throwaway for obvious reasons but yes, this is my niche if you will. I grew up very poor in a very abusive family and couldn't wait to get out. Left home as soon as possible, was 17 with no real skills and nothing to my name. I worked for minimum wage for a few years but always had a passion for working with computers. A couple years down the road I was working in a manufacturing plant and hear that they have a tuition reimbursement policy 100 percent of everything for an A reduced amounts for lower grades. I enrolled for over 30 hours in a single trimester at Devry, aced all my classes. They paid the 30k bill or books and tuition and swiftly canceled the program as that was MUCH more than someone at my level even made in a year, I later learned that I was the only person that ever used the program and it was considered a no cost recruiting tool until I "abused" it.

Meanwhile due to "half laziness / half wanted to see if I could" I wrote a "program" in my free time that setup jobs automatically across all the wire cutting machines in the plant and optimized them to specs that I had developed during my time working on the line. it was really nothing more than a VBA script that tapped into the com interface the cutting machines had and mapped out upcoming jobs. I showed my boss and she bragged about it up the chain of command and I was offered an entry level IT position, doing desktop support and the like. However I sat next to the real programmers and eventually picked up the lingo they used and got to the point that I was able to carry on a conversation about development projects and sort of sound like I knew what I was talking about. Some one heard me talking about development and thought hey why not let this kid get his feet wet so I got my first dev project, build a simple intranet that had some HR forms and whatnot which through a ton of googling I was able to pull together somehow. Flash forward a couple months and I was writing my first real web application for sales guys to use in the field that would let them configure a wiring harness that get sent back to the engineering team for review. Keep in mind I am still just a dumb kid with no life skills and bit of an ego. I made some stupid choices, and I stole a computer from work. It just so happened that another guy did too but he didn't just steal one he stole a half dozen and someone noticed. I got wind they were starting an investigation and decided to just turn myself in. I was fired and escorted out instantly, but consider myself lucky not not have been prosecuted.

I looked for entry level IT jobs that fit my skill level for about 6 months. I was broke and starving so I made a resume that made me look like a decent mid level systems engineer and began sending it out. I had job offer for 50k within 2 weeks. Keep in mind that 6 months before I got fired I was making $7 an hour and when I got canned I was making around $15 so I thought I was hot shit doubling my salary to $15, and nearly crapped myself when I got an offer for 50K. It was for a HUGE international finance firm doing systems engineering, I was definatly not qualified but somehow I scrapped by. I hated the job though and began looking for something in the world of software development. I was there less than 90 days before I found a mid level software dev gig that offered me 75k. I was terrified that I would be found out and that someone would call me on my BS. But somehow there was always an out. "I dont know off the top of my head how to write that in PL/SQL I have only used T/SQL but I'm sure I can figure it out." "its been a while since I have done something like that but I should be able to get it done." "Would you mind taking a look and this and helping me figure out what is wrong, my brain is fried today." "You are right that was a stupid mistake, I swear I looked at that a dozen times".

I did this for about 18 months and actually became what I thought at the time was a decent developer. That company awarded me with an all expense paid trip to florida for being a top performer my second year on the job. During that time I learned that 75k was nothing for a decent dev to make salary wise so I started networking with local recruiters and ended up landing a gig at another local company for 95k, however the culture was different that what I expected and I left 9 months in for another gig making 120k working from home. I hated that company and called my previous employer back and asked if they still had room for me. For some reason they offered my old job back and matched my current pay of 120k. 3 months later my boss quite and there was literally no one else on the team that even remotely decent so somehow I got his job of senior dev. Fast forward about a year to now, I was just promoted to Vice President of Software given a 20k raise (puts me at 140k which is damn good for a 20 something in Kansas) and have a great team of a dozen devs working for me.

So yeah, fake it till you make it, make good choices, when you don't own up to your mistakes, learn as much as you can in the process, be kind to the people around you and they are more likely to help you out, and don't be afraid to take a leap, you never know where you might end up.

Just sat in my first upper management strategy meeting the other day and realized I was surrounded by people who know just enough to get to the next step, just like me.