Funnily enough, I had the exact opposite experience: I played with computers all day long as a kid but somehow it never occured to me that I could be a programm

Funnily enough, I had the exact opposite experience: I played with computers all day long as a kid but somehow it never occured to me that I could be a programmer, I used Scream Tracker instead and wanted to be a film composer. After my first internship in a sound production studio, it dawned on me that what I was watching was really cutthroat assembly line work where "composers" had about an hour per episode and were constantly recycling and taking shortcuts. Outside the top 1% of Hollywood composers, that life seemed to mostly suck (later on, I realized that's true for the bottom 99% of almost all art related jobs). It was only when I took a random job to pay the bills and started automating my job away that I discovered the joy of automation with code. Was uphill from there.