What brought you into Testing/Software Development?

I have more than 10 years of experience in aviation industry, from check-in counter, to organizing multiple teams on the apron, to aircraft maintenance helper, to country manager. Never changed a tire on a car but changed plenty on Airbus aircrafts. About 3 years ago my company lost the public tender/auction and I found myself unemployed. The new company offered the same position but I turned it down cause I have two kids now, and all that traveling would make me an absent father. So for about half a year, every night after kids went to bed I was learning, coding, getting ready for interviews, hoping to land a QA job, mostly oriented on automation. After months of seeing daily emails that started with "we are sorry...", I finally had a chance at an interview. I was eating leetcode exercises daily so when they asked to code live, I was not that bad.

I've already changed companies because recruiters were insisting a lot. So salary went up quickly. 

As for why QA? For me, I like to break things and coding is like a puzzle, I like the dopamine kickin in when it's all green.

I don't like to fix things, cause that would make me a dev. So I leave that to them.

I have a very well long term defined plan and I am disciplined, and that's all you need to succeed. Maybe also a sprinkle of luck. 

willing to learn (philomath)

I was playing World of Warcraft back in 2008 and wanted to show off my DPS (damage per second) to my friends, so I started looking for a feature that would allow me to do so. I haven't found any (spoiler alert: there were plenty), so I have started looking into how to create one and stumbled upon an article mentioning that players can create their own addons using the programming language Lua. Since I wasn't that good at googling, I went to a local bookstore to buy a book on game scripting in Lua and started learning that way. Even though it was a bumpy ride, after some time I was able to create my own DPS meter. Then I realized that I wasn't the first one trying to create it, and in fact, there were plenty of DPS meters available on the internet. Nevertheless, I fairly enjoyed building new stuff, which is why, even after 15 years, I am still doing it. :)