30 years ago the company I worked for had just taken delivery of their first Unix machine (a Sequent Symmetry). It was about the size of a large refrigerator and sat in our machine room blinking at me. My boss, standing in the doorway with a cigarette gripped in his teeth, said "learn how to use this."
There was no internet and we had no books but somehow I figured out the 'man' and 'apropos' commands. From there I read all the section 1 man pages, experimented with the things I found and basically figured out how unix works. Within a couple of months I had a suite of shell scripts doing most of the regular maintenance work for me.
A few months later on a Friday afternoon one of our legacy systems, the one for processing cheques, died (literal smoke coming out of the back of it). My colleague and I had been learning C in our spare time so we volunteered to rewrite it over the weekend. We had no sleep that weekend, but we delivered a working replacement (using ncurses) by Monday lunchtime.
It was a simpler time and a more charming time. The internet has been a game changer, both good and bad. It's easier to learn new things now but there are a lot more new things to learn.
Work-life balance is a hard one for me to answer because my situation has changed. Back then I enjoyed being at work more than I enjoyed being at home so I worked super long hours, I even slept in the office fairly regularly (mostly because of the pub across the street). So there was no work-life balance, but I liked it that way.
There was no internet and we had no books but somehow I figured out the 'man' and 'apropos' commands. From there I read all the section 1 man pages, experimented with the things I found and basically figured out how unix works. Within a couple of months I had a suite of shell scripts doing most of the regular maintenance work for me.
A few months later on a Friday afternoon one of our legacy systems, the one for processing cheques, died (literal smoke coming out of the back of it). My colleague and I had been learning C in our spare time so we volunteered to rewrite it over the weekend. We had no sleep that weekend, but we delivered a working replacement (using ncurses) by Monday lunchtime.
It was a simpler time and a more charming time. The internet has been a game changer, both good and bad. It's easier to learn new things now but there are a lot more new things to learn.
Work-life balance is a hard one for me to answer because my situation has changed. Back then I enjoyed being at work more than I enjoyed being at home so I worked super long hours, I even slept in the office fairly regularly (mostly because of the pub across the street). So there was no work-life balance, but I liked it that way.