I joined the army and got trained to be an Arabic linguist. That was getting old and frustrating, so I taught myself javascript/ksh/Tcl and made some dumb applications at work, which was enough to get noticed by some neighboring IT shops (I was out of the army, working as a contractor by this time).

I ended up doing Groovy, then Java, and now I'm in the government version of "Enterprisy Java" and I feel stuck myself. 150k isn't that much if it leaves you empty inside.