It was December, I was bored to death staring at my four screens and thinking the weather really sucks in Europe in winter, and some guy calls me out of the blue asking me if I want to move to the beach. I had a chat with a few colleagues, one of them told me he spent a year in Australia and loved every second of it; his wife refused to move from Europe as she liked to be close to her parents, so he was stuck in the miserable weather and resigned to his fate.

I took the Skype interview at 6am in the dark of my flat, wearing my suit for work, and he made sure to tell me about how he had just gone surfing that morning. I had to do three trades from the train platform due to the delay and a time change in South Africa we forgot about.

My boss was busy making a lot of money on a volatile morning and took a couple hours to process my verbal resignation, at which point he jumped ("you WHAT?") and told me to go see HR. They trusted me, and were relatively busy, so they let me stay til the next day.

We had a chat in a conference room where he told me that his biggest regret was how his career kind of "just happened", with positions of ever increasing money and responsibility keeping him in the game until he was life-locked (kids, house, cars, skills, network...). He encouraged me to go seek adventure, he had wished to go to Asia at "my age" but never got round to it.

Sydney was even more awesome than I imagined. The rest kind of followed naturally; that and I never managed to get back in, so had to keep going, self-teach, moved companies, etc.

But it all comes down to a cold, miserable day in Geneva and an executive trawling LinkedIn for suitable hires for his team downunder. I sometimes wonder whether I'd have eventually quit to do my own thing, or whether I'd be, like some of my friends from university, debating whether to go for the DBS or the F-type this season.

Programming was my second choice.

I wanted to be a math professor. One day I'm sitting in the office of my favorite professor and we're talking about grad school and PhDs. I asked him if it was worth it. He told me that you don't do it because it's worth it, you do it because you love it. I knew this, and I loved math, so I nodded.

Then he told me what my career could look like after I graduated. Part time, working at 2-3 universities, where teaching math was more of a hobby than a job. I decided that for me, no matter how much I loved math, it wasn't worth it.

Fortunately, I'm pretty good with computers and programming comes naturally given my math background. I'm really satisfied with where I am now, but math is the one that got away.

I was a heating engeneer and liked it but during the winter it was so freaking cold, I couldn't feel my feet. That's when I decided I needed a job which can be done in an office where it is warm during the winter.

I went back to school, made a website with Frontpage for my first band (when I was 22 or something), that got me interested in computers. I self learned webstuff, later landed a job in web but decided to study computer science at a university to trully understand what I was doing. Now I am a Linux programmer in the car industry.

So basically I got cold feet.

Career: Finance/Trading Platforms Developer (by accident). I wanted to be a doctor. And I hate math.

When I was 7, me and two of my friends signed up for a local free summer course for computer skills and typing for Pioneers (this was in Kiev, Ukraine, in mid-90s).

Learning MS-DOS was pretty cool and different. It was also great fun to make infinite-loop batch files that printed out some vulgarities on screen when the instructor wasnt looking. One day, when walking into a class, an older (maybe 15?) guy in corner of the room (who turned out to be a sys-admin) drew my attention: he had a bunch of weird text on screen in some program I've never seen before (all i knew was "copy con mytext.txt"). Then, at a press of a button, his computer lit up and started drawing colorful circles and making noises.

I've just experienced QBasic (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QBasic).

I was fascinated by what I saw and, with encouragement of the the sysadmin visited couple of sessions of an "advanced programming" class. Although I didn't understand much, I was hooked. With great support from my parents - who - and i'm still not sure how - found the means to get me a PC at home (those cost many months of salary at the time) - i started tinkering with graphics, windows, and random computer stuff. Then a "Delphi for Dummies" found it's way to my hands somehow.

The rest of it all, leading up to today, is history as they say. For me however, it's a series of completely random, lucky, events that gave me the initial interest and subsequently permitted me to pursue an absolutely fascinating career.

Today, i am actively dedicating time to get young engineers interested in technology and show them what amazing possibilities it brings.

Maybe one day i'll even write a blog about it :)

I'm a stay-at-home dad.

I fell in love with my son. He drove my wife crazy. She'd rather be coding.

I had goals and dreams of becoming a professional chef. Even applied for Le Cordon Bleu my senior year in high school.

In the meantime I was tinkering with building websites and learning HTML and that. I built a few sites and one day a friend who taught me told me to put some playboy style pics on my site and it'll attract people to come. Being 16 I was down for looking at hot girls. So I did. Then later he told me to sign up for these "webmaster programs" and put links on my site and I can make money. So I did.

Long story short, Paris Hilton did what she does best and lets a sex tape of herself leak and I got ranked in the top 5 sites when people started hammering Google searching for it and I was doing about $5-10k/week in revenue off that video. I decided after 10 years of running porn sites I'd bunker down and really learn to program, and now I'm a software engineer.

So you can say Paris Hilton is the reason I do what I do.

Current job - spacecraft thermal engineer, currently taking a 3 month vacation.

It started when I first played halo CE. I decided I want to make massive space stations like halo and I realized that in the next 20-30 years that will hopefully be possible. Until then I am trying to gather all the tools and knowledge I need to lead the next chapter in space exploration and colonization.

No one chooses insurance, it chooses them. Joined a management consulting firm out of school, got assigned to a bunch of insurance cases. Escaped to Oracle. 1998, got a call from a friend of a friend: I hear you know a lot about insurance...I just got a million dollars to start an online version of GEICO...are you in? 17 years later, my career is insurance.

"I must create a system, or be enslaved by another man's; I will not reason and compare: my business is to create." -- William Blake

I grew up in a software company. Mom worked for a German company that designed embedded software used in automating sea ports and satellite tracking / telemetry. Mission critical kind of stuff. The company would hire developers from all over the world and they would come to Germany and often live with us for a couple of weeks before finding their own place. So many of the engineers became "big brother" kind of friends to me. One of them gave me my first computer. A Sinclair Spectrum 48k. I started using unix (running on a VAX) at work playing with their kit, too.

Mind you I didn't want to become a computer programmer at all. I would come home from school and stop in at my mom's work and all these engineers would be sleeping under their desks because a port worker had been killed when a container ship struck a pier or a satellite entered low-earth orbit and flamed out costing $100 million or something. I associated programming with tragedy and high stakes.

So I went to art school. My senior year I was spending more time in the computer lab than anywhere else. We had a lab populated with Silicon Graphics workstations and I'd written scripts to render my animation across all the machines so I could get a result in minutes instead of hours. Then the web became deregulated.

Lately I found my way into working on rail automation software that had safety critical requirements. Which is exactly what I never wanted to do and so I quit after 3 years.

I'm still in the industry and haven't figured out what I want to be when I grow up.

Currently a software engineer working in NLP and machine learning, with a bit of demo-quality front-end design recently. I started out as an electrical engineer, though.

When I was doing my undergrad, I didn't really like programming. I took many of the core CS classes, though, because I really wanted to do embedded development. I just wanted my degree to be electrical instead of computer engineering because I felt an EE was going to have an easier time getting a job in the rapidly imploding dot-com bubble. Plus, I actually liked the physical aspects better; one of my two backup plans was to become an electrician.

When I got into a real job, though, I discovered real-world programming was more interesting than what I was forced to do in class. Additionally, I got introduced to the world of FPGA and CPLD programming. While my first position was hardware production support, I pushed to move towards signal processing. After 3.5 years I managed to switch programs.

Unfortunately, the program I switched to turned out to be a black hole. It was a DOD program that required special clearances to work on. I found out much too late that this effectively made me a prisoner of the program because getting people cleared was so difficult and expensive. Furthermore, I could say so little about what I was doing that I could hardly get interviews, let alone sound competent in the few I did get.

I took my current job out of desperation. I had been searching for over two years and basically took the first offer I was able to get, which was a small local company. It was a domain I had never worked in (NLP) in a language I had never worked in (Java). It has worked out pretty well, though I can't get as interested in NLP as I was in signal processing. Unfortunately, I think I am trapped again as I get recruitment pings about once every two weeks from my new world but can't get the time of day from companies in the old one I left reluctantly.

Startup founder and now a CEO (which feels like the strangest job in the world). When I was working as a software engineer, I felt like I had a lot of excess energy that I wanted to put towards something that was mine. I am drawn to responsibility, because responsibility means that I'm in a position to make decisions that impact many people. It's thrilling and I enjoy being in the service of other people. Anyways, it's really hard to not have responsibility when you really want it, so I realized I had to leave and start my own thing to really get that.

Technological generalist: programmer, project manager, product developer, database guy, etc.

Why am I in tech? Partly due to participating in the Duke of Edinburgh's Award program and partly because I just took whatever was interesting at university until I was forced to pick a major... when I tallied up my course credits, the shortest path to a useful degree was "computer science" so I did that.

Why does my career look like the plot to "Memento"? Because each time I reached a point where my work was no longer that interesting, I looked around and started doing something else.

So I went from front-line cast member at Disney World[1], to a university grad, to Java dev for a small dev shop, to Perl/CGI and Javascript at a tech mega-corp, to acquire/process/present data on a trading floor, to semi-retirement, to Japan, to a web-dev shop, to an ecommerce mega-corp. At the moment I don't do any development but that will likely change soon as I miss it.

I feel I've been really lucky. I could easy have (and almost did) crashed and burned but somehow it has worked out so far.

The trick is to look at every opportunity and ask yourself "if I turn this down and never get another chance, will I look back and wish I had done it?". If so, think hard about what really matters to you and do whatever will maximize that.

[1] I took a year off university to go work at Disney on a cultural exchange program. It was an awesome experience, I met my future wife (who was on a similar program) and gained extremely valuable customer-relationship experience.

It was the logical choice, really. I'd been programming since a young age, it was logical that I'd become a programmer.

I often wonder if there's a job out there that I might enjoy as much or even be better at. Only other profession I might be interested in is watchmaking (sounds crazy but there's actually a huge demand for watchmakers), but the cost of tuition and the risk I might not be good at it means I'll probably never give it a shot.

Freedom.

The reason I founded a startup is the same reason Jack Sparrow is a pirate. The freedom to choose what to do and how. And when.

For example, right now I'm in the middle of a 3 week paternity leave because of my second son's arrival. Here at HN there's this vibe that if you run a startup, you're not supposed to sleep or take vacation. But really, why be your own boss if you don't use the freedom that comes with the package?

I've always kinda of been into computers and technology. My first encounter was in pre-school with an Apple II; it seemed to be my favorite thing in the school and I'd always watch the teachers when they plugged them in.

I played with a lego a lot and would take apart my RC-Toys to see how they work, and then put them back together. By the time I was 14 I started learning how to upgrade my computer and shortly after I build my first budget gaming PC. Around the same time as the gaming PC I got a chance to see inside the Microsoft compound in Redmond because my to-be step-father worked for Microsoft. I got to see a glimpse inside the NOC, I got to see a server room, and I was amazed that everyone had Nerf guns, the vending machines were free, and everyone made a lot of money. I knew what I wanted to do now: I wanted to be a game developer.

I started playing with linux, aspired to be a "hacker" in the FOX News sense when I was 16. Started learning more, and ended up with a hobby. My high-school years were very rough and my career aspirations went by the sideline for a number of years until I got away from that life.

Then at about the age of 20 I became a recluse, hikkikomori, and my best friends were talked to and found over Skype and various forums. I put my life into anything that involved technology and I gave myself a skillset. Once I got tired of being alone all the time I started putting out resumes to anyone that was hiring and I landed an interview with an animation studio. I excelled at the interview, got a job as a sysadmin, and the rest is history.

A promotion and a raise later I still feel like I've found my place. The job is a perfect fit for my skillset, cultural values, and the kind of people I work with. I think I've found where I belong.

Conincidence mostly. I didn't actively search for what I'm doing now (10% hardware 90% software from very lowlevel microcontrollers/fpga to highlevel business apps). Or maybe is was just destined to be: I wouldn't really want to be doing something else (well, except for quitting jobs all together and go live far away and be self-sufficient, but that's something with a long learning curve).

Wanted to go for biology first but hearing what it would take to really get into cutting edge research I changed my mind and went for what seemed, given my hobbies and complete lack of interest for other non-tech fields,the most logical: electronics engineering. Thesis project was picked truly by coincidence (basically the last one left because we were late, lol) but the company offered me a job because I fit in pretty well. Still working there now parttime (did work in different departments as well in the meantime, now I'm back where it started) and parttime for a startup but the job is similar.

I'm a software developer.

I hated being bored and I didn't like working hard. ;) When I was a teenager I asked myself what kind of activities I enjoyed doing for long periods of time that made decent money and working with a computer was one of those, so I pursued a CIS degree.

But I'll be honest. I hated my job for a long time. My original two reasons are awful reasons to pursue any line of work. I eventually became disenchanted and started making serious plans to switch to photography full time because I loved photography, which had started as a hobby and was growing into much more.

But two things happened which changed how I looked at my job. One was I got over a lot of the initial learning curve and switched companies and found a work environment I liked considerably more. The other was due to my interests in art, which unlocked my desire to understand things which was eventually fed by software development.

I love my job now (weird how that worked out).

Anyway... thats me. :)

First I played video-games all the day. Then I had to fix/upgrade my own PC because I couldn't afford to pay anyone to do it. This got me deeper OS and networking knowledge than the normal user. From building and repairing PCs and building networks for friends came editing configuration files and later writing scripts, first to get things running on my bad machines and then to cheat in games or automating some IRC stuff. Which led to becoming a programmer.

The only thing I knew after school was how to do stuff with computers and playing games, so I did a degree in computer science and worked as a developer.

I didn't really choose to be a developer, I just did it most of my adult and adolescent life and some time people asked if I could code for them and they paid me.

Sadly this led to boring jobs, since I never really searched for anything, I just did what people asked me to do.

Pragmatism. I tried twice to get an engineering degree (electronics and CS) but I am too lazy when it comes to studying boring stuff on a structured manner. On my third attempt (age 23) I decided to water-down my aspirations and simply get a BS with a CS and Math focus. I had been programming for fun since age 15 (an Atari 130xe with a Basic cartridge) so it was natural to do it for money. Naturally, like any real professional, I started learning everything that I know AFTER graduation, using my clients as ginea pigs. I never wanted a job per se so the degree was more of a social fulfillment rather than a pre-requisite to start a professional career. I turned down job offers and opened shop right after graduation. I am 40 now, busy and happy :)

Career: Programming/Creating a startup.

I was an Arabic linguist at the NSA, and would input certain numbers I'd hear into a tool. Whenever I heard a specific one, I was supposed to add 9 to it and put that number into the tool. This drove me insane, because I kept asking why I had to add 9 myself, instead of the program just doing it (since I could describe the rule myself). I started putting in trouble tickets every few months, but they were all ignored. At one point, I just decided I was going to fix it myself, and approached the guy who made the tool and asked him for permission to modify the program to fix it. He handed me the O'Reilly Perl Cookbook, and said to go to town on it.

I ended up finding out in the code how to fix the problem within the first day, and started thinking about other ways I could improve the program to make our lives easier. I made all sorts of improvements, and my cubicle neighbors saw this and asked if there was any way I could make a tool for simplifying their manual process. I got to work on it, and quickly whipped out something that stored all of their entries for later review. The big problem at the time was that I didn't have any basic knowledge of CS -- I didn't even know what a database was, so I built a system of just storing all of the text in flatfiles and using Perl's Tie::File to turn the files into dynamic arrays.

I started making program after program, and what drew me to my career was walking by someone's computer and seeing the program I built on their desktops as they were working. Eventually, the entire division of 80-90 people were all using my programs for their day-to-day, and I had to quickly learn a lot of hard lessons about putting things into production.

So, in short, I think the big reason I chose my current career was that I always loved building things that people not only wanted to use, but thanked me for building them because of how much easier it made their lives. There is nothing more satisfying (to me) than building something useful and having people who use it think you're a modern day magician.

Got a degree in Physics when I was doing grad trips but had a conversation in the basement of a STEM dept in the northeast where I discovered that for people of my race they would have exactly one grad student and they would graduate them with a masters 7 years later(One of the kids from my school went and he has two masters they were ranked #1 at the time and I believe still are). At that point I decided grad school was too much of a risk. I worked in phones for 3 years, mostly technical support and I loved it it was easy for me. So I went back and did a degree in Computer Engineering which I loved and presented some really fun challenges and now I'm looking for something with smarter coworkers than my current government affiliated work.

Pure luck.

After a few crazy moves and dropping out of 3 different universities, I was down to washing dishes at some crap restaurant and underpaid tech support. After 18 months of that, I told myself I deserved better and just quit. A week later I got called for an interview at some financial-software company I'd never heard of, they were desperate for an Italian-speaking geek. 11 years later, I'm a well-paid consultant in an expensive niche.

I'm not an ambitious guy, I've always just wanted a nice house, not having to worry too much about money, and time to geek around. If I could do it all again, maybe I'd study harder, maybe I'd emigrate sooner, I don't know.

26yrs old, Academia (Info Sec), I was in the final year of my BTech Computer Science, i got a scholarship from my Undergrad(UG) university to do my final(4th) year in South Korea as part of an Academic Exchange. The catch was that when i returned upon completion of the exchange i was to work as a TA at my UG university. when i returned i worked there for a year and was sent to do a Master's(Info Sec& CyberForensics) abroad, the catch was that again i had to return and work as Faculty(lecturer) at my UG university. So my career path has been chosen for me in a way.

i would prefer to get into private industry when my contract finishes.

A desire to work at an intersection of programming, physics, and statistics.