I work in manufacturing and I'm the programmer. I don't have the convience of writing programs by means of the computer I have to write all of our part programs by hand. Makes the job a little harder but I feel I learn more of the machine codes and what they do and what the different moves and canned cycles are. I've been running all manual D.R.O lathes for a few years and running the cnc has been a challenge at first but now its pretty easy since you see the code every day and know what each one does. I get a kick out of old programs I wrote a few months ago when I first started and go and totally rewrite them and ask myself what were you thinking on some of the stuff. I've cut our cycle times drastically since we first got our cnc lathe.