Age 15, 1988, Left school. 5 GCSEs A-C.
Nothing special to show for my time there.
Salary £0K
Age 16, 1989, At the end of the year, booted off a National Diploma (ND) at college.
Mostly for lack of bothering and too much drinking.
Salary £0K.
Age 17, 1990, Spammed (using snail mail and stamps) every IT company in a 10 mile radius.
Which led to a couple of part time jobs, a lot of "We'll keep you on file" which is code for "Its in the bin", then landed a position at the local Royal Aerospace Establishment (RAE) six months after they initally interviewed me.
This was a massive lucky break.
I was a lowly Administrative Officer (I was 17, with all the worldly experience of a squirrel), and I worked in the Computing Department as a computer operator (doing all the feeding and watering of a big systems that is too menial for SysAdmins). I had exposure to Honeywell mainframes, VMS servers, a Cray supercomputer (it was liquid cooled and cost several million quid), some small things running an obscure OS called Unix etc.
I got paid shift allowance, some wierd thing called London Weighting Allowance and got sent to college 1 day a week for free! Life was great for 3 years. Finished the National Certificate and was shoved on a HNC to follow.
Unfortunately, as is common in the civil service, reorganisations come along, expensive consultancies are brought in, downsizing has to happen, costs need to be cut and departments have to close (at the same time that big contracts are given to expensive suppliers to provide new systems and make everyone else obsolete and everything else not work). And because an Admin Officer is an Admin Officer is an Admin Officer, I was shipped off to another deparment.
So I wound up in a role typing data into a database all day and producing boring spreadsheets and charts for another department. This was a department involved in making things blow up and putting pointy sharp things through other people+vehicles, but it was still really boring. And I lost all the allowances too. And I really lost faith in college who were using BBC Micros when I was used to seeing Silicon Graphics kit (used to create Jurassic Park!) and rooms filled with noisy hardware.
I looked outside to get back to my Operations / wannabe-SysAdmin roots.
Salary £8 - £12K
Age 22, 1992, landed a role at a aircraft manufacturing company who needed an operator.
I was back to my roots on a much smaller scale. HP Minis, and the rise of the PC, client-server and Microsoft.
Office was everywhere, email was booming from nowhere and I got involved in all of it as the company transformmed from dumb terminals to PCs, TCP-IP and internet connectivity. I also delivered the reports around the company. Bloody loved it.
We would get quotes and implementation plans from big expensive consultancies, play them off each other and work out what we needed to do ourselves.
Why pay £100K for some expensive guys in suits to come in and install everything when you can send the skinny kid off on a bunch of courses and he'll do it for peanuts working every hour he can? Which is what I did.
Did that for 5+ years until I worked out despite a yearly incrmental payrise I was massively underpaid for the skills and experience I now had.
Salary £14 - £18K (including shift work and overtime)
Age 25, 1998, went off to work for a systems integrator
I went to go and become one of the expensive guys in suits. Working across the country, often in the City, for big name firms, institutions, banks, brokers and other shysters. Given my previous salary and lack of proven experience in front of real business people, they paid me £20K to start with a promise to pay me in line with my colleagues when I had proved myself. Bought a suit and a shiny car.
Built servers and networks for banks, did troubleshooting for the stock exchange, did support for anything and everything.
A year or more went by, review time came and went, and nothing changed. Some of my colleagues already on double or more than me got massive payrises.
And I was fixing their stuff because they couldn't.
Salary £20K + car allowance. Bonus £0 (.
Age 26, 1998, decided to jack it in to go travelling.
Came back in time for 1999, the dot-com bubble was soaring.
Age 27, 1999, went back to work for the aircraft manufacturing company
They offered me my old role back for £18K. I knew they'd had multiple contractors in covering my old duties, what they were paying them, and laughed.
Went back to them for £28K.
COBOL millenium bug was a dull disappointment.
As was NYE2000 watching Robbie Williams on the telly. Nothing blew up.
Loved it, until one day I intercepted an email showing how the whole team (including the IT manager) was headed for closure, redundancy and outsourcing within weeks (if you are going to send emails like that with the associated documents - use the right ****ing email address and encrypt the contents!).
Jumped before I was pushed.
Salary £28K plus overtime.
Age 28, 1999, went to work for a company providing IT services to finance companies
Basic windows admin, lots of promise of learning new stuff.
Main responsibilities were actually to wear a suit, answer the phone and keep quiet and look busy.
Everything was actually run by a couple of contactors earning about £70K each and hoarding anything and everything.
Bored to death.
Salary £33K, no overtime, no bonuses, no prospects. Felt like I'd sold my soul.
About the same time I was introduced to my second massively lucky break while fixing their server one evening on a cash-in-hand basis.
Also regret it. I would have done it sooner, it's just permanent roles have landed at the right time with ease and possibly luck.