I was totally the same. Got several phone calls and had my ISP service terminated when I was 13-14. Portscanned and war-dialed everything. Went to defcon when I was 16.
I got my first job at a local ISP after the owner busted me for running "John the Ripper" password cracker against his system that I had a shell account on.
As completely careless and reckless as I was, this kind of interest in hacking was my saving graces in terms of employability, because I failed out of highschool and never went to college. I work at a FAANG, miraculously.
Same, had to repeat 10th grade, dropped out of 11th to get a job in IT and I've been living it up ever since. Not with any FAANG but then again I'm in Europe so we don't have such giants here. I work for the largest telco, partly government owned. (same ISP that sent me that letter;)
Same here. I was a relentless script kiddy who flunked out of grade 10 because of undiagnosed ASD, but having “tech skills” in the early 90s meant I had no problem finding random IT jobs and working up to a career in Gov IT.
I remember hitting a point where there we no more local ISPs who would give us an account, so we’d go to the library and use BO to steal dial up accounts from random companies (always targeting local companies we hated at the time), which we’d keep in a txt file via an IRC fileserv and rotate through. Kept us online until we got better at not getting caught.
Of course all that these days would get you put in prison but back then even when we got caught it was more of a “silly teenagers, don’t do that again or we’ll tell your parents… by the way, can you help fix our printer?”
When were you hired to the FAANG? There used to be a culture of hiring hackers like you without a second thought, but sadly nowadays my cynical assumption is that most FAANG companies would be too corporate and buttoned-up to even consider it, at least not without needing to cut through some red tape about degree requirements and background checks.
I resisted joining a big company for most of my career, which in hindsight I now somewhat regret (I thought I would be worked too hard, turns out working at startups and no-name companies is just as bad and typically pays less unless you are lucky). 3 years ago is a the real answer, far into my career (I'm 39). Pretty sure every single person I work closely with has a BA or Masters in computer science. I just have a lot of experience.
I got my first job at a local ISP after the owner busted me for running "John the Ripper" password cracker against his system that I had a shell account on.
As completely careless and reckless as I was, this kind of interest in hacking was my saving graces in terms of employability, because I failed out of highschool and never went to college. I work at a FAANG, miraculously.