HACKER Q&A
📣 newbei

How/When did you find your calling in life?


How/When did you finally find a field you were interested in, and decide to pursue it for the rest of your life?

Was it ever too late to revert a decision you made about your career?

Supposing you were a kid, and really didn't know what you would be doing When you would be however old you are right now. What would you do in that case?


  👤 surprisetalk Accepted Answer ✓
I highly recommend reading the book "So Good They Can't Ignore You".

A perfect career is very rarely something you can will into existence. It's more like a series of very small stepping stones. Certain stones will move you towards autonomy, flexibility, etc.

I generally recommend thinking about your day-to-day dream life (how much expendable income? living in nature? vacations? etc.) and then strategizing some paths to get there.


👤 h2odragon
I was 13, I had a computer with BASIC, a printer, and a manual for the printer that described all sorts of neat things it could do. So I wrote a program that sent codes to the printer to demonstrate some of those things.

Showed it to someone who had a use for it and was willing to pay me for it; and that was the experience that opened my eyes to the fact that I could find an excuse to play with computers even more.

I wanted to fully comprehend computing from the plug to the outputs. I can't say that I've got there completely yet, but it's been a great deal of fun so far. Doesn't look like I'll run out of new thing to learn anytime soon, either.


👤 thrwwycbr
I found my calling when I watched Person of Interest.

I still think that the series was ahead of its time, and predicted a lot of scenarios that happened afterwards in reality before anybody thought of that being even remotely possible.

I also have the theory that every child that owned a C64 or Amiga went on to automatically be drawn to IT security, pentesting or similar areas.


👤 devdude1337
Christmas 1992 - my parents gifted me the Nintendo Gameboy. One hour after playing Tetris I told my dad: that’s what I want to do when I’m grown up.

And now I’m a grown up L block. Mostly useful but often leaving gaps


👤 jzombie
I'm 92. I received my first phone call when I was a kid. There's still time.