I won’t name names, so we’ll call her Jane.
Jane’s five closest friends are two engineers at Google, an engineer at Eventbrite, an architect, and her father (which is so cute), who is the president of a national soccer team in Jane’s home country.
Jane graduated with a degree in Business Administration.  That was a mistake.  BizAdmin in San Francisco basically means she takes other people’s work and tries to find a use for it.
When Jane moved to California, it was 2008.  The economy wasn’t on her side.  What little she chance she had at getting a job as a recent grad was thwarted by the flood of mid to higher range vets coming into the job market.  So Jane did what she had to in order to make ends meet; she got a job at CVS working as a pharmacy technician.  
Jane spent the next year applying for jobs in her field.  In 2009, she got a customer support role at Genentech, and hated every moment of it.  Job satisfaction was not in her vocabulary.  And she talked about vacations.  And she talked about what new movies were coming out. Worse, she talked about celebrities.  Jane was simply existing.
In late 2010, Jane noticed the happiness and satisfaction her friend had with Google. He talked about Google, a lot.  She asked how he was so happy. The answer was simple: The tools he built helped change an industry, even the world.  The stuff he did mattered.
Some light inside Jane turned on around that time; she had a new mission.  She would work in technology, and she would do it as a QA engineer.  She sat down with her friends and they all helped determine the right path to get her where she wanted, if she was up to the challenge.
Keep in mind, this was...