Ask HN: Why did you join the tech industry?

I first got into coding at 15 after chatting with the admin of an MMORPG private server I played on often over IRC on QuakeNet. Eventually I discovered that there was more than QuakeNet, and a group of moderators from forum network I followed had an IRC server. There I made a couple of friends and started learning PHP, getting into building my own websites.

I enjoyed it a lot, and I decided that as I got older I'd start my own company building apps! It grew from there, getting my first job locally and a couple of years later joined a startup.

Yeah if you get 1 year under your belt in a stable sector, you know the ins and outs of the system you work on... can easily do 40 hours, wfh or even be remote. Get paid solidly. You are set and you have a life.

I don't even care about it that much but I want to be decent at it so I can always get a job like this. They are not gonna automate everything overnight.

Like most of us, I wanted to write my own games, which I did until I reached professional age.

Now I deeply regret making a profession out of my hobby, for the following reasons:

- Projects in general are unrewarding and uninteresting. People claim the industry is broken due to the hiring process, but I actually find whiteboard interviewing quite fun and challenging. The question for me is not why the hiring process does not mimic a real work scenario, but rather why are our jobs so boring to begin with.

- The industry is infested by puritan and cult like behaviour. Critical thinking is the fastest way to being an outcast and having an unsuccessful career. Plus everyone seems to have realised that you have to be a self-branding narcissist these days.

- Lack of true passion and love for programming in the field. Talking about, I don't know, compilers for example, rewards you with weird stares and disgusted faces.

- The pay isn't that great in Europe to begin with.

I got a Tandy 56k when I was about 7 years old. I tried following the programming instructions in the book with limited success, but I do wish I had an adult who could have helped me along with it. I wanted to make a game like Excitebike.

In college, depressed and unsuccessful in my chemistry major, Quake found me and I fell in love with pc gaming and thought, once again, that I might make games. In junior year, I decided to take Java but though I got an A in the midterm, I couldn’t even get a program to compile. The next semester I transferred to a public college and started a computer science major using C++ of all things where I did really well, made lifelong friends and found my love for programming.

Today, I’ve yet to make a real game, but the journey to trying has taught me much and I really do enjoy creating applications that make things easier for my coworkers so the dream of making video games is on the back burner.