When was your first actual job and how much did you make?

[Xithras]

56. I was a bit of a computer geek from elementary school on.

My mother is a lawyer, and when I was in junior high I started writing her a PIM/case file manager for her office. There were commercial packages out there that did the same thing, but all had five-digit price tags and required assistance from triple-digit hourly consultants for setup and support. Mine worked well enough that it was quickly adopted by all of the other lawyers in her office, and by my sophomore year in high school it was being used by most of the lawyers she knew (somewhere around a quarter of the lawyers in our hometown). My age and lack of business acumen kept me from marketing it more widely, but my mom (being a mom) was always thrilled to show it off and generated tons of clients.

Most of my clients didn't pay a dime for the software, but they paid me $30 an hour whenever they needed help. There were enough of them calling that I'd have at least one billable hour every day from at least one of them.

It was a pretty good gig for a teenager. Looking back on it, I personally think the software was horrendous, but computers were still a new thing for most people in the late 80's and most people didn't know any better. My clients generally just liked the fact that it worked, it did what it needed to, and it was dirt cheap compared to the commercial competition. I just liked the fact that I was the only computer geek in high school who could get a date