My first real paying job was at a small little company in Camberley, England called Digital Integration. The two-line advert in a national paper said “Assembly language programmers wanted for real time software”. The number included was in Reading, England. I called the number and the next week was on a train to Reading to go to an initial screening interview.

I don’t remember much about that interview. It was in a boring office building walking distance from the station. I had just finished university and had no luck getting a job, along with about two thirds of my course. This was 1991 and a recession was hitting hard. Nobody was hiring. I still remember the careers advice given to us in the last year of university: