I'm almost completely self taught. Went to uni for a couple years and changed directions a bunch (CEng -> CS -> Math) before dropping out.
> Why did you get into the field? What did you focus on at first?
A friend back in high school pointed me at the problem of brown numbers (Brocard's problem), which are pairs (n,m) where n!+1 = m^2. Known pairs are (4,5), (5,11), (7, 71). I became obsessed with this and attempting to find a new pair, and spent most of high school learning programming to improve my searching programs. Things went from there, since I knew that's what I wanted to do.
> What are you doing at your job? Is it everything you dreamed of and more?
I'm a systems engineer working with Rust on AI infrastructure. It's what I expected to be, it's a good job in that it pays well and I enjoy it. It's not perfect, and I wouldn't describe it as a 'dream'.
> How did you break that first-job barrier?
Got an internship by emailing around, that transitioned into a full time position.
> What were you doing before this?
Uni, mostly.
> Any tips for the rest of us?
Find a cool problem and use it as a 'north star' when learning, I think that helped me a lot. Also, it's a big field, you may find that you don't like a corner of it, but don't take that to mean you won't/wouldn't like any other parts of it.
We've been actively trying to remove mentions of it from the documentation.
If you want something "installed" use home-manager. If you just want something for quick dev use nix-shell.