Kind of depends how you define self-taught to be honest. Though I went through university, I do consider myself more self-taught more than anything: I got into

Kind of depends how you define self-taught to be honest. Though I went through university, I do consider myself more self-taught more than anything: I got into programming when I was 10. By the time I got to university, I already knew 4 or 5 programming languages and even after that I kept learning more. And at this point I'm using technologies which were far from conception during my years in university, so again - largely self taught. With that in mind: > Why did you get into the field? What did you focus on at first? As I said, I was 10. At the time Windows was the only choice on our family computer so I started with a few batch scripts. At the time someone started publishing a small local magazine called "hacker" which iirc, was coming out once every two weeks and cost what would be the equivalent of 50 cents. And in it there were a lot of mentions of C++. So when my dumb 10-year-old ass saw a C++ book on the window of a book store right after the holidays, with some granny-cash in my pocket, I picked it up. As for the dumb 10-year-old ass - everything was going smooth as hell until I got to the section where namespaces were explored in more detail - I was completely unprepared for that. At the time I had this really cool ICT teacher at school who was aware I was ahead of most of my classmates so he let me do whatever I wanted, installed a C++ compiler when he saw the book on the computer I was using and it was game on from that point on. > What are you doing at your job? Is it everything you dreamed of and more? Lead developer, playing devil's advocate to be honest. Up until very recently (think 1-2 months ago) it was - awesome team, decent work-life balance, decent paycheck. But lately politics are catching up so I'm looking out the door at this point. > How did you break that first-job barrier? Pure coincidence. A neighbor at the time who had a real estate agency and infrastructure from hell learned about what I was into and studying so she offered me a job. > What were you doing before this? Not too much, I had a few small jobs to earn some pocket money, from driving laundry to copying pirated cd's (we are talking about the dial-up era where 1.38kbps was the speed of light). > Any tips for the rest of us? Don't sweat it. Pay close attention to what is happening and what people are developing and dig into it. Sooner or later a point comes where your experience will have immensely more weight than your education. I've interviewed dozens of people and when I look at their CV, I'm 1000000 times more interested in what they've been working on. Triple that if they have a public github account, even if there's one or two tiny projects in them. I'll spend hours digging through the code and commits just to get an idea of how this person ticks.