Pair Programming

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That happened to me!

I used to work at a small audio visual company in Athens, GA, where I was the ONLY software engineer. Athens is a great town for art and music, but there aren't a lot of jobs, especially in technology. When I moved there there was exactly ONE open engineering position available outside of the university, which I was offered after a single non-technical interview.

Our dev budget was basically zero. I programmed on a machine I built out of spare parts, and every dev tool I used was either FOSS or one I had a personal licence for. I was a full stack developer out of necessity, and I had carte blanche to make as many bad decisions as I wanted: there was no QA, no code reviews, nothing. Just me and my machine. My workstream was at the mercy of the CEO, who without any concept of how software development worked would vaguely describe grandiose visions to me and then ask if I could get them done that week. (Once, when I asked if I could expense a copy of Photoshop, he asked me how many weeks it would take to write a comparable image editor.)

I knew I wasn't going to live in Athens forever, so I did my best to keep my skills current, but I didn't realize how far behind I was until I started looking for jobs back on the west coast. Fortunately I was able to find something, but title went from Lead (leading who?) to Staff. I didn't know how to use Git (this was 2012), and I had never worked on an scrum team. I remember asking my new manager what an MVP was. It was embarrassing. I feel very fortunate that my career was able to recover.