A friend in high school helped me install a counter strike server on linux on an old desktop. From there, I experimented with hosting some forums and an upload script to save files remotely. In the days way before the cloud was a thing. That got me interested enough to start figuring things out and get into it.
I did similar. I asked for double my previous salary, figuring that’s absurd. They told me that’s too low for the position, so they gave me 5 grand more than what I asked for. Clearly I could have gotten substantially more.
But the way I look at it is I got a very high salary that I wasn’t expecting, and the company feels like they got a deal. Win - win situation, right?