Why Did You Become A Software Developer?

While money definitely had a bearing in my final decision, I think I was always destined towards the software development industry. When I was younger I messed around with BASIC a little, and even though the games I created were simple (and just copied out of some BASIC book), I was amazed by the potential. I did have ideas of becoming a game developer, but I never got around to that. Now, I can't see myself doing anything else apart from writing or designing software.

James

Because I'm looking for intellectual stimulation and being able to build something concrete with my bare hands...something tangeable.  I want to be able to come home some days and say "I built something fun and useful today".

I had a stint as a project manager for 13 months and I didn't find it intellectually stimulating, so I went back to coding.  As a project manager, at the end of each day, I couldn't say to myself "what useful stuff did I do today", because most of the time I was in useless meetings, phone calls, interviews, presentations, pushing paper (ms word) or creating power bloody point slides. All those project management stuff are actually administrative secretarial duties that could easily be done by not so bright high school drop outs.

Here's a useless business analyst at Initech from the movie Office Space. It reminds me of a useless Pointy Haired Project Manager

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ti53kjHsAas

"I deal with the god damn customers so the engineers don't have to. I have people skills; I am good at dealing with people! Can't you understand that? What the hell is wrong with you people?"

Also it would be interesting to see, how our primary language choices evolved over time.

For me, it is: QuickBasic -> Pascal -> Delphi (ObjectPascal) -> C -> C++ -> Java -> Scala

I made my long term hobby my profession (started out with 6202 kit, TI-58, TI-59, Commdore PET, C-64, Atari ST)! My chain of languages: Commodore Basic, 6502 Assembler, Atari Basic, Visual Basic (this is an embarassing amount of Basic!), C++ (3 years), Java (12 years).

 Chris

I got my first IBM PC with 7 years.. it was a huge device. But since then I was interested in how computers work and what I can do with them. 

Languages: BASICA -> QBASIC -> PowerBasic -> TurboPascal -> C -> PHP, JavaScript -> JAVA .. and now some JVM languages like JavaFX, Groovy and Scala. Learning never ends.

Once upon a time, I was premed student, but organic chem was too hard -- and comp. sci was cool. 

Then I was a comp. sci student, but it was too abstract -- so I got a job as a sysadmin (and kept studying). 

Then I was a systems administrator (sysadmin) -- but people only spoke to me when they were problems and my colleagues were weird. So I got a job as an (information) analyst. 

Then I was an (information) analyst -- but I never got to really make anything. I was just analyzing.. and I missed the code and started reading books about code. My housemate saw that one day and said "Why aren't you a developer?"

And now I'm a developer! People ask me to make things, and I get to make them! And when I need to, I end up playing "information analyst" or "sysadmin". :)

(Ironically, when I graduated from university,  the last thing I wanted to be was a developer: I figured I'd end up working on a small part of the system, never get to see the whole thing and sit in a corner all day in front of a computer. None of those ended up being true.. ) 

I sort of stumbled into software development. I was doing tech support for enterprise software (Essbase) in the mid 90's. No one was taking ownership of supporting the Visual Basic APIs that customers used, so I took the time to learn. As I started to transition my way to the QA group, the development group offered to interview me and take the chance of brining a junior developer in. I jumped at the chance.

I learned C from the pros in the development group and was off running.  Later another company took a chance at hiring me as a Java programmer, again not knowing the language. Now, I've been programming Java for 11 years. Right now I'm trying to learn Objective C (and it hurts!).