My first job was working at a video surveillance company... My specific job was reversing multiple proprietary video streams, transcoding them and stitching them into a single output stream and sending it to a browser. For example, taking nine 1080p video streams and stitching them into a single 3x3 video stream that totaled 1080p.

It was a chaotic mess of C++.

I did it for a year before joining a startup, and on and on.

One word : plastics.