government and industry firms running huge legacy systems. Think Raytheon, McDonnell-Douglass, Hershey.

Eventually they did switch to C. I wonder what the curriculum is today.

This was 2003, and was for a job with the State. I was absolutely atrocious as I had no idea what I was doing and really got no support to figure out how to code in the real world. Knowing now what I know now, that codebase could only have been created by sticking new grad after new grad on it without any peer reviews. The amount of nested if statements made it impossible to follow.

I don't know why anyone would hire these consulting firms other than plausible deniability of blame.

I would imagine that most large corporations and government code is still Java, only specialist systems are still COBOL.

"The amount of nested if statements made it impossible to follow"

I'm floored that you mentioned this. One memory I often cite of my early days there was walking past a colleague's desk and seeing a diagonal line of text from the upper-left corner of her monitor to the lower-right. Closer inspection revealed that she was processing a 30-character part number with as many nested IF statements, instead of iterating through it.

Even as a 21-year-old I was appalled that this was being delivered to clients.

It was awful, but not being exposed to Java, or professional development before I assumed it was how it was meant to be.

I still have to use Java from time to time, and I dislike the amount of "Spring magic" that colleagues try to use with it. No wonder the kids end up writing junk, they are used to never understanding what's going on anyway.

St Charles. This brings back memories. I fly in at like 9pm and there is nothing open to eat, at all. Only one slice of leftover pizza at the "social centre", and it did taste like cardboard.

Ever go to Scotland Yard? The one bar in town. Some CLMs (career-limiting moves) took place there (not perpetrated by me).