As someone who wanted to get into software development originally, who went to college with a passion for computer science and familiarity with programming from the beginning, there were a few major road-blocks. One, the classes were very poor. We approached programming the way the worst History classes approach transformational periods. Instead of rote memorization of dates and battlefields, it was rote memorization of standard library functions. Our first project was the canonical “Hello World” program, and the last project of the semester was writing the same program except it used an ofstream instead of cout.

Then there is the job market. I was looking on Monster and shit and it was all Bloomberg fintech shit. Or it is a meaningless app with obligatory Facebook account tie-ins to compete with the one million other meaningless apps on the app store. The only interesting stuff going on is in the Free Software world, but those poor bastards don’t get paid (and only recently has the patreon model gotten anywhere). Anyway, I became a CNC machinist.

In a lot of ways, to become a professional software developer you need to not give a shit.