I followed kind of a similar path. I didn’t go to school or anything for programming. It was my natural learning path from the graphic design field after seeing how web development was blowing up. On top of that, my dad was an MS-DOS nerd, so he had me navigating a terminal when I was like 12. So I never needed hand-holding at jobs. I was definitely underpaid for quite a while before I started connecting more and more with others in the field.