Tie me down
> In 1982 the field was not yet very professional.
Oh, I don't know.
Some years before that, yours truly finished the university year and rocked up at my parents house that weekend.
On the monday I picked up the local (weekly) paper and looked casually through the Positions vacant section. There, in small print was a company just a bus ride away that was looking for FORTRAN programmers. "I could do that" (and even now I still write FORTRAN, but in several different languages) and gave them a call.
Having explained myself to the person who answered the phone, they said "Come over, we'll have a chat".
Now job interviews were pretty new to me. So I didn't change out of my ratty old jeans and faded T-shirt - after all, it was only a "chat", wasn't it! I got to their nice, clean offices with potted plants by the window. Indoor shrubbery - what an odd idea. While waiting, I watched someone enter the pass-code to their secure area and made the number and then got called in to see the man
Can you write FORTRAN he asked, which after my 2 years of 1 lecture a week I replied in the positive. I had done a couple of projects of which only one had locked up the university mainframe, so I though that was fair enough. The man started rattling on about Data General and Eclipses and credit scores and stuff. I nodded when it seemed opportune.
Eventually he stopped talking, wrote a name and an address on a piece of paper and handed it to me. "You start tomorrow, it pays £55 a week. Here's the name of the team leader (wassat?) and the customer's address. Just one more thing: could you wear a tie?"
I learned two things from that. The first that a nod's as good as a wink when you haven't a clue what someone is talking about. And second that wearing a tie gets you places. How much more professional can it get?