Hi! I'm THJ. I'm from Norway. I'm an independent software contractor. On my spare time, I make music and build electronic circuits. I want to tell you my story. It begins in a big white house in a small town in northern Norway...
I sat in the kitchen. On the dinner table in front of me sat a battery and a couple of wires that I was currently intently occupied with. On the window ledge stood a radio tuned to a silent AM station. I touched the wires to each other, causing a small spark, and a pop came out of the radio. The year was 1990, I was seven years old, and had just learned what a spark gap transmitter was.
My father had recently purchased his first home computer, an Intel 286 machine with 16-color EGA graphics. More importantly, it had a modem, which prompted him to spend hours in front of the computer, writing to people in other cities and downloading software. Naturally, this was irresistible to me.
The computer had some games on it: Captain Comic, Mach 3 and Yahtzee. Being a strange kid, I got bored of them very quickly and didn't play them very much. Instead, I marvelled at the cool graphics and sound effects, and began to wonder how computer games worked. How could one make a computer game?
My dad had an electronic organ in the living room. I would play simple melodies and chords on it. At one point, I took piano lessons. The teacher seated me in front of a dusty old piano, and wouldn't let me play any electronic instruments, which I found incredibly dull. It didn't last for very long.
I liked to draw as a kid, and got quite a bit better at it than the other kids in class, because I would copy comic book illustrations. However, as with the music, my repertoire was quite limited, and I mostly stuck to drawing heads and faces.
Fast forward about two years. I was in the public library, which shared a rather drab and anonymous-looking building with the town administration. I would often go to the library after school and just sit there and read. While I did take considerable interest the popular Asterix, Spirou and Gaston albums in the comic section, my main preoccupation at the time was a thick, red book:
On the cover, it said "Guide to BASIC", with "The University Press" written in small letters beneath it. Hardly a book for elementary school kids, but I persisted. The World Wide Web wouldn't be around for another couple of years, my sources of information were limited, and no one was around to teach me.
The contents of the book were rather dry, mostly consisting of brief entries on various BASIC features, interspersed with short lessons on their working principles:
To me, this was crucial information. I was beginning to learn how to code.
I had a pretty ordinary childhood. My grandparents were simple farmers and fishers, and my parents had worked their way into a relatively comfortable middle class existence. Our town had a population of about 2000 people, and was kept propped up by a nearby army garrison and an airbase, both of which had seen considerable expansion during the Cold War years due to our proximity to the USSR. My elementary school had about 300 pupils across 6 grade levels. In secondary school, the maps in the class rooms still said U.S.S.R. on them some 7 years after the Berlin Wall had fallen. We kids didn't know it yet, but the end of the Cold War was to signal the slow demise of our town.
I wasn't one of the cool kids. Rather, I was the kid everybody else picked on, and was a frequent recipient of unprovoked punches and kicks from the local bullies. I didn't have particularly good grades, despite being a smart kid. I was not good at listening to people talk for extended periods of time, and much preferred to read books. I soon developed a fear of homework and a fear of other children. Needless to say, I did not like school very much. I figured that if people wouldn't like me for my personality, maybe they would like me for my knowledge and skill. (This is, as we all know, not how the world works.)
After middle school, I told myself that I wanted to complete high school. I hadn't yet worked out that you actually need motivation to get things done, so this was actually a complete lie, and I dropped out very quickly. I had another go a year later, and the same thing happened. At this point, I concluded that high school wasn't for me. My mother would plead with me to complete my education for years thereafter, however.
At this point, I had developed decent programming skill, and could write programs in C, which I perceived to be the holy grail of programming languages at the time, but at age 17 in a town of 2000 people, there was no chance of finding any work, so I just lived at home for a few years.
At this point, my forays into electronics and music had long since been abandoned in favor of my interest in computers. This was about to change.
Puberty would not only prompt a growth spurt. It would prompt a spurt, a revival, of creativity. My interest in music was renewed once I discovered that you could create more or less any sound you wanted in the computer. My interest in drawing was renewed when I came across a large, old Wacom digitizer in the basement at my father's office. It sat there unused, and I asked if I could borrow it, which they let me. With the help of the Internet, I learned how to draw cartoon characters from the professionals.
My uncle had a MIDI setup with a professional Roland synthesizer. His daughter was a proficient keyboard player at a young age. My uncle and my aunt were going through a divorce at the time, and said daughter (who was my cousin) was temporarily staying with us. One time, he brought his MIDI setup over. Once I heard it, I knew that I wanted something like it. It sounded much better than what I was doing with my 8-bit SoundBlaster card.
After getting some Cisco and CompTIA certifications (I wanted to document at least some skill) around age 19, I moved south. I stayed with my sister in the countryside near Oslo (the capital of Norway). At this time, I developed an art community website which had 7000 registered accounts at its peak. After a brief 3 month detour to a callcenter in Sweden, plus more time at my sister's place, I eventually moved to a small apartment in Oslo, and worked at a few callcenters. Using the art community website as proof of my programming skill, I got hired for my first programmer position.
At first, I was proud and excited, but after a while, I began to hate it. I had no control of my time, no control over what I was working on, and no one seemed to acknowledge or respect me. I didn't know any of this at the time. I didn't know what was wrong, except that I wasn't enjoying it. Thinking that I was supposed to just endure it, much like school back in the day, I soldiered on, but this didn't work out too well. I wasn't motivated to do any work, and the boss fired me from my first job.
During all of this, I met an American girl through my art site, she moved in with me, and we got married so she could stay in the country. She didn't have a job, so I had to support her during all of this. She was from the projects in Philadelphia, and turned out to be an emotionally manipulative gold digger. Going to Norway with me was mainly a source of excitement to her, not a serious commitment. We eventually got divorced and she moved back to America.
By the time I was in my late 20s, I had held 3 or 4 different jobs, and none of them had ended very happily. I didn't know what to do. This wasn't how it was supposed to be. Other people did not have such problems. At this point, I began to wonder if I had ADHD or maybe some disorder on the autism spectrum. After a while, I dismissed these thoughts and decided to give education another try.
I signed up for a one-year preparatory course for getting into technical college. I wanted to become an engineer. I did not enjoy the experience. It gave me constant flashbacks to my former years in school, and I was no better suited to a school environment than I had been previously.
At this point, I began to talk to psychiatrists.
As it turned out, actually getting a psychiatrist to acknowledge that I had a problem was very difficult. In hindsight, perhaps justly so. My problems with school and work didn't fit the typical patterns they were looking for. I felt terrible, but apparently did not suffer from depression. I couldn't concentrate on my job, but apparently, I did not suffer from ADHD. I never had the best social skills, but apparently, I did not suffer from Asperger syndrome. However, the psychiatrist did concede that I had some mild autistic traits. Because I was desperate for a solution, he gave me an Asperger diagnosis. In retrospect, it was not a very sincere one, so I've always been hesitant to let it affect my self-image with any considerable weight.
The diagnosis did not help me in the ways I had imagined it would help me, and I would gradually come to see it as useless and irrelevant.
It was late 2014 and I was struggling to find any direction in my life when I got in touch with an old friend, an American programmer that I had met during the art community days. Save for the interest in programming, his life had been a mirror image of mine. He had sailed through his education at MIT and Stanford, and was now working for companies in Silicon Valley. He was living my dream...
...and he had a job referral for me. I was to develop computer graphics algorithms for a startup that his friend had co-founded, and so it was. During a 12 month period, I made some very good money doing this. Unfortunately, the CEO was slick, and kept milking more work out of me for less and less money. I had made the mistake of becoming chummy with him, and felt bad about claiming what rightfully belonged to me. During each subproject, I would work, eat and sleep, and do nothing else.
Having such a direct incentive for working was a powerful motivator, and I began to realize that what I had been lacking during all of these years was self-discipline. I can't really explain why I didn't learn this in school at the same time as my peers, but I suspect it comes down to a certain tendency I had of being a bit headstrong and quarrelsome. I wouldn't follow any order unless provided with a good reason for it. To this day, I don't function very well in situations where I have to concentrate on things I don't understand the purpose of.
During my work for the startup, I realized I should be channeling all this cash into a business entity, and I started a corporation. As time went on, I realized that the cash flow I was getting would sustain me, but wasn't sufficient to build a substantial cash reserve. One day, the projects stopped coming. The startup was low on cash and was trying to get new investment rounds going, so all my stuff was put on the shelf.
I randomly decided to log into a BBS (bulletin board system) that I used to hang out at when I was a kid. My account there was now 17 years old, and this got the attention of a few people there. The SysOp remembered me from way back then, and we began to talk about how our respective lives had developed since then. It turned out that he had started a company too, and it was in the computer business. He offered me a vacant seat in his office, and I accepted it. Soon, I was developing software for his company.
And with that, we reach 2016. The situation could be better, but it could also be worse. I'm barely keeping afloat. I'm wondering what to do next. I'm not a great salesman, but I sure as hell know how to code. In a perfect world, I could send a few emails, and have more projects to work on, but as it turns out, networking is the crucial thing to get right in the business world, not level of skill. It's not what you know, it's who you know, as they say. It would be nice to live in a world where people seek you out for your skill and not your connections, but as we've already concluded, this is not how the world works.
I don't know what the future has to offer, but I hope there's some good stuff in there. Thanks for reading!
