It’s a Good Thing That I Didn’t Take That Programming Job

It might have changed my life in a bad way

Photo by author. TRS-80 c. 1978

Back in the late ’70s, I was casting about looking for another job.

I knew more about computers than most people did back then; I had bought a TRS-80 and programmed it for games and to do some heat exchange calculations for a stack reclaim system I had been selling. When I saw an ad for a junior programmer, I thought “Why not?” and applied. The company responded quickly, telling me that I would need to take a test.

Okay, a test. I’m good at taking tests. No problem with that. I figured it might be something showing basic programming concepts with pseudo code or something like that.

Nope. It was a big old pages thick intelligence test. Nothing to do with programming at all. When I showed up for it, there were a dozen or more of us and a proctor who gave us the spiel about how we had an hour or whatever to work on it, but we were not expected to finish it, because nobody finishes.

Yeah. I finished it with time to spare.

Now that sounds like bragging, but it isn’t, and you’ll learn why shortly, so hold back on the vitriol and snide comments.

I walked up to the proctor and turned in the test. He looked at me with barely concealed…