Outdated computer technology

When I was working at a web design agency in the late 90’s in New York in the middle of the dot-com boom, we would occasionally get resumés from older people with no experience building websites, with backgrounds in FORTRAN or COBOL. We were young and thought we were very cool and had a fun company culture with Nerf guns and funky decorations, and couldn’t see how this dude, 20 years older and from a drab sterile ultra-corporate office environment, could possibly have anything to offer us.

Now I’m the oldster. I look at some of the programming languages I learned in undergrad and grad school that are barely touched today*: Pascal, Lisp, Perl, Prolog. The textbooks that taught me about operating systems would have been considered vintage years ago. I have no doubt that if I applied to most hip modern tech companies, my resumé would be met with a chuckle.

Technology comes and goes at an accelerating pace. It flies in and out of fashion, it is replaced with something that’s better, or just more popular. The specific  languages I learned in school were never going to be of any value in the long term.

So what was the point of all that stress and those tuition fees, if the tools I spent years studying weren’t going to last me for a full career?

What I learned was how to approach a problem. Any problem.

There are systematic methods to track down and resolve a programming bug. Some of them I learned in class. Others I learned through trial and error, and in the process of my studies, reinforced and practiced them until they became second nature.

I can apply these methods anywhere, in theory. That doesn’t mean I can actually fix my car, because I only understand cars in very broad terms and don’t know enough about specific parts to go in and do it myself. However, I know how to tell the mechanic what I’ve tried that has and hasn’t worked, and the circumstances in which the problem occurs. That makes their job easier.

If you’re someone who doesn’t have a technical background, and who finds yourself lost and stuck when a problem occurs that doesn’t have an obvious solution, some of these methods may be helpful to you. Even just remembering that you have some tools in the toolbox – or a toolbox at all! – can be a great start towards shifting your mindset about technology.

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*Ironically, if I’d kept up with some of these languages, I could be raking in the dough maintaining legacy systems for things like power plants and government payroll. But no, I thought it was more fun building websites.

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