I got my first job as a software developer in 1996. It was never negative it was just a job.

Despite what you see on r/cscareeerquestions, if you tell anyone outside of tech that you work at a FAANG, they just shrug.

I was a hobbyist for 10 years before I got my first job. I was a short (still short), fat (I got better) kid with a computer, what else was I going to do?

But by the time I graduated in 1996 and moved to Atlanta, there were a million things I enjoyed doing that didn’t involve computers when I got off of work.

I’ll be in my 30th year next year. My titles might have changed but part of my job has always been creating production code.

I have never written a line of code since 1996 that I haven’t gotten paid for. It’s always been a means to exchange labor for money and before that, to exchange labor for a degree so I could make money