The urban dictionary says:
Hacker
Person who gains authorized/unauthorized access to a computer without the intention of causing any damage.
My first job was to help computerize the company, which is a very nice way of saying that the company had purchased a computer and they needed it filled with data – specifically it needed to be filled with inventory data.
It was only in retrospect that I discovered I was a computer person but not a data entry person. The reason that some people become skydiving teachers and others become teachers, clerks, physicists, etc is because the person’s interest and abilities match up with that type of work. I did not know that taking inventory of toilet seats, nails and hinges would somehow lose its shine. It was nice getting a paycheck but after a few months I found it tiring and unfulfilling.
It was at about the same time I discovered that some of the commands that worked on my home computer also worked on the work computer. It turns out that the system was written in basic and it did not take very much examination to read through the code and to jump to other menus. Granted some of those menus were password protected but all you needed to do was list the code and find a different menu further down the menu hierarchy.
I suppose it was the software vendor who eventually they discovered a bit of unusual activity and ratted me out to management. Unsurprisingly they asked that I focus only on my data entry. Shortly after this meeting the source code also was encrypted so it couldn’t be listed, as luck turned out the summer was over and I then was heading back to school. I learned quite a few lessons at this first job but actually the most important was that I was not a data entry person.
Note: I was both a minor and there were no computer Cybersecurity laws in place at that time. (whew!)