I had been programming since I was six but, as a consequence of having never met a professional, was almost entirely unaware that there was a career in it. The tech industry was an abstraction I read about in the Wall Street Journal, like Wall Street itself.
(This is a major reason why I spend so much effort writing.)
As long as we’re on “Interesting perceptions of reality that one can have as a geographically isolated individual with minimal social network”, at graduation I was under the impression that there were no open programming jobs between St. Louis and Asia, so I decamped to Japan.
