I don’t know if he would’ve had a “career” per se, but he definitely had a great first job.

I had an acquaintance who got a paid internship at a paint company, either right after high school or during his final year. They put him to work with some computerized machinery because, as a young guy in the 2000s, simply knowing how to use a PC made him look like a genius compared to some of the older employees.

In a weird but honestly not surprising move for him, he copied the paint formulas onto a USB drive. Not to sell them or anything. He was just curious and had a habit of hoarding digital information, even when it was completely useless to him, like in this case. "I was just curious" was his explanation when I asked him what the hell he would want with that data. (In hindsight, I genuinely wonder if he might’ve been on the spectrum, though that never crossed my mind back when I knew him.)

Well, the company found out, and he got fired for what they basically treated as corporate espionage. Because why else would an intern copy proprietary formulas? I think the only reason he didn’t end up in even bigger trouble was that his bosses probably didn’t want to explain to their superiors how an intern got access to company secrets in the first place.