At 18 and a few weeks old, I did NOT have the awareness. At 33 and a few months, though, I feel I'm better aware of being taken advantage of, and have raised my hourly requirements to better suit contract work. I had no negotiation skills, and even if I did, they wouldn't have upped the pay, and then I would have been back to working at a call center for $8/hr.
The job was a crap job, but that job taught me a LOT about being a software developer.
Any crap software job is better than a crap retail, crap food service or crap call center job. You made the right move, and I am sure even a crap $30k a year software dev job paid dividends in experience. Coming right out of high school you did the right thing
Agreed, because a crap software job is like a crap apprentice job to a tradesman. The work might suck, but there's knowledge being imparted or, at least there to be sought out or absorbed.
It's the same reason a few years apprenticed to a plumber or carpenter is better than a few years in retail. At least you'll have come out the other end with something more applicable to a career, if you decide to pursue it.
They were using me for cheap labour, I was using them to get a CV that allowed me to get a real salary somewhere else later.
I literally said this to the director who hired me (a few months in, in his office with nobody else around) and was rewarded with a huge grin because I'd guessed correctly that he'd prefer cheap labour who -understood- that was the deal and wasn't afraid to own their half of it.
Worked out fine for me, and I did duly leave to take a much better paid job after about a year.
Not sure where you were, but a lot of the UK is actually pretty livable on minimum wage, so then you decide are you going to do 20 hours at McDonalds and have time for friends, or 40 hours at minimum wage and build your career.
As much as I hate to admit it: I'm all for abandoning friends at 18-20 for the career focus. Then bring back the handful of them that stuck by you.
Plus being cheap meant my management were pretty open to "I don't know how to do that -yet-, but I think I have an idea what I'd need, can I have a few days to research it and get back to you?" which was -very- helpful to my learning process.
I had been planning recently on taking a multi-year hiatus and moving to the midlands and attending university (for the visa and NHS), because after researching it, 3 years of university and living expenses are roughly what 3 European vacations cost anyway. And this would make vacationing to Europe a lot cheaper than from the states.
If it hadn't been for the NHS, I don't think I'd ever have risked going freelance.
Though you might also want to consider Germany - a lot of bits are liveable primarily speaking english and they're not currently suffering from the "fun" of brexit.
I had been hoping the "fun" of Brexit would have made my dollar stretch further, but each time I see it drop toward dollar parity, my hopes are dashed. Sorry if it is a bit morbid of me to wish the pound would lose value so that I as an American can go there for cheap.
You took the best option presented to you. A fresh-faced 18 year old isn't presented with much in the way of good career opportunities.
Our stories are pretty similar. My first dev job paid $9/hr! Sure, in some ways you could consider that to be "taken advantage of" but only because we were successful. Had either of us been flunkies, we would be the ones taking advantage!
When you hire an 18 year old for an important job, you know the risks and the potential payoffs.
Yup and he was smart enough to get out sooner rather than later, and got a lot of hardcore experience along the way. Landing that first tech job is the hardest, after that, it's pretty gravy.
It is hard to quantify across all of my income streams, but I bill for butt in chair and hands on keyboard: $150/hr since 2018. I haven't raised my rate since the world shut down and its high enough for me and keeps a lot of crap recruiters from hounding me constantly. The first thing I tell them is my rate.
The job was a crap job, but that job taught me a LOT about being a software developer.