[jacques_chester]

People can work dead-end jobs a long time before getting "called up". I work in "real tech" these days, have gotten to write a book on a trendy technology, have had a hand in multi-billion dollar projects.

Before that I was writing PL/SQL in a remote tropical town for peanuts.

Before which I spent about a decade working a parade of jobs that varied from shitty to crappy in the same town.

It is a normal state of being for many folks that their life doesn't run directly from a fancy highschool to a fancy university to a fancy job.

[kortilla]

The question is about the transition, not the length of time before software programming.

[jacques_chester]

I don't agree with your reading of the question. I feel like "rather large 10 year gap" is fixating in part on the length of time.

[kortilla]

> glosses over the part where you went from installing internet to being a software engineer. It makes it sound like you just magically became a software engineer while road tripping around the country managing a friend's comedy tour.

parent is wondering about the transition to software engineer, not saying that nothing happened for 10 years