I basically had a grab bag of shell, python and ruby stuff that I learned how to do over my first 5 or 6 years in the industry and then saw an article about Haskell, tried to learn it and realized, I don't actually know _what programming is_, and then spent 10 years teaching myself all the computer science stuff that I missed from not having a degree.
I still don't know Haskell, but it was a valuable learning experience anyway.
I got hooked in a similar way. Wrote an Excel macro to automate an operational thing I did in my real job, and then asked myself, "Wait, how did that work?"
I still don't know Haskell, but it was a valuable learning experience anyway.