30yo. Grew up on a small farm in rural Illinois. Studied Physics / Math at a no-name liberal arts school in the Midwest. Got a job as a programmer out of school working for Sears Portrait Studio (no lie). Wrote a piece of OSS software over Thanksgiving break 2012 that front-paged on HN. Major tech co reached out the following week. Got the job, moved to SF, etc. I now work for a fairly well-known startup, living 'the dream.' Incredibly thankful for the opportunities that I've had.
Ask HN: How did you get to your current job/startup?
51–60 of 82 posts
Re: Ask HN: How did you get to your current job/startup?
#5231 years old - in a couple of days I reach my 3rd year anniversary in the industry.
I had the typical profile of a student who was going to get into any college I wanted (700+ on both math & verbal on the SAT I, 740 in Math in 7th grade, 800 on the SAT II Math 2C in 8th grade, 730+ on 5 SAT IIs, including Writing, captain of varsity tennis team for 4 years, played varsity for 5, etc.), but ended up not getting admitted to any of them, in large part due to my bad college essay. I went to a state school in NY instead, and entered college with 56 college credits (including Calculus III/Multivariable Calculus & Linear Algebra in 10th grade, and college chemistry & differential equations courses). I was a bit of a bad student in college - failed 3 courses in my majors (math & mathematical physics) in part due to laziness. After my second year, I turned around my work ethic and started working hard again of my own volition, and excelled.
I dropped out of my PhD math program at UIUC after 4 years, largely due to extra-academic issues. Spent 2 1/2 years looking for a career track job - I was willing to do whatever it took, I even enlisted in the Marine Corps Reserve to try to get a better chance. 2 years into the search, I got fed up looking for any sort of job, so then I started teaching myself programming. A half year later, I got my first job, but my efforts at learning did not stop there - I experimented with tech from didn't languages/platforms from Java, Scala, Ruby, Python, PHP, and Node.js. My first job also had me doing frontend, and using angular.js just before it became hot. I was mentored to drill down into source code to figure things out. I also lurked in the angular IRC channel and asked for help once in a while, but also tried to help as many people as possible.
As I spent more time in the angular community & using angular, I became uncommonly versed in the intricacies of the framework, and picked up being disciplined in writing unit tests. This turns out to translate very well in the profession, and I have been able to turn this to become a lead frontend engineer at one point - I switched jobs 4 times so far, and am currently a senior engineer who does some open source in my spare time (lead development on UI Bootstrap, developer for the ng-bootstrap & UI Router projects, occasionally contribute to Angular).
Some luck, and self-initiative, hard work, and smart decision making has helped me succeed.
Re: Ask HN: How did you get to your current job/startup?
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
Did you ever really fare well in Mechanical Engineering?
I did. I was one of the youngest people in the company (250+ person company) and worked in the R&D department. There were several rounds of layoffs in the year I worked there and I survived them all and was given a raise. I simply found ME to be too slow on multiple dimensions.
I feel you. I had the same experience working as an ME in R&D and left for programming. What languages did you end up learning? What was your first?
Re: Ask HN: How did you get to your current job/startup?
#54When did HN turn into reddit? Not just this post but recently a lot
It happened in the fall of 2007. I was actively reading both sites and saw it happen.
Re: Ask HN: How did you get to your current job/startup?
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
Just curious, how old were you when you hit the 6 figure salary and which city was that in?
I'm on the East Coast, mainly Boston. And I was between 26 and 27 when I got the "achievement unlocked"... That is not to say it can't be achieved much younger, but then again, it's never too late.
That seems very young. I think I only know one person who had accomplished that, and she's a 4.0 student who skipped grades and actually finished her masters on time.
Re: Ask HN: How did you get to your current job/startup?
#56I'm 32 now. I dropped out of High School out of disinterest and obtained a GED. My interest was in computers; I spent my teenage years coding and (re)assembling computers.
My first job was an intern at a Help Desk for a media company, making minimum wage ($5.25 at the time, iirc). Toward the end of my internship I accepted an offer to continue working full-time, making 18k/yr. "You don't have a college degree," was the justification for that amount. I excelled technically, eventually taking on a more sysadmin role. After 1 1/2 years I began to question why I still made significantly less than my college-educated colleagues, even though I became a lead with way more responsibilities. Angered, I took the ACT exam, applied to state universities, was accepted, and left for college.
I switched majors from CS to Broadcasting during my freshman year because I was bored with the intro courses. In retrospect, this decision helped me become a more social person, as the Broadcasting/Communications curriculum forced me to work with others and do a lot of public speaking. I somehow managed to graduate in 4 yrs (I was lazy, hated doing papers and taking exams).
That was 8 years and three jobs ago. I now work at a well-known tech company making over six figures. All of my jobs up until now were because I knew someone and had the technical ability. I applied to work at my current job because I wanted to work for a tech company with a tech culture (previously all media + very corporate).
TL;DR - I despise school. All of my technical skills are self-taught. All of my jobs up until the present one were obtained because I knew someone and had the technical ability.
Re: Ask HN: How did you get to your current job/startup?
#57I'm 33 now. I was an artist/painter. In about 1998 I started messing with computer animation. I went to art school and found my computer experience was more useful and stopped painting. My animations slowly became scripted with, Director's Lingo, Flash's ActionScript (a flavor of ECMAScript), and Maya's Mel(a flavor of C). Through all of these I learned the basics of programming and I was able to get work far exceeding what I ever dreamed of being possible as an Artist. I was interested in the internet as a place to make creative things and was able to get paid creating for people. I graduated college in 2004, the first real salary position I had was at a large advertising agency I got through a recruiter. I stayed for a few years doing work for huge clients and learning how to program and design better end products. In 2005 I joined an ActionScript user group and later that year started a company with two other friends from this. We learned Ruby on Rails and accepted any work we could find. We never quoted enough, we never agreed on anything, and we all learned a lot before totally failing. Through this I helped build a few MVP's for some startups. When the company folded I jumped from one startup to another building larger and more well crafted applications. Through this time I kept going to meetup groups and all of my work connections have been through relationships with people that I have met at them. I've been at my current startup for 5 years.
Re: Ask HN: How did you get to your current job/startup?
#58My current status: CTO of an online education company.
How did you get your current job or startup?
> Friend's recommendation.
Did you go to college? Dropout?
> Yes, top 1 university in China. And yes for dropout, I quit my master when there was about 3 months close to my M.E. degree.
If your did go to college, have you ever failed a course?
> No.
Did you have to move to a different country?
> No.
How did you manage that and what was (in general) the biggest obstacle/low-point of your journey so far?
> I worked for a U.S. based company for almost 8 years and they kicked me out for bad performance when I didn't work as much as before (at least 12 hours per day, 7 days a week) because my son got seriously ill and I needed time to take care of him. Then I did some freelancing but got a really bad agency (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10433237). I lost my job, my savings and almost my son too.
During then, I was close to lose hope of life for several times. But my family kept me up. We lived a very low cost life for about half a year, during when I did some work for a friend who runs a small business and used that income together with my wife's (totally a little lower than 3000 USD per month) to support a family of four. You may think that was not a small amount but Beijing's living cost is very close to SF. That barely covered the rent, food, clothing and tuition.
I kept doing the contracting job for my friend and I did it well. I worked 20 hours a day and managed to get one of his projects done within 1 month instead of 2 that we agreed on. I had to because that was the only way for me to generate enough income. I kept this performance and workload. He was impressed and later on when a friend of his asked about a candidate for CTO position, he recommended me. Now I have built up a team and work very happily. I am paying off my debts month by month.
I think I may have been slightly off topic. It's just I feel I need to tell someone my experience. Life had been tough on me for the past 2015 but I am glad I never gave up, and have a supportive family.
Re: Ask HN: How did you get to your current job/startup?
#59Lots of luck + some hard work. Graduated from a decent state school with a degree in English and started working for a small publishing company as an "editor." The luck part was that the company was so incredibly cheap that rather than hiring a person with real programming skills, they opted to repurpose a young person (me) with some technology knowhow to do some programming for internal stuff at a fraction of the co…
Hey, come on, give yourself the due credit. You probably put in more hard work than you give yourself credit for :)
Re: Ask HN: How did you get to your current job/startup?
#6035 years old. Started out in Florida in the honors program at my state college on full+ scholarship, got a mix of Bs and Ds the first semester, went downhill from there. Mine was mostly a motivational problem though, I hated that you had to go to classes you weren't very interested in to graduate... so I just didn't go to those classes. Unfortunately they are required to graduate, and at some point they dismissed me. After that I got an AA at a community college with fairly high grades, and went back to my original college. I eventually withdrew from school to prevent being kicked out for academic reasons so I could have a shot at coming back at some point in the future.
During college, I was also working full time at a local police station. Started out in the records section, then moved to the forensics section helping with their computer stuff. Eventually I became a forensics technician with a specialty in computer forensics (at this point I was done with school). This was probably the job with my highest job satisfaction, I felt like I was contributing and making a difference. CSI was very big at this time, and even though people mostly dislike police.. they like the civilian forensic technician who is trying to help them. Unfortunately it paid pretty poorly (~36k), and so I took a job as a full-time computer forensics (no field work) at a sheriff's office about 8 hours away for almost double the pay (55k). I worked for a child pornography task force, and at first I thought I could handle it... but it got pretty depressing sometimes and I ended up dreading going into work. Luckily(??) I ended up getting divorced around this time and couldn't afford to live alone so I quit and moved back in with my parents at 27 years old.
At this point I realized I needed to do something else altogether, and I had always liked programming. I had enjoyed writing a few scripts to parse files out of unallocated space and also some report-writing software while I was working in Forensics. So I got a job as a programmer working for the state (~36k). It was pretty boring... I still liked the programming part but we were doing nothing but maintenance and the actual work was not that often. So after a year there I started looking at jobs in California. I found a job on craigslist in San Diego and did a webcam interview, flew there with two suitcases and started working in early 2008 (55k). 55k in California wasn't very much though, I was riding the train/bus to work for a long time (1hr+ commute). Eventually I started doing freelance work in addition to my main job. Once that happened I was able to ship my car out, fix it, and trade it in.
In late 2010 I got a job at Sony (~80k) and stayed there until early this year. Consequently I broke the six figure mark early this year (34yoa at the time), although I was close by the time i left Sony (over if you count bonuses). I could probably make in the 150-200k range now I if I hunted around for a while, but I like my job (almost full control over technical stuff) and while more money is good it's not my primary focus anymore.
Anyway, that's my life story. I'm not sure exactly what anyone can glean from this.. I still have problems with motivation. I want to start a startup but can't seem to trust my own ideas enough to steadily work on them.
Also on the college front.. I've thought about going back to finish (just to get it done), but I don't see the point anymore. I don't think I had the right mind-set going into college, I was pretty poor socially and I didn't drink back then... all bad things to enjoy college properly.