>Did you learn to program in school or teach yourself? School, I had a few credits to fill out my Econ degree and thought the CS intro classes would be interesting.

>Did you do unpaid work to establish yourself? Nope, but I did work for pennies. $11.50/hr writing code at my first job, and then later $1000 for an Android app with another $500 to port it to IOs.

>Roughly how long did it take you from day 1 of learning to day 1 of being paid? Six months.

>What was your first gig? Working on campus making Salesforce magic happen. I graduated recently and now work as a Salesforce/Java/web-backend developer.

As idealized as being self-taught might be I think there's a lot of value in getting your base knowledge in the classroom. Data Structures and Algorithms especially is a great course to learn with a professional as a resource.