As for how I got into it - I went to film school. I worked in the film industry of a foreign country for a minute after going there to study the language. It didn't work out and when I came back to the US I was very unemployed.
My downstairs neighbor in the down-and-out apartment building I found lodging in was Mel, of Mel's Hole fame (yes, really). He brought me along on some gigs to install cat5 cables in various offices. I managed to parlay that into some part time tech support and sysadmin jobs at those offices. Generally there was no budget for IT so I learned Linux and programming to be able to solve problems with free software or homegrown tools. I had my hands on basically every kind of office system there was - domains, file/print serving, SMTP, web sites, security systems, etc. Learning what I needed to be able to reimplement expensive commercial software from scratch. No budget for Exchange? Then I'll cobble something together out of SMTP, IMAP, and Caldav servers with Thunderbird and a smattering of extensions. We need a real firewall but Cisco is out of our price range? Guess I'm building a pfSense box out of a retired desktop this week. That sort of thing.
When those jobs fizzled out and I was unemployed again, a friend hooked me up with an interview at my current company. Despite my... interesting resume. But it turns out that there are very few people in the IT world who actually know anything (this has been confirmed over and over again by my own hiring efforts), and there are even fewer with knowledge across a broad spectrum of topics, which turns out to be important for the tool I work on. So I was able to stick around, become an indispensable expert on this (again, incredibly niche) tool, and eventually become a team lead.
I do tech support / programming for an incredibly niche b2b software product used by like a dozen companies
It's boring as fuck but the pay is obscene
As for how I got into it - I went to film school. I worked in the film industry of a foreign country for a minute after going there to study the language. It didn't work out and when I came back to the US I was very unemployed.
My downstairs neighbor in the down-and-out apartment building I found lodging in was Mel, of Mel's Hole fame (yes, really). He brought me along on some gigs to install cat5 cables in various offices. I managed to parlay that into some part time tech support and sysadmin jobs at those offices. Generally there was no budget for IT so I learned Linux and programming to be able to solve problems with free software or homegrown tools. I had my hands on basically every kind of office system there was - domains, file/print serving, SMTP, web sites, security systems, etc. Learning what I needed to be able to reimplement expensive commercial software from scratch. No budget for Exchange? Then I'll cobble something together out of SMTP, IMAP, and Caldav servers with Thunderbird and a smattering of extensions. We need a real firewall but Cisco is out of our price range? Guess I'm building a pfSense box out of a retired desktop this week. That sort of thing.
When those jobs fizzled out and I was unemployed again, a friend hooked me up with an interview at my current company. Despite my... interesting resume. But it turns out that there are very few people in the IT world who actually know anything (this has been confirmed over and over again by my own hiring efforts), and there are even fewer with knowledge across a broad spectrum of topics, which turns out to be important for the tool I work on. So I was able to stick around, become an indispensable expert on this (again, incredibly niche) tool, and eventually become a team lead.