Good fun 
and no whinging users 
After starting off with 360 Assembler I eventually moved to the dark side - applications and users - mainly because I was good at bv11$h1tting and on the user side there’s lots of scope.
i’m not a natural coder but loved wading through hex dumps debugging. Whilst cursing the programmer (that would be you, John, by the sound of things 
) who’d written tricksy code that used an alphabetic test value to find a number because the alpha would be able to be used to test if just 1 bit out of 8 or even 16 had been fliipped, therefore much faster running and smaller code in those days when a room full of computers had less power than my phone has now. Clever… but as you say a nightmare to debug.
Best thing I ever did was 360/370 Assembler though. Because as you’ve also said that gave technical knowledge that meant, sitting on the dark side, that it was very hard for IT or IT service or software providers to bv11$hit you technically.
Dead on Karen Those end users 
. They just couldn’t understand that the whole purpose of investing in a mainframe, computer room, network, remote processors, etc. was to give me something to play with. So what if the accounts didn’t balance? I guess that was the genesis of my deep suspicion of bean counters. Which was to be vindicated later in my career. A profession, while vital, unless watched carefully would ensure you went out of business profitably. If a company was a car the CEO is steering, the Marketing Director has his foot flat on the accelerator and the CFO is looking out of the rear window and tugging on the handbrake
I remember my first review with the IT Director in Grenoble (I’d been a sysprog for some years by that time) and he said I was the best sysprog he’d ever seen (he obviously hadn’t seen many ) but I didn’t suffer fools gladly. I took both comments as compliments 
I’ve no idea why he said “but”, it should have been “and”. Which brings us to this course I just stumbled across… it’s 8086 assemble I think, not BAL but what the heck…
I never wrote any 8086 assembler, though I looked at it when the IBM PC came out. The memory management seemed a bit tricky. Segments and stuff?? Too much bovver.
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We’ve always known that the purpose of IT was more IT. 
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I have had the privilege of hobby that paid me a salary. Heaven knows what trouble I would have got into otherwise. An International Man of Mystery perhaps
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I recognise that for myself too, to a degree, since it’s not always been much fun.
More recently I’ve become frustrated that there seems to be only 2 types of people in IT: those trying to break in and those trying to keep them out. Actually getting any work done that might make something that can be sold to pay salaries (and buy the enormously expensive company cars all the IT directors drive - we had an IT team meeting here recently and the car park was stuffed with top end Audi, Merc and BMW) seems almost entirely unimportant. If you think all these hobbyists make me angry (IT now outsourced to India as of this year because the systems were so poor) then you might be right.
I’m going back nearly fifty years, I wrote my first program in 1976 It’s very different industry now.
All those Audis, Mercs and BMWs in the carpark were on on lease or PCPs, with low interest rates they were cheap deals. With interest rates going up the replacements may be less affordable, and of course the drivers have no equity.
I don’t suffer jealousy, but I know that if my sector performed as badly as the IT dept then I’d have been fired a long time ago. It just makes me very cross to to see a bunch of people being paid a lot of money to not do an adequate job.
Ah… well I used to support our team who leased computers to customers.
They told me that expensive cars and computers are cheaper to lease, as the balloon value (the residual left when the car/computer is returned) stays high. So the lease payments can be lower, for expensive cars, as the car has a high residual value when returned as it will have depreciated far less than a cheap brand car.
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Harumph. They might want to see how good a service they get from India. They may come to regret it.
I have only come across one company whose outsourcing to India was an improvement.
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It’s not a choice I would have made, but it certainly hasn’t become worse.
I remember at the start of the move of development to India the systems analysis and design was done in Europe and the coding in Bangalore or somewhere. There was an apocryphal tale of a full system sent of for PL/1 coding tgat came back in COBOL
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