do you regret getting out? Did you learn any valuable lessons in other domains you worked in?

Looking back, would you advise to stay in, or experience other lifestyles instead?

I regreted getting out in that I took a large paycut (50%) when I dropped out but I was able to start making it up quickly as I got promoted about 6 months in. (I only ended up making up about half of what I lost so for me software definitely has more $ potential) Depending on the field you get into, a lot of the technical skills you acquire are really just logical ways of problem solving. These skills can be applied to a variety of fields, making things that a majority of others may find challenging into relatively trivial challenges. Not because I was smarter than anyone else but just because developers are trained to approach problems in a specific way. I got into analytics, so if you jumped into sales or something like that your mileage may vary. I was also able to leverage my programming background to creating some automated vba scripts which carved hundreds of hours a year off of my teams workload. Simple scripts that any developer could do but only a developer would think to do. These scripts led to some nice pay bumps.

Nicest part was being able to leave work at the office, it hit 5 o'clock and I was gone. I got to enjoy personal and family time.

I worked for a very large company when I got out which I had not done before and I learned how political things can be. I also got to interact with non-technical co workers which was a nice change of pace.

I do regret the years lost from a software career perspective but when I got out I was fried so I may not have been that far ahead anyway if I stayed in.

I would probably do it again if I had to, it was good to see what else is out there. A career is a long time and I wanted to be sure.

"I was also able to leverage my programming background to creating some automated vba scripts which carved hundreds of hours a year off of my teams workload. Simple scripts that any developer could do but only a developer would think to do."

This is the sort of thing I enjoy. If you work as a regular programmer, you're usually walled off from the effects of your work, and you can spend months on a big project and then it all gets scrapped or becomes pointless for reasons outside of your control. And there are innumerable cogs between you and the customer/client. Your managers and PMs don't truly know what they want either. But helping someone that you interact with daily is tremendously more rewarding, regardless of how cool the technology is or isn't to the cognoscenti.

Did you start working at 17?

I started at 16 during a summer while still highschool as a SQL developer for a staffing agency, it was technically an internship according to the company handbook but I had real deadlines and the code I wrote ran in production until the owner retired and shut the company down about 1 year ago. That experience lead me to advise anyone that asks me how to learn to code to start with SQL. It's easier to go Excel -> SQL -> OOP than Excel -> OOP -> SQL. SQL is such a small language, great docs and a much smaller envelope of operational freedom that a general purpose language. Also teaching SQL first provides more career path options earlier in their careers, mainly because they could screw the OOP and pursue positions as a DBA, which made me feel better about firing or laying off people. Most enterprise projects involve databases anyway.

He did say he has no degree so it seems plausible.

Yeah, you're right. By the numbers he gave it sounded like he could have been even younger than 17. It's always interesting to hear how very young people get into a programming job. I worked with a 15 year old intern who was probably the smartest person I've ever worked with, and we probably would've hired him at 16 if he was looking for a job.

lol strange, you are right, I actually started at 21. Worked til 30, got out for 7 years and then got back in. In my head I have always said 10 years. Weird I have been living a lie this whole time.

Ah ok. Not that it would be that weird to start working at 17 right after graduating high school.