I finally hit 30.
I used to close my eyes and wish for time to accelerate, for the years to rush past just below my perception so that when I opened them again I would see myself somewhere else, with someone else, doing anything else.
I’ve never had a job, not a real one anyway. I’ve always worked though, even as a kid. Every weekend since I can remember I have been working a stand at a flea market. My family sells clothes at four different flea markets six days a week. As a kid I helped with what I could. Eventually I helped with everything. After I graduated, weekends became six out of seven days of every week. Now we all work ourselves ragged every day. I am a tired, mindless body.
We make ends meet by living within our means. I don’t have a car. I don’t have an income. Sometimes I’ll hide a hundred dollars before handing in any sales to my dad. So maybe that makes my income a hundred dollars every two or three weeks. I mostly use that to buy vapes, cat food, and cat litter. Sometimes I’ll use what’s left for mutual aid or save up to do so later.
I suspect I am somewhere on the autism spectrum and/or suffer from ADHD. I’ve been depressed for almost half my life now. I suspect I’m only still around because I am a coward. It’s gotten too close to escape its pull but I won’t so I am trapped. Zoloft and therapy helped for a little while but I quit after they didn’t. To top it off, this was all before my egg cracked but my home situation is not one in which I can present how I would prefer even now.
I went to college on the government’s dime for a bachelor’s in computer science. I looked at my degree once and haven’t seen it since. Fragments of websites, webapps, api wrappers, an ecommerce store, blog posts, essays, and shit litter my memory, failures that weigh my conscience with shame. At this point I’m not entirely sure if I was ever actually able to write any code or if just I bullshit my way through everything in life to protect my fragile ego.
But I need to get better. My life will not change unless I make it change. I need to get a job, I need to be self-sufficient, I need to grow.
The largest hurdle I can see is my complete lack of experience. I graduated almost a decade ago. I’ll be starting from the bottom way later than I should have. Looking at local job openings on Indeed, it seems my best bet will be some sort of IT or Help Desk role. I’m taking a break from reading theory to read about networking and cybersecurity. I remember much of the network material while the cybersecurity concepts at least make sense to me.
The next step of the plan is already daunting to me. I need to write a resume. How to do this thing with no experience? An eternal problem I’ll need to figure out. This is as far as I’ve gotten but I’m not giving up. It’s about time I grow up.
Thanks for reading. Apologies for whining about a job.
LIE. Lie on your resume. Look for the highest paying job for someone who graduated from your year with that many years of experience and use an AI like chatgpt to tailor your resume for that job. Don’t use your real name, just tell the AI: “create a hypothetical resume that would be perfect for this 150K+ comp sci job” and it’ll give you a good idea. As for the actual companies you “worked for,” there are so many defunct IT companies that you can say you worked for. And just use a friend as a reference. Better yet, find defunct contracting companies that the big name companies use to hire contractors and then just say you “worked for microsoft for 2 years” etc. If they ever try to check, just say you worked at Microsoft, but it was through a third-party contractor (which no longer exists) and boom it’s all good. I’d say your goal isn’t to go after the “big tech company” jobs like Google, Facebook, Microsoft, etc, but rather to lie about working at those places and then aim for a small-ish company that will still pay you a lot and give you a lot of leeway. You can always spin it as “man I used to work at big tech but I’ve realized that life is about more, so I wanted to work for a smaller, more tight-knit company” type of BS. I say this because at the big tech companies, they’ll either know you’re lying in the beginning or find out pretty soon. Whereas at a smaller company, there might be some completely tech illiterate dumbass hiring manager that says “we really need a computer person cuz I have no idea how to use MS word!” and it’s the type of job that still pays a lot. They won’t have the resources to background check you too hard and if you’re the best tech person there then no one will question you. If you land a higher level job where you don’t really have to code but just do bullshit paper pushing, you can basically get a remote gig and make bank while doing absolutely nothing and working only like 4 hours a week. Then you can travel, do hobbies, etc. all while “working.”
LLMs like ChatGPT have quickly made knowing how to code from scratch way less important. For you I would brush up on the fundamentals, then learn how to read code that other people/models write, how to interpret what’s going on, and how to make changes.
LLMs are bullshit for a lot of reasons but they’re good at getting you 80% there with code in literally seconds.