# How to describe the computer-related job that I'm looking for

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-to-describe-the-computer-related-job-that-im-looking-for/704438>\
**Category:** Factual Questions\
**Created:** [November 12, 2014, 11:36am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-to-describe-the-computer-related-job-that-im-looking-for/704438 "2014-11-12T11:36:44Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Page:** 2

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**Author:** ![robert\_columbia](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/e79b87/32.png) [@robert\_columbia](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/robert_columbia)\
**Post date:** [November 13, 2014, 4:15am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-to-describe-the-computer-related-job-that-im-looking-for/704438/21 "2014-11-13T04:15:25Z")

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> [@Keeve](#):
>
> …  
> I began my career 30 years ago as a programmer, but I neglected to keep my programming skills up-to-date, so about ten years ago, I shifted to a more “Help Desk” focus. I love programming; for example I can easily make simple-to-intermediate changes to scripts and macros and such, but getting a job as a programmer is not realistic unless I go to school and learn something from scratch - in which case I’d be competing with people 30 years younger than me.  
> …

If you are really a programmer, one who learned the fundamentals of Computer Science, this isn’t really true. If you understand the concepts of pointers, references, stacks, buffers, recursion, threads, blocks, functions, types, casts, regular expressions, automata, and Turing Machines, you can teach yourself any language or framework. Even Cobol on IBM mainframes. If you’re a Visual Basic jockey who hacks and kitbashes someone else’s scripts until they sorta work or at least don’t crash but you don’t know why, not so much.

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