Well, I'm not sure it was so different then. In my case there's a pretty good story behind it. I was working as a temp doing data entry for 1000+ page industrial catalogs, and then we ran a Perl script to generate QuarkXPress files while sizing/moving products within the 3-column layout to cut down on pages. It was sort of a killer feature for the monstrous CMS app they made, and we were the pilot project. But this was 2000 and there were lots of Unicode bugs around © ® ™ ” etc. Since almost every product had a table with 10ish SKUs and 2-6 columns of various dimensions measured in inches, there were a lot of problems---I'd say hundreds per page. Oh and also the script added extra spaces around every special character. We temps were kept around longer than expected so we could circle in red every bad character on every page of the catalog. That was bad enough that I started poking around, saw the app was in Perl, and tracked down the problem (a single regex). When I told my boss I could fix it, he asked me to write up a proposal, which I did, and they asked the original developer if it looked okay. So that's how I got the services job. :-)