At the time, he was making $100,000+ and taking time off whenever he wanted. I think he made a lot more during the fixes that prevented #Y2K from becoming the expected meltdown, but he then ran into headwinds because foreign programmers were being imported to do the work for a lot less than what he was accustomed to earning, so he retired.
I thought about this back when the lockdowns geared up and state governors were crying about lacking the COBOL programmers to fix their unemployment insurance systems.
@cwebber@emacsen Another great episode. I'm not neurotypical, and I was a classic "computer nerd" at school. I was into video games, programming (a bit of #BASIC and #Pascal), #SciFi and fantasy, D&D etc. I was a school librarian all through school, and at high school I was part of the nerd crew who hung out in and around the library. I mostly abandoned this around the time I left school, and only came back to hacker culture later via activism, and being involved in projects like #Indymedia.
This was my first programming manual. It was for an Atari console that could be booted into #BASIC. It had no permanent storage, so programs would disappear after you turned it off.
I was about six. I couldn't speak English very well yet, let alone read it, but I was able to copy the programs from the book and see what they did. I remember being happy I got the random-number guessing program on page 35 working: