I’ve always been unable to ignore bullshit from management at work. It’s cost me jobs and promotions in the past, but now I work for a trade union, where the ability and desire to argue with bosses is a benefit rather than a liability.

I fell into it, and let me tell you the excel skills of my coworkers is abhorrent. One of them maintains a shared workbook with 30 worksheets all held together by manually-pasted data and she acts like Vlookups are the greatest thing since sliced ass

IT.

Injured out of infantry and poored out of college but landed a shitty little ISP job. Started one to beat that one, because they were sleazy like used-car salesmen. Left embezzling biz-partner to do coding-adjacent job in NJ and stop being startup-poor. Kept working. Fast forward.

I only regret I was unable to use my skills to relo for new jobs farther away like some of my peers.

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!

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!)

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

IT

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

That’s really what decides most people’s jobs