alt Hacker NewsI'm the first person in my family to have gone to college, and we never really had any money.
Still, I've always been interested in science growing up. I was programming video games and building little robots before I was 10 and envisioned myself being a robotics engineer when I got older. I got into Johns Hopkins for a double major of physics and astronomy, I couldn't actually afford it, didn't win enough scholarships (they only awarded a very small subset), and my family didn't have the money.
In the end I ended up going to a local college for computer information systems, and while I love my IT job, it's well under six figures, and I'm $60,000 in student loan debt that I'm probably gonna be paying off for the rest of my life.
Damn that is absolutely brutal. I dropped out of college after about 1 year and just learned by watching YouTube videos and installing Linux on a spare computer and running a homelab. Had to hop through a couple of lower paying IT jobs to accumulate some experience for the resume, but am now making low 6 figures in DevOPS, fully remote.
I recomend job hopping if you haven't in a while, that's the only way to really get those 20-40% raises from what you're making at the moment.