I was ->this<- close to being ??fired?? before my career even started.

This is a true story of how passion and determination can take your career to unimaginable heights.

During the senior year of university for my Computer Science degree (1997-98), I landed an offer, 6-months prior to graduation, for a full-time job that would pay $39,000 / year. In the 90s, this salary was top 10% for my graduating class, and it would allow me to save an amazing $400 / month after paying living expenses and interest on the $80K in student debt I acquired. I was perfectly happy to eat Taco Bell for weeks on end to dig my way out of the debt.

I was ??OVER THE MOON??. I eagerly accepted and offered to start working part time during school breaks and vacations before I started.

I was hired as a programming instructor for a training unit out of Boston. It was a small boutique firm with 12 amazing people teaching methodologies and emerging languages to corporate accounts through the Northeast. I was hired as the Java instructor as I had demonstrated an early love and affinity for the language that was still nascent.

The firm landed a client that wanted a custom course built for their custom technology. It had nothing to do with Java. One of our instructors needed to attend a live class, learn the technology, and then draft a course. The next course overlapped with my Spring Break from university, and I volunteered to go.

The tech was cool, but the instructor (who happened to be the founder / CTO) was unimaginably unintelligible and so dry that I ended up struggling with a) what the hell is this crap, and b) keeping my eyes open out of outright boredom. I literally slept through half the course.

This didn't go unnoticed and now my new firm had a very very unhappy client. I was called into the boss' office and given the riot act. I was about to be fired. The only saving grace was that I chose to record the entire training and was able to share it. I promised to develop the materials behind-the-scenes, and they let me survive. That project was eventually successful, and I was able to keep my job -- barely.

Things got better once I settled into my Java training rhythm after I joined in the summer. Java was ??HOT HOT HOT??, and there were very few people globally who knew about it, much less able to teach it. I occasionally taught C++ courses and those still give me nightmares.

I was giving courses every week, and along the way I told my boss that I thought Java Server Pages and Enterprise Java Beans would be the "next hot thing". We should have courses for them. They were both preliminary and experimental in 1998. There was no demand, and I wasn't going to be given slack time to build a course for something without demand. So, he told me, let's advertise a course to see if anyone bites. And so, we did - a 5-day hands-on course on EJBs, although I had no idea how to use them.

Things go by and a couple months later, my boss calls me into the office and says, "Ya know that EJB course you advertised? I have a client, they are BEA, a major EJB vendor, and want to acquire us as we are the only company with an EJB course on the market. They will be here in 7 days to review the materials."

Holy crap. I ended up working a 120-hour week and somehow fell in love with EJBs and produced a full 5-day course. BEA's software was very buggy, but we made it work. I didn't really sleep and was nail biting when their experts came to review my course. They'd see right through me, right?

They loved it. It was accurate and thorough and would change the face of their unit. They acquired us a month later making my boss wealthy. I was made a Director (at 23 years of age!) responsible for all of BEA's courseware and instructor certification. BEA upped my salary by 100%.

I was humbled - my boss as a thank you came to me and paid off my student debt. I spent 6 amazing years at BEA growing in responsibility and learning the software business. It has been nothing but an amazing, joyful, and fulfilling experience ever since.

Never give up. Stay passionate. Work hard through aversity and you can have any career you want.