[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.