I am gonna start my last semester in CS so for me it was just generally games. I went pretty fast from the game dev aspiring route over to other professional areas in my HS years. What about you?
I learned I wanted to crime from grand theft auto
My dream job would be to be to teach people to use Linux and open source and watch them thrive as they really learn how to use their computers. And this was inspired by getting steam and proton to work under Arch for me. π
Not me personally but related. American Truck Simulator has started displaying in-game billboards for an irl truck driving recruiter.
Iβm usually pretty strongly against in game advertisements, but this one just kind of makes sense to me.
It was game design, and I discovered it playing ZZT.
For the unfamiliar, ZZT was a game that came packaged with the tool used to make the game. A bustling Internet community grew up around making and sharing games using this engine. The ZZT scripting language was one of the first languages I learned, alongside BASIC. Nowadays, game-making engines are chocabloc, but back then it was something special, almost unique.
Kind of a roundabout answer to your question, but I got into tech bc of my love for gaming and specifically LAN parties. My buddies and I would get together and knew that hubs were needed (this was ~20 years ago) but didnβt know much else, so I ended up figuring out your to build super basic networks. That led to being a quasi TA to the IT teacher in high school and then to a very basic tech support call center job out of HS.
Iβve been in the industry for over 20 years now, and while not every job has been great thereβs always more to learn and ways to grow, and I still love what I do. I even came full-circle and for a while got to work for the game developer of one of the games my buddies and I used to play at those LAN parties back in the day!