That's some really good advice, thanks mate. I really see how that is a much better way in, and getting a lot of other experience along the way. Thanks 
My great pleasure. The experience makes for interesting jobs. And the more varied your engineering background the greater your ability to adapt to new challenges. I've programmed everything from data loggers, water distribution analysis and modeling, water treatment plants, heat trace modeling to pipeline design automation. It has not been a boring ride. Incidentally, I was a high school drop out, never even finished grade 10, tho I have a bit of grade 11 math (the only subject I liked aside from science). I don't advocate this last bit of info as a strategy tho. It does underscore my statement "If I can do it surely you guys can".
you must be pretty happy Michael.
Thru the miracle of drugs I'm working towards that, been a long ride.
Seriously?
Sorry to thread necro but this one was too interesting not to comment on.
I can fully attest to the validity of what MP says, especially the comment about "once your foot is in the door, programming opportunities abound"
LISP is like a dirty little secret sometimes, that not a lot of companies want to strive to commit resources to because of the variable productiveness of any LISP routines they may have used in the past.
For me it was a family connection, so yeah I cheated...but that was how I got my foot in the door and since then I've ran with it. It's very possible. Drafting and design, with no college....just from knowing someone in the business who had a good relationship with their boss. Just enough of one to convince him to let me help out for a few days...after that, he approached me with a job offer. It wasn't until later that year at that same company that I was first introduced to lisp, only as a third-party gifted tool that at the time amazed me, due to the automation it exemplified....but it wasn't until half of a decade later that LISP would once again become a part of my career.
Gas and oil and architecture they're always going to be there....work will be around. If you can reach the people who are in management positions via family connection, out-of-work friendships, or the most basic method- employee to employer or from staff to management, then any intelligent person would leverage the power of automation upon the desires of cad-bees.
If you can code, and you're in a position to show how your code can be effective, this to me has been the only successful method in truly getting the 'o.k.' to code for a living.
I'm a fledling but lisp is so powerful I've been able to put code together that allowed 3 end-users to create an entire refinery's p&id processes , from scratch to 160 cad documents in a matter of weeks, nearly eliminating all of the red/greenlining that those same managers would spend hours of their own time to do. Now the same company has hired me direct and wants me to take a look at the electrical and civil structural processes in addition to see where I can streamline and/or make more efficient their existing methods. Not to interfere here guys, but hey try this out for size....even old-bears like it when the fish are dropped at their feet instead. Just made that metaphor up but I think it's apt.
It seems to me like there's a very small niche that autocad programmers fit into. Yet there's a ton of room for growth---I shudder to think of the efficiency someone such as lee could provide to a company willing to rework their processes from the ground up, integrating custom routines and applications to automate processes and eliminate the human error contained within the manual versions of those tasks...
My 2 cents, sry from the necro'in
