What a terrific career advice! Go after hard to get skills in your early career, work with the best even if you have to work for free! Don't let the better pay

What a terrific career advice! Go after hard to get skills in your early career, work with the best even if you have to work for free! Don't let the better pay to lure you into dead-end jobs. I wish my parents taught me this when I was 18. I’m thirty-two, a consultant developing in-house software for insurance industry. Well-paid and in demand for the best part of my thirteen year professional journey, getting well above average programmer’s pay I suffered so many sleepless nights thinking about where I really dreamt to be: working for the likes of Adobe, MS or Google. A real software company that makes a difference in the world! Just to think that would have I made some better choices thirteen years ago, I could have been part of the core Skype team right now breaks my heart. But I can’t, I’m just not fit for the job, after thirteen years of hard work there is nothing on my CV that would make a head hunter working on behalf of a real software company to pick up the phone and give me a call. So far the strongest driving force behind my career, the litmus test for any prospective job was financial viability; it was always about the better pay! I had to support myself and increasingly my family since I was 19 and I just couldn’t afford to go into full time education, I had to stay on the path scattered with lucrative but essentially mundane in-house programming jobs. The beast I had to feed was getting bigger and bigger as I was getting older and I didn’t know any better nor had anyone given me the timely guidance to get off the money needle and hunt down the hard-core programming skills and experience needed to hack Linux kernel, write a sound processing library or a come up with a better search algorithm, the skills that would have opened so many doors to me, the doors that now matter so much! The advice I’ll be giving my kids is not to let the financial considerations alone to guide your early career choices, go for awesome skills what will pay off in a fulfilling job later in your life.