Put as much money into my 401K as I was legally allowed to.

It was 1996 and I just graduated from college in south GA with a degree in CS. I had a choice to work for Total Systems in Columbus GA (https://www.tsys.com/) making $35K (more than enough back then and inline with entry level developers) writing Cobol.

https://www.tsys.com/

My other choice was working in Atlanta GA at a company where I interned the year before as a computer operator making $22K. I chose the computer operator job because it would get me to Atlanta and I could figure out my next step after that.

They ended up needing to expand to a new contract where they needed programming done six months after I joined to create the new department. I wrote the entire fairly complex data entry system by myself in C. Even today I would consider it one of my more complex green field initiatives.

That let me skip the entry level developers job market completely.

Another former classmate of mine is still there in 2025 pushing COBOL code.

Unfortunately, the mistake I made was staying at my next company that I started working at in 1999 for over 9 years and became an expert beginner.

It took me 8 years and three job changes to recover from that and become a true “senior” developer as far as scope, impact, technical skills, etc.

Because of…life…and responsibilities. It was another 4 years until I got into BigTech at 46 (no longer there - thankfully).

Not that I regret any of my choices. The landscape was different back then. But I preach to all younger grads to get out of enterprise dev/corporate dev as fast as possible and do whatever it takes to get into tech adjacent companies that pay more - yes “grind leetCode and work for a FAANG (or equivalent)” (tm r/cscareerquestion). No I never had to but again times are different starting out.

Getting any programming job. I was too stuck on working for FAANG and that made me apply for 1.5 years. Getting a job and just doing something meant I slowly got experience. The pay was shit, the experience was okay. But then after 6 months when I applied again, I was seen as someone "with experience" (in 2018). I felt it was really unfair/crazy because I wasn't that much better.

To this day the toughest things I've done technically are at uni (Rowhammer via JS, hacking binaries, creating computer graphic engines from scratch, etc.).

There were some things in industry that were tougher. Mostly: navigating millions of lines of code, at one company.

My best decision was not making any hard decision, it did took me through some unexpected twists and turns but overall I think I ended up in a rather good place

I was strategic about where and when I gave my fs

Following the conventions of Ruby on Rails.

It continues to pay dividends in app design, organization and code patterns.

Realistically, it was probably graduating high school. It's step one in the so-called 'success sequence' for a reason:

1. Finish high school.

2. Get a full-time job once you finish school.

3. Get married before you have children.

97% of millennials who followed that sequence avoided poverty by the time we hit age 30 or so, so it's got a pretty good success rate. #2 has the most immediate impact here, but #1 makes #2 much easier, and not following #3 sadly makes #2 moderately harder (juggling childcare is tough even in the best of circumstances).

Finishing college would be a somewhat distant second, as it makes the entry pathway into a lot of white collar jobs a lot easier, even internationally. This was especially important when I realized pretty soon after finishing college that I had good reason to leave the US.

I'm now happily married with kids and full time employed in a senior position here in Finland, all by 30, so I'd say I've done pretty well for myself.