I was working at a hotel job part time while doing a bachelor’s business degree when I finished the exam prep up to a point where I didn’t see a benefit and tried out codecademy.

I had an incredibly pure joy of just creating shitty webpages and doing assignments, learned some javascript and then it hit me.

I started a compsci degree, stopped working and got some student loans and overkilled every programming assignment. I basically thought “If programming is the most valuable part, I’m just gonna max it at the cost of everything else” and it was a fantastic choice.

I applied to all the jobs in Iceland, nobody took me in so I started applying to bunch of jobs in all of Europe. Ended up landing my first job in Germany and that’s where it my career started.

From a news paper ad. Yes I’m that old. It was only almost 26 years ago…

Been climbing communication towers since 2000 March. I’ll be 50 on the 16th.

IT

It was a place that paid a good wage that chose to hire me

That’s really what decides most people’s jobs

IT professional for 20 years. C/C++ developer for 10 years prior to that.

My first job out of college was mostly luck. I took a job doing tech support but after a couple of years was able to transition into development work.

Virtually every job since that first one has been thanks to connections I made among coworkers. I got my current job because I knew two employees here. One of them was a co-founder of the company, and somebody I’ve known since the 1990’s and worked with at 3 other companies prior to this.

I was on CL looking for an N64 controller and this drunk guy posted an ad for an English teacher in Beijing in the for sale part of craigslist.

I thought that misplaced ad was funny, applied, got the job and flapped over to Beijing to teach.

Rocked. made more than in the states working less than half as much ($2500 USD/month for 9-20 teaching hours a week), cost of living was insignificant, great food, learned mandarin, started traveling and never stopped, and a lot more!

C# Software dev…

Well i liked doing it during test runs. Wanted to be a cook but that doesnt pay. Neither does if you get a degree in history and i wouldnt have made it threw more standardised tests.

And that one company was the only offer i got to train me sooooo here i am. :)

Not that i dislike it. Its really fun. (Exept the user story writing. I really dislike that!)

I chose from a list of vocational schools that the GI bill would pay for.

Imagine my dismay after I graduated the schools, Veterans Affairs told me I have to pay all that money back. So I’ve spent the last 15 years working those jobs to repay the government all that college money they said I earned for serving in the army. Thanks for all these years of empty promises & torture, GI bill.

Rust Software engineer.

At a very young age, maybe 12yo, a friend of my mom’s knew I liked computers, maths, and english, so he sent a youtube course to me on python. And I just couldn’t stop watching it. Since then I’ve learnt a few more languages, but Rust stuck in my mind and I simply loved every part of it. Recently I received an offer to work with Rust on a financial company and I’ve never been so excited about a job :3

Emergency/Crit care doctor.

I initially studied physics/maths with a goal to go into aerospace engineering. I was binge watching scrubs and I thought medicine might be cool so I did that, then I thought emergency medicine sounded cool so I did that, then I thought critical care sounded cool so I did that.

Basically I’m a child that makes poor life choices because things sound cool.

My previous boss showed me the job listing and said that it was better than anything he could offer, and told me to apply for it out else he’d lose respect for me.

My career found me to be honest. My university study was a dead end (AI) and I needed money. My then-girlfriend had japplied for two jobs, one entry-level programming job and another one, not programming related. She had just been hired by the other company when the programming company contacted her for a second talk. Of course she declined, but they asked whether she knew anybody with a bit of programming experience who was looking for a job. The talk went well and within days I had an actual income.

Mine was all over the place to be honest.

Couldn’t afford college, so I joined the military as a weather forecaster - which is what I’d wanted to go to college for anyway.

After my contract, I tried to get into a college for meteorology, but because of the way some “classes” are graded for the military associates you can get, my GPA was technically too low for that program to accept me. I didn’t really have another choice for a college at the time, so I did a ton of research on bls.gov and decided to get a degree in geology.

Gosh I loved that program. But unfortunately I got really sick midway through and spent a lot of time in the hospital. What I was diagnosed with basically meant that I would never be able to be a geologist, so I had to swap gears again.

Instead I found GIS and got my degree in technical geography. Took a ton of internships that landed me with a good resume.

Now I work for a utilities company, making maps that are used internally. Since it’s utility work, we’re union and we have great benefits and flexibility. It’s really worked out for me

In 2008, I was fed up with a combination of wage slavery and freelancing, so I started looking around for a proper career. I found a job posting on monster.com for something called “seismic survey technician”. I was severely underqualified and I had no idea what it was, but it involved computery stuff with and emphasis on Linux and other unix systems, in addition to international travel which sounded interesting, so I sent in my application out of curiosity.

I ended up getting the job, turns out dicking around with Slackware and FreeBSD for 10 years was actually useful. Over the years since then I’ve carved out a pretty comfy niche in the industry.

Basically because of video games.

It first started with doing some admin work for a very early online StarCraft tournament. Keeping the roster/grid up-to-date and posting results … by literally editing the html file. Started out helping out more and eventually got into PHP code of this early tournament software and helped with that.

Then later it turned into writing scripts and addons for World of Warcraft, as well as just hosting the general infrastructure like forums, dkp systems and voice chat servers you need for a large guild. Even later external online tools for EvE Online (D-scan parsing, wormhole mapping).

Then I just got lucky and while telling someone all of these “qualifications” they basically just hired me. Even funnier, over a decade later an old WoW guildmate approached me with a programming issue … and after solving it he offered me a much better job. That’s were I work now.

Did a few jobs while still in school, since then I was basically handed over to new jobs by reference. Never had to write a CV or ask for a job, always “when you are done here, I’ve found you someone who needs your skills”.