Junior in high school, working as a UNIX Systems Administrator - got hired (at 17) by a .com company. Ended up learning Perl and MySQL out of it. Very fortunate

Junior in high school, working as a UNIX Systems Administrator - got hired (at 17) by a .com company. Ended up learning Perl and MySQL out of it. Very fortunate that the boom ended and I lost my job (and ended up going to college), as staying as a Systems Administrator wasn't where my heart lay.