Exactly true. Was a teenage software hacker, reverse engineered many games mostly because I was a bored teenager with free time and many games I legitimately bought. Mostly it was to cheat a little, like tweaking player stats or number of lives in a save file.

All that reverse engineering experience gave me a particularly useful talent as a developer: an uncanny ability to sit down and grok other people’s code almost like magic.

Solid experience with reverse engineering really is a good skill to have.