Word of mouth. My first job: my high school CS teacher knew I was good with computers anecdotally. (He heard second-hand from another staff member that I had l

Word of mouth. My first job: my high school CS teacher knew I was good with computers anecdotally. (He heard second-hand from another staff member that I had looked at another student's buggy code, written in a language I had never seen before, and identified and fixed the bug in a few minutes, before I had ever taken a formal CS class at the high school.) One of the teacher's former students had a small business that was hiring people to do some one-off data entry work over winter break and asked if I wanted to give it a go. (I said yes.) Boss liked my work ethic, and offered to hire me back the following summer to work on their C#/ASP.NET code base (even though I'd never coded C# in my life).