Throw away ID and first post. Some perspective from an old timer. All in the NYC financial disctrict. While finishing my college BS degree I was working at a major bank doing data entry, at the end supervising a night time data entry crew. This bank ran an internal training program for programmers, I applied and and started programming full time for them.

- 1987-1992 43k-60k programmer Bank 1 (IBM mainframe, cobol, 370 assembler, IMS, CICS)

- 1992-1997 60k- 80k senior programmer Bank 2 (was actually lucky enough to work in Smalltalk for the first 5 years here)

- 1997-2017 80k-221k various titles Bank 2 - java and the internet killed smalltalk and the project we were working on, the technology group jumped on java and we had many years of work converting mainframe apps to java apps.

Played many roles from leading a small team all new to java including myself, up to architecting and building the shared components and shared architecture for 45 J2EE applications. Was let go after 24 years there in yet one more reorg/RIF 1 year after the last major mainframe app was migrated.

I am retired now, and feel lucky to have been able to have an interesting and challenging “normal” career with 2 large stable companies, with pensions, with matched 401k, etc.