[zentiggr]

FWIW, I went from building single board computer and learning COBOL in high school, to lots of personal / freelance projects, to lots of menial jobs, to the Navy, to C/C++ programming in 2000-2007, to tier 2 tech support until about two years ago, and I'm now working for a DoD contractor supporting a legacy Java app and learning C# as the language of the rewrite.

53 now. It's been a weird ride, my own faults contributed a lot to not progressing anywhere near as fast as others that I feel I could code as well as... but I'm having fun with this and if life turns out that way this job will be a good solid stepping stone to any other Sr Engineer position.