Ask HN: What made you choose your current career?

It was December, I was bored to death staring at my four screens and thinking the weather really sucks in Europe in winter, and some guy calls me out of the blue asking me if I want to move to the beach. I had a chat with a few colleagues, one of them told me he spent a year in Australia and loved every second of it; his wife refused to move from Europe as she liked to be close to her parents, so he was stuck in the miserable weather and resigned to his fate.

I took the Skype interview at 6am in the dark of my flat, wearing my suit for work, and he made sure to tell me about how he had just gone surfing that morning. I had to do three trades from the train platform due to the delay and a time change in South Africa we forgot about.

My boss was busy making a lot of money on a volatile morning and took a couple hours to process my verbal resignation, at which point he jumped ("you WHAT?") and told me to go see HR. They trusted me, and were relatively busy, so they let me stay til the next day.

We had a chat in a conference room where he told me that his biggest regret was how his career kind of "just happened", with positions of ever increasing money and responsibility keeping him in the game until he was life-locked (kids, house, cars, skills, network...). He encouraged me to go seek adventure, he had wished to go to Asia at "my age" but never got round to it.

Sydney was even more awesome than I imagined. The rest kind of followed naturally; that and I never managed to get back in, so had to keep going, self-teach, moved companies, etc.

But it all comes down to a cold, miserable day in Geneva and an executive trawling LinkedIn for suitable hires for his team downunder. I sometimes wonder whether I'd have eventually quit to do my own thing, or whether I'd be, like some of my friends from university, debating whether to go for the DBS or the F-type this season.

Entrepreneur in the software business.

I've been interested in computers and software from when I was 8 or so. I've to thank my father who introduced me to computers when he let me use his C64 (for gaming at first but I quickly turned to writing Basic programs as well).

I became an entrepreneur because of freedom and flexibility.

I had goals and dreams of becoming a professional chef. Even applied for Le Cordon Bleu my senior year in high school.

In the meantime I was tinkering with building websites and learning HTML and that. I built a few sites and one day a friend who taught me told me to put some playboy style pics on my site and it'll attract people to come. Being 16 I was down for looking at hot girls. So I did. Then later he told me to sign up for these "webmaster programs" and put links on my site and I can make money. So I did.

Long story short, Paris Hilton did what she does best and lets a sex tape of herself leak and I got ranked in the top 5 sites when people started hammering Google searching for it and I was doing about $5-10k/week in revenue off that video. I decided after 10 years of running porn sites I'd bunker down and really learn to program, and now I'm a software engineer.

So you can say Paris Hilton is the reason I do what I do.

I started trying to make games when I was 5 or 6 on a ZX Spectrum. In retrospect, I never chose to become a software engineer... it was just the obvious thing to do. Interestingly, at that age I was also starting to write short stories. I didn't explore that path professionally, but I've taken writing seriously as a hobby a couple of years ago. I've written a novel and three screenplays so far.

In summary, I'm doing what I was already doing when I was 6. Not sure what to make of that.

Do you still cook?