In college in the 70s, I submitted decks of assembly code and Fortran to an IBM 360 and learned Pascal on a PDP-10. My terrible secret is that most of my career I was a hardware engineering but I had coding tasks pop up here and there over the years. I guess I would not accept a position in Windows coding for two reasons. One, I became pretty anti-Windows since Vista came out and convinced me to switch to a Mac. Two, it is just not an ecosystem I am familiar with so I would start off pretty far behind the eight-ball. Maybe there is a (3) also, that Windows feels like a quagmire where once you get into it, there is no getting out. Linux for me, please! As to your comment about learning tons of new tools, isn't that always the case in a software career? And isn't it great how easy it is to learn modern tools and libraries? That's the main reason I switched from hardware to software. All the fun stuff to play with has been is in software for a while now.