My First Job

My very first job was in India during the late 90s. I joined a computer-aided design software company in Pune. I had just finished my Ph.D. My first computer at work was a state-of-the-art Sun Sparc workstation. It was bulky, but I loved the keyboard. The company handed those workstations off to us because the codebase was huge, computationally heavy, and required graphics-rendering power. It was a large proprietary codebase in C, C++, and PERL. Shortly after I joined, the company sent us to its headquarters in Bedford, MA. We spent about four months there. I don’t recall committing any code before that trip. I don’t think we were even allowed or expected to check in code for some time. No one mandated that we be productive on day one. We spent most of our time setting things up, reading manuals, and learning to build, debug, and run the codebase. Java was new then, and I used to get back to work at night to learn and build apps on the side. I couldn’t afford a personal computer yet.…