When you were a kid, what did you want to be when you grew up?

I remember I wanted to be a veterinarian because I love dogs. :blush:

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I still donā€™t know. Iā€™m retired now.

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At first Astronaut, then Pilot, and later scientist(chemist) in my high school years.

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A computer programmer(became a dream at around 10 years old) and a trader(became a dream at around 14 years old). I was blessed to become both, but still working towards the dream of full time trading.

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Wanted to be a doctor but then I realized how long itā€™ll take for me to make moneyā€¦ that and I hate seeing open wounds.

You must have another computer programmer in the family? How were you exposed to this possibility?

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No programmers in the family. I come from a long line of factory workers. I have no college degree either, yet am a very highly compensated software developer. I just relentlessly pursued my dreams until they became realities. And there was a whole lot of sweat equity involved.

Haha, this is good. That is definitely a deal killer.

A trader! Haha, noā€¦ I wanted to be a violin player, then a designer, then moved on to economics :slight_smile:

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A PRINCESS. :smiley: Hahahaha. Just kidding. Iā€™ve always wanted to be a lawyer. :stuck_out_tongue: I thought I was tough enough to be one. Haha. :sweat_smile:

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Thatā€™s amazing. I have a lot of friends who didnā€™t go to college too - a good bunch of them are successful entrepreneurs now and some are (highly paid) programmers also. School is overrated. I wish I knew what to do when I was younger.

I also wish the younger people I see now would realize this fact and not force themselves to go knee-deep in debt just to get a degree in something the may not even use.

How did you get into programming? What was the first language you learned? Stories like yours are so inspiring - I always share them with nieces and nephews. (They probably roll their eyes internally haha)

I always fancied being a detective in the force, but only because the TV made it look so interesting. I ended up being a graphic designer, then I self trained to be a programmer, and now Iā€™m self training to be a trader.

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My dad was always keeping up with technology. We got our first PC back when I was around 3 years old (1990) and I started using it at the young age of 5 or 6, which was pretty unusual for the early 90ā€™s. We were one of the first houses to get internet when dial-up started rolling out in the mid 1990ā€™s. Maybe from all of that exposure at a young age, I was just really intrigued with creating software.

I believe the first language I learned was VB. I have a brother that is 8 years older than me, one of his friends that was just graduating high school was learning software development and let me borrow his SAMS Teach Yourself VB in 21 days book series. I was around 11 years old at that time. When I got into middle school I started teaching myself C++, which I stuck with until my early 20ā€™s when I switched over to C#.

When I was 23 I got hired at a gas & oil meter calibration company working as a low paid paperwork person. Just a month or two into my job I saw a lot of manual processes that I thought could be improved using software. So I wrote some software on my personal time and eventually gave it to my boss. He didnā€™t know what to think because he didnā€™t realize I could write software. Long story short, unbeknownst to me the leaders of the company were privately planning on starting a new technology-based branch of our company and were looking for a software developer. I showed up on their radar with the software I had just created. Me and another person(who is now my boss) were chosen to start the company, which has since grown exponentially. As they say, the rest is history.

Interesting! Do you think a college degree is necessary for becoming a professional trader?

No, not at all. It probably doesnā€™t hurt to understand all of the intricate details of the financial world, but I think becoming a successful trader boils down to hands-on experience. Anyone who is willing to put in the thousands of hours of screen time necessary has the chance of becoming a full time professional trader.

Like a lot of kids out there I wanted to be an Austronaut. :smiley:

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So cool that your dadā€™s a tech person. Itā€™s important to expose kids to these types of things but also itā€™s nice that on your own, you took that to a different level. What a great story to add to my ā€œschool is overratedā€ library! Thank you for telling us!

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I agree. In my opinion the earlier one exposes their kids to technology, the better. Itā€™s part of modern life, itā€™s best to learn how to use it.

My first use of a PC was an Apple Macintosh at my dadā€™s office in around 1996,1997.
In 2001 we got our first home PC.

what did you end up doing? :slight_smile:

I wanted to be a checkout lady. Ka-ching ka-ching haha!

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