Do you all mind if I tell my story?

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MyStory

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MyStory
Oct 22, 2021 44 Comments

I’ll start from a decade ago. I was off to college at 17. I was excited, I was the first in my family to attend college. My family grew up poor, so I was fortunate to attend but paid for everything off student loans and grants. I was young, and stupid, made a few mistakes in college that led me to go spend a few nights in juvie. My parents found out and they were pissed, so mad that my dad wouldn’t speak to me for months. Afterwards I struggled in college, was in a major I didn’t care about, dropped out, and enlisted in the Army.

I joined the 82nd airborne as a paratrooper. Even though I had a 97 on my ASVAB, my juvie charge blocked me from a security clearance at the time. (It’s expunged now) So… I enlisted as an 11 bang bang, an Infantryman. It was probably one of the most miserable times in life. I had to work 7 days a week, some times when we were in the field I would only get 2 hours of sleep. Fortunately was never deployed.

Well I was still a dumb kid. One day I was out partying with a few other soldiers. One soldier asked me if I wanted to take an pot edible, I was drunk and I said yes. The soldier who offered it to me took one too. He was also very very drunk at the time, nearly blackout. He got really mad and started breaking things. Our NCO woke up and found out, he panicked and admitted to taking drugs and ratted me out too. We had drug tests, I failed and a month later I was discharged from the Army. General discharge. A senior NCO chewed me out, called me a piece of shit and told me I would amount to nothing in life.

I leave the army, parents hate me now. I have nowhere to go. I’m broke and homeless, so I moved back to my hometown and slept in my car. Eventually a friend let me couch surf. I found a bunch of shitty min wage jobs, saved up enough money, and told myself I’d go back to college. I went out partying at my future college, had a drunk convo with someone and they told me I would make a great computer science major.

So I enrolled in school, switching majors to computer science. Was so poor during college, I worked my ass off, working 30 hours a week and taking full time classes. I took out a bunch of loans too, got grants for being poor, and took summer classes / community college courses whenever possible to save money.

I was fortunate to land an internship at a famous retail company in college as a software engineer. That internship led to a return offer for $90k/year, money my family has never seen even. Met my long term partner in college. Became the first in my family to graduate too.

From my first job, I jumped after 2 years to Amazon at L4. 2 years at Amazon and now I have an offer at Facebook for E4. The fortunate position I am in now… I couldn’t even imagine it. There were times I spent picking up quarters from a parking lot so I could afford Taco Bell for my one meal of the day. I feel so lucky. Things do get better, even if it takes hard work.

For those who will ask, current TC is $193k new TC is $270k. I’m a remote dev in LCOL.

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