“So, have you any experience of working with computers ?”

The faltering answer is a no but in his eyes there is a desire.

I pickup my beer and wonder if in today’s world of MCSE, ITIL, SOA and outsourcing if there really is a chance for someone who wants to learn.

That’s how I started in the 80’s. A sudden career change and a job where all I did was pick up the phone and type things into a VDU during the day and nag people to show me how to program in the evenings.

In those days, in a small, hungry firm there wasn’t any problem getting a MUMPS partition setup on a system and being allowed to play in my own time.

Today that resource would have a cost associated with it which someone in a company would need to pick up. Today the competition is from people who are graduates or who have been through numerous boot camps to cram the essentials of the technology into their brains.

But it worked for me and, just perhaps, it could work for him.