[yamtaddle]

I'm literally only doing this because tinkering on computers in high school got me skills that had me accidentally landing jobs that paid better than anything I actually wanted to do, with comically little effort. Never intended to do it as a living, don't really like it (and like it less every year), but don't want a 50-70% pay cut in middle-age, either.

[y-c-o-m-b]

Similar story here. I got into this because of video games and that accidentally turned into a career in software development. I originally wanted to get my shit together and go to med school (or in the med field at least), but got turned off by the cost, duration, and non-living wage during pre-med/residency.

I'm nearly two decades into the software dev industry now and working in a FAANG. I use "working" loosely as I've completely gone into quiet quitting mode for the last 5 months or so. I hate this job, I hate this company, I hate this industry. I can count on one hand the number of times in my career that I actually enjoyed working on a particular project and those were exclusively lone-wolf risks I took to advance myself (thankfully they paid off).

I'm only doing this to support my family. There is not a single day where I don't dread sitting down in this fucking chair and staring at a screen for 8 hours. Thankfully I'm able to stave off depression with hobbies and other interests.

[yamtaddle]

> I'm only doing this to support my family. There is not a single day where I don't dread sitting down in this fucking chair and staring at a screen for 8 hours. Thankfully I'm able to stave off depression with hobbies and other interests.

I've preferred working tech support. I've preferred low-end service jobs.

But those pay shit, so here I am.

I think I might really enjoy & be good at product management, but breaking in without lucking into a role at an existing employer is tricky. Keeping an eye out for opportunities—I definitely do not want to still be killing Jira tickets and fighting broken tools and bad SDKs when I'm in the last third of my career. Started out ambivalent, and have grown to hate it.

[EDIT]

> There is not a single day where I don't dread sitting down in this fucking chair and staring at a screen for 8 hours.

Oh, yeah, and this resonates, in particular. If not for having a family, I'd be out already. Find something with much lower pay but a quick little well-defined, "person asks for thing, I deliver, they're happy" reward loop, ideally with as little glowing-screen time involved as possible, and go back to having, like, any energy at the end of the day. All that extra money would not be worth staying in this industry, if it were just me (also I'd have a whole lot more saved up for early semi-retirement by now if nobody else needed any of it, LOL)

[robbyking]

That's really funny, my story is almost exactly the same. I was working an hourly job out of high school and my roommate was a web developer who not only made about 4x what I did (this was 1998), but he also got to wear jeans and death metal shirts to work and play Half Life at lunch. I bought an HTML for Dummies book, built a small portfolio of skateboarding websites and was hired at his company a few months later.

25 years later I'm a still working in software (though not on the web), and my motivation for doing so has changed very little.

[yamtaddle]

Haha, mine was within a couple years of your story, even. I wonder if that still happens—kids pick up some light computer skills, accidentally end up with a tech career and find it hard to leave because everything else pays a ton worse and/or requires extensive, expensive re-training—or if that was just a span of a few years we both happened to be the right (or wrong...) ages for.