I was super lucky to live near a call center that handled front line support for Microsoft. A few of my nerdier friends got jobs there before me. When I was 20,

I was super lucky to live near a call center that handled front line support for Microsoft. A few of my nerdier friends got jobs there before me. When I was 20, I applied for the Win32 MSDN group. Devs called with questions about anything Win32, I triaged them. I was hired on the strength of my C++ knowledge. I hopped from that job after 9 months, directly to my first app development job, and I’ve never had any trouble finding work. For the first ten years I had to settle for mildly interesting things, but for the next ten, I picked where I wanted to work and what I wanted to do. If I was compelled to summarize how I did it, 1) devoted enormous quantities of free time, from age 12 to mid-career, to getting good; 2) pretty smooth talker; 3) actually wanted to do #1, as in couldn’t drag myself away from it.