It was very different. At the dot-com's that I was at, web servers and application servers were Red Hat Linux, and only the databases were Sun boxes, with E4500 being a high end box. At a post-IPO dot-com there might be one E6500 and maybe a few Sun E4500's, and lots of Red Hat machines. At the investment bank they were all Solaris on the Unix side, and had dozens of E6500's in my city, and hundreds of E4500's. The investment bank had admins in the OpenBoot PROM all the time, whereas I had barely been in it. The investment bank was always replacing disks in the hundreds of external RAID arrays they had whereas only our database had a large external RAID array. They used NFS extensively and you had to know it thoroughly. My knowledge about Red Hat Linux, Apache web servers, Java application servers etc. didn't amount to much.
It was qualitatively (and quantitatively) very different, and in interviews it sounded like I didn't know what I was talking about.
On the developer side, the bureaucracy is very different. If a minor change in a software package is being pushed to New York, London and Tokyo, which often it is, you might have five meetings about it, and the code push might take weeks or even months. No matter how trivial the change. Three different divisions might have to sign off on the change. It's definitely not an agile code process, with code going from your fingers to the production web/app within the week.
Did you know that Open Firmware has its own theme song?
https://web.archive.org/web/20060111132138/http://playground...
http://everything2.com/title/The+Open+Firmware+Song
Sung to the tune of "The Flintstones"
Firmware
Open Firmware
It's the appropriate technology,
Features
FCode booting
Hierarchical DevInfo tree.
Hack Forth
Using Emacs on the keys,
Save in
NVRAM if you please.
With your
Open Firmware
You can fix the bugs in no time
Bring the kernel up in no time
We'll have an FCode time!
For production slated machines, we were usually running commands such as "copy-clock-tod-to-io-board", nothing too creative.
While I was there, the Sparcstation 20's reached end-of-life and we were allowed to bring one home (I still have it). At home I had gotten ADSL through a reseller that had an odd routing setup - they wanted the MAC address of my desktop so that they could assign an IP to it. I guess I should have gotten a hub that could do NAT, but I gave them my Intel PC MAC, and then went into the SS20 OBP and changed the MAC address to that of my PC. It worked too, both machines got ADSL. Actually what I wound up doing is doing NAT with the SS20, after I swapped out the PC ethernet card with a spare one lying around.
the whole devlop on a mac book when the actual production systems are linux makes me wince.
I did not stay in enterprise for long. I like mainframes, but I hate the culture of big companies. I next helped founding a university, and when tired by ivory tower, I left uni to fund a company to focus on machine learning for industrial applications.
So, most important advise from an old sack: stay flexible, and dont be surprised that old skills in solid technology might be worth good money at the moment when the hypes end.
That's what happened, and many of them then ended up as estate agents.
Last job involved C# and it was good, and dynamic (pun intended)
The pay was certainly not poverty level and the required skillset was pretty achievable.
Perspective is a funny thing. I started in the enterprise and was there through the bubble (excluding a brief stint at a startup). I then went on to found my own company some years later.
Anyway, it somehow never occured to me that people actually depend upon the startup ecosystem continuing to thrive, and would feel absent options without it. I mean, I guess it's obvious, but I suppose I just hadn't consciously considered that it really implies "startups as a career".
So, it's somewhat hilarious for me to read someone musing that maybe they should "learn enterprise".
I'm also not in SV or another startup hub. So, I'm sure it's partly cultural as well.
I'm actually still in school. So, I tend to muse over learning a lot of different things. Your life story was really neat though ;)
But, I'd say, yeah...get you some "enterprise" while you're there, especially if they're offering it for the same price. ;)
Glad you enjoyed my life story. Happy to share.
New suggestion, though. You should spend your time in school learning how to remove your prejudice. It's pretty bad, and will hold you back more than not learning a particular language will.
P.S. Just to be clear, I was bothered by your ageism.
Knowing how to be graceful will spare you a lot of future pain in your career as well as your social life.
However, the way you phrased your criticism was very polite, yet firm. It drove your point home in a self evident kind of way. It's got me thinking and I appreciate that.
There's a world of difference between having a fake personality and learning to politely and gracefully interact with others even when you really don't want to. Those skills are far, far more important than anything technical you will learn in your CS classes.
That's the real skill to master, especially amongst the smug closeted egomaniacs in the programming world. But as a normally blunt person, it all seems a little silly(and very insincere) to me.
I'd suggest reading it. The protagonist struggles with "fake" throughout the whole book. Might give you some perspective.
Theres nothing wrong with being a bit blunt and direct, ageism is well beyond that threshold.
The end of your second point fails to address the comment you responded to, I was addressing an entirely separate issue about how this community (and to a lesser degree, the programming community) chooses to communicate. Specifically, how it fails to actually remove flaming, trolling, rudeness, and arrogance. It merely wraps these things nicely in pseudo intellectual packages.
Anyways, I wasn't defending my (purely spiteful) "ageist" comment, nor do I intend to. Although, I keep getting baited to address it, so here I am. Rest assured though, while I may never transform into a different gender or race, I will certainly age. I'm sure one day, when I'm older, someone on the internet will say a rude, politically incorrect comment towards me, and I shall weep with regret and understanding.
For what it's worth, I do think there's way more utility in differentiating oneself by having opinions one believes in, vs trying to be a crowd pleaser (which really adds no long term value to anything). Now the onus is really one oneself to make sure that those strong opinions are right, of course. :) Kinda like on HN, having a differentiable and unique idea/product/startup is way better than all the me-toos, as long as the idea is actually any good. :)
Consistency is one of those things that people try to figure out all life. I personally respect those who are clear in taking a stance even if I don't agree with them -- they've found their niche. The alternative is someone who's trying to play short term efficiencies and please everyone -- all they say are words everyday, words that carry no weight or meaning behind them.
Pardon the jumbled metaphors and all that. :)
PS -- Being mindful of what you type on the internet, just like being mindful of what you say in real life, is helpful in being genuine. Specifically it's to understand what other people are trying to say, and also understand the ramifications of your own words. And as you exercise this mindfulness, it'll become second nature and become a skill.
PPS -- re: gracefulness - just remember the downside value of a comment is not 0 but negative, and the expected value of a comment is not necessarily positive.
There's an entirely different philosophy out there from the startup "push code to production on your first day". That of (lowercase) solid engineering practices where production releases are major events that require lots of interactions, checks and planning. It teaches you an awful lot. Safety critical industries, and many financial companies after Knight Capital, are good places to learn this kind of discipline.
You made it through by being versatile. Not by starting to learn while you were job hunting, but being prepared when jobs were aplenty.
You had to be ready to be employed in a non-VC funded world, doing boring things.
I liken it to today, where you have an abundance of 6-week boot camps and developers writing code against the sexy Javascript framework du jour. Those developers will starve if we hit another period where VC dries up.
Learn some boring stuff, even stuff that gets laughed at on HN. .NET. Java. In places like Houston, there's TONS of jobs, but they're not in Rails or Clojure or Angular. They're in .NET, writing apps for big oil or healthcare.
Though it wasn't as big then, I think learning dev-ops will really take someone far when no one's writing Twitter aggregators or social networks for quadcopters.
tl;dr When times are lean, boring languages in boring companies that make real, not VC, money is how you stay afloat