Let me guess: you are a US citizen, or anyway live in a country where developer positions abound. Well, not everyone is. Some people live in small towns where the cool programming positions are adapting invoice management software for small businesses.
Also this was before Freelancer.com, before code.org. And he was a boy, he couldn't just relocate. Also, before the App Store.
This is exactly the curiosity that people who enter the InfoSec world feel, coupled with real skills. Often too much skills and too little to do to start.
Then you stumble upon a IRC channel and a world of challenges opens in front of you.
By the way, he asked Valve to hire him. Maybe he just didn't find "less destructive ways to make money" yet.
Don't judge if people are oppressed (or better, repressed) if you have never been, please, either because at that age YOU had the occasions or guidance, or because you hadn't that curiosity or talent.
That's a legitimate programming job. Cool software rarely makes money. Cool software that makes money (game development) doesn't pay very much.
Then you stumble upon a IRC channel and a world of challenges opens in front of you.
A book is far more challenging, because in an IRC channel you're a fish in a small pond. Eventually you grow to be the biggest fish, or forever limit yourself to being small. What a book can't give is peer recognition. But peer recognition is a vain motive, and vanity is rarely lucrative. A book also can't answer questions, but you can use IRC or a website like stackexchange for that.
If anyone reading this has personal experience flirting with blackhattery, please carefully consider what you're doing and why you're doing it. (And if you'd like someone to talk to, please feel free to shoot me an email. I'd like hearing about your experiences and your thoughts.)
Peer recognition is critical when starting at that age. Also careful consideration is not exactly common.
I'm in no way alleging that it is a reasonable way to go for a mature professional, but I acknowledge the charm it has for the young high-schooler that is being "taught" Excel at school and being told not to fiddle with that weird black terminal.
These boys and girls should not have their lives destroyed by a harsh punishment for their curiosity, that in a different setting would have been highly rewarded. I can totally picture myself doing the same errors in different conditions.
Btw, management software is a legitimate programming job of zero interest to security people. Just different curiosity fields.
Your thinking must be stuck in the last century. By the time I entered the game industry 13 years ago, salaries were already on par with the software industry at large. My first full-time position was in 2003 and paid $85,000/year. Based on the numbers I've seen, game programmers currently earn significantly more than web developers with an equivalent amount of experience, despite the wage-inflationary effect of the VC money faucet.
The coolness factor used to play a greater role. I would say it still affects the supply side for QA, design and very entry-level positions in programming. For programmers with any level of competency and experience, its role is negligible.
I know your personal network is extremely large. If you have a lot of knowledge about the topic of gamedev salaries, I'd love to hear more. Since talking about salaries with colleagues is typically verboten, I'm curious how you collected your salary datapoints and what your sample size is.
There's a lot of anecdotal evidence of studios underpaying interns and programmers who are straight out of college, and regularly working people 60 or 80 hours a week. The anecdotal evidence fits my own personal experience, but perhaps my experience isn't representative of the whole industry; maybe I was just unlucky with my first couple studios.
This was in 2004, 3 years after the dot com bubble burst and was getting rosy again. Everyone and their mother's with a blog were making hundreds a month.
Programmers have been peddling shareware since BBS days.
Are you really calling Germany a 3rd world country?
> Some people live in small towns where the cool programming positions are adapting invoice management software for small businesses.
So why is this not legitimate work?
> Often too much skills and too little to do to start. Then you stumble upon a IRC channel and a world of challenges opens in front of you. Don't judge if people are oppressed (or better, repressed) if you have never been, please, either because at that age YOU had the occasions or guidance, or because you hadn't that curiosity or talent.
This is a pretty arrogant statement. Many programmers don't program malware not because they aren't smart enough, they don't do it because it is socially unacceptable and they don't have a criminal mind.
If you feel the need to "learn" about security, don't exploit, trojan, or ddos my server. Do it to your own computer.
I'm about four years older than Gembe, when I was 18 I endured:
Threats of violence, death threats, constant insults (such as 'paedophile', 'baby rapist', 'retard', 'cunt', 'fat cunt', 'queer'), people spitting in my face, prank calls at two in the morning, false accusations (eg. being accused of threatening someone, said someone would regularly say to me "I'm going to kick your fucking head in"). Being called 'cunt' every other day tends to become a drag after twenty years or so.
My 33rd birthday is fast approaching, I still have trouble with other members of society treating me poorly. When most people go to work, they don't expect to put up with threats of being punched in the face. When you complain about your treatment at work, you don't expect to lose your job a week later.
I've spent the last two years learning programming, ten years ago I decided to learn a load of maths (my education wasn't that good). On both occasions the response often was "stick to what you are capable of" or "go and learn something useful instead". Or how about the time someone at the Job Centre decided I was incapable of filling out forms by myself, then filled it on my behalf without my permission, complete with a few silly spelling mistakes.
Gembe sounds to me like he has had it easy.
Nice justification of criminality. "But I was bored and talented!"
Oh dear, who are we to stand in the way of your genius then?
Especially in the case of juveniles, we (as a society) should be understanding of minor indiscretions, and look to guide kids onto a better path. Thankfully the German justice system seemed to get that.
I don't have a black and white view, I just don't buy "I was bored and clever" as a justification for breaking the law.
That's been essentially my entire (for money) programming career and I adore it, taking a crappy manual/outdated process and refining it to create a tool that becomes a core part of a customers business is vastly rewarding to me.
