I was a high school dropout working in a skate shop in the mid 90s, teaching myself web design via view-source, and the owner of the shop asked if I could build

I was a high school dropout working in a skate shop in the mid 90s, teaching myself web design via view-source, and the owner of the shop asked if I could build him a little website for the store. This was back when only big companies had websites, so him having one for his little skate shop was mind blowing to everyone. I had no idea what I was doing... just copy/pasting various bits I liked from big websites like Microsoft.com or telco websites as they had the "nicest" sites at the time. It got me poached by a media company who was all-in on the dotcom boom hype and convinced we'd all be billionaires within a year. They paid me stupid amounts of money (for a dropout skater who refused to wear a button up shirt to work) and I cranked out crappy HTML templates for them to sell to people who had "an idea and some money", investing their life savings in the "next big thing". Always felt dirty working there, so I wasn't upset when they went bust and ended up owing millions to creditors and losing everything they had. That all led to a 20 year career in web stuff for F500s and Government as I self-taught my way through web design, to graphic design, to front end dev, to back end dev, then to netsec. To this day I never finished school or got any qualifications, new jobs would come to me via old jobs. Something I think would be impossible in IT today. I left tech about 10 years ago now and mostly work on old cars and be a dad, reading HN to see how much things have changed and for the nostalgia trips like this. It's insane seeing how different things are when it wasn't "that" long ago. I can't think of any other industry that can be so unrecognisable within such a short timeframe.