Dang, I'm kind of blown away from all the people here. Way more accomplished than I am. I went to college for IT work, starting in 1999. College required a paid internship after 2 years. Well just in time for the dot com bust lol. No one was hiring someone without a degree and offering to pay them. So I left and worked at a call center for MCI doing collections and payments. This sucked. After a year and a half of this, I went to another college fair locally and transferred most of my credits to a college that had no internship requirement. Graduated from there in a year and a half.
Then finding work was still difficult, ended up having my sisters boyfriend help me get work at the Geek Squad. (I couldn't pass their personality exam). I ended up being one of their best at fixing computers and such, given my education and hobby of computers when I was younger. Then I got lucky - one summer my cousin said, "hey, we should go on this local tour of a science lab at the University. It looks interesting." I went, it was fun, thought nothing of it. About 6 months later I was looking for jobs better than Geek Squad and came across an ad for a desktop support person at this lab. I think I was hired because I interview well, and because of that tour!
Well, that was in 2006, and I still work there today, now doing server specifications, automation and management of the Windows fleet of desktops and servers, and design and planning for all new services, and cybersecurity. A bunch of promotions and pay raises keep me there, along with a University having really good benefits, probably the best pay in the area, and amazing work/life balance. Every time I've even tried to leave checking the market they decide to give me a raise. I just wish I didn't have to get a job offer every few years to get them to do so. Oh, and because we're a lab - it's more employees than students. In fact, since COVID I've been WFH 99% of the time, and only go in when there's something very specific I need to do in person. Because of this, I plan to try working while travelling like some of the other posters - I have approval, so we'll see how it goes. I have an inordinate amount of vacation anyway, so I probably could just take the weeks off. I want to try and get in more travel than I did before, but don't have to laze around the whole time. We've got a wifi hotspot with unlimited data and I have a work laptop. I'm going to try working during the day and vacationing at night! Also, because I'm salary the hours are very flexible, and my bosses care about the work getting done, not how long I sit online or in a particular chair.
The timeshare system seems to be enabling the travel so far. I went from at most one trip for 5 days every few years in the summer and a winter trip for a couple days to NYC around Christmas to 3 week long trips this year and one already scheduled for next year. The buy in is a little steep, but I did resale - and after that the deals if you're just willing to go where there's a deal in RCI are just too good lol. (Well, from my perspective). I tent to travel with family, my sister, my mom, some family friends, my cousin. While we made hotel rooms work for years, it's easier to go to 2BD timeshares let me tell you.
The travel is both because I've always enjoyed seeing new places but also to build on my latest hobby in photography - got over $11,000 in gear, and want to use it for lots of different things - but landscape is my first photo style and I'll probably always enjoy it - and to do that, I have to go places with different landscapes!
I'm in my early 40s, never married and probably will work till I have to retire. Most of the last people who retired did so at 70ish because the job is mostly fun, and doesn't need a lot of physical ability so you can just keep going, and unlike lots of IT, it's not ageist - in fact the institutional knowledge and experience is prized. I find it sad so many other places think everyone should job hop every 3 years or less, and would rather pay more every couple years to hire outside people than just offer raises to keep existing employees. I also wish more places understood that for salary people, it's about the work getting done, not exactly where or when someone is in a chair or on the computer. I can tell you that even though the University doesn't pay top dollar, the flexible work and general lack of stress makes up for a lot of it.
