Comment by colkassad

At thirty I quite my job as an industrial painter and sandblaster and started as a temp data entry clerk at a local government for $8/hour. Worked hard at what I did, made connections, and moved into field-work, then GIS. From there I moved to the private sector in Civil Engineering, still doing GIS. I then made a tangential career change into geospatial software development after moving to DC, as I spent a lot of time learning programming on the job as a GIS Analyst. Now I do DevOps. I think the key for me was to put myself into an environment where I could get the opportunities that I wanted, and working hard towards those goals.