| Ok, I know how you feel.
You are 26yo and you are definitely a good programmer.
The problem: You're not 10yo anymore, so no one will congratulate you for building your bots and games. You realized that. You are intelligent like many others in this industry.
You've understood that you had potential and now you've got the feeling that you wasted it.
Otherwise I can't explain that all your writing is directed towards your past. I get that you feel sorry for yourself, but this won't help you, it'll lead to a miserable life. The solution is simple:
Start to live your own life. Pack your stuff and go.
And when I say it, I mean it. Stop building these bots if you don't earn money with them.
You can start later again if you have companies that want to pay your for this.
Start asking for advice for your landing pages, your own website, Hivee and talkbot look like they have interesting content, but it's very inaccessible (e.g. Talkbot: would be a great chance to show the features instead of opening the mail client). If you have experience doing web development, native app development, AR, NLP, ML and even Hardware/IoT, you are absolutely able to get a job that is paying you a rent and a lot more.
Maybe your home city is not right to get a job there, maybe not even your home country.
But you really don't want to waste your life feeling sorry for yourself. So go out and seek opportunities. Use Github and show your projects. Talk to business owners, ask them if you can work for them and search for opportunities to implement software that help them and charge them for your support. Learn to do invoices, seek a mentor who can help you with your tax filing. -- you're not going to build your own life if you're not even able to learn how to get money. Stop calling yourself a founder: say that you have some projects, but don't sound like a douche bag - having a business means getting revenue. Show people your projects and they will understand that your work can help them. Whining about missing support from people who don't know code is only the absence of creative ideas and valuable projects that even laymen can understand. Work a week for your father and you'll see how inefficient his processes are: improve them, you have the skills. -- When I was 12yo, I was crying once because nobody in my family understood my coding hobby. After I wrote some helpful tools and earned some money, they've realized that this computer stuff is good for me and supported me. Regarding job interviews: The best way to get hired is to build trust and relationships. You don't have to do whiteboard interviews if you know the right people. I'm not suggesting that this works for Facebook or Google, but there are more than those 5 companies you've listed. And if nothing works, make a nice CV, write some blog posts and case studies of your projects, create accounts at upwork, craigslist and similar pages and connect with other people through the internet. So, back to your question: "How do you keep motivated if nobody supports you?"
You start to give a f#?k about other opinions and simply hustle, we're not entitled to anything. Stop blaming other circumstances and gain control of your life. You may want to be the highly gifted man who talks about his businesses while living at home or you start to do the real thing - your choice. |
1. Lots of projects don't really mean much. More can be worse, as it (potentially) shows an inability to focus on a task. Instead, reduce it to a few core projects. List what technologies they use, what problems they solve and how you solved them. Ideally, upload them to github so that people can see the source code.
2. Move. You're going to have to take the plunge and believe in yourself. Especially if visas are involved, it's far easier to hire someone locally if you have the choice. To be considered for a visa for a common job like programming, you would need to be absolutely amazing.
3. Aptitude. As someone who's hired over a dozen people in various tech and supporting roles, aptitude and team fit are just as if not more critical than actual technical skill. There's no point hiring the greatest programmer in the world if they aren't going to be a good fit or if they can't adapt to different processes. Good programmers are adaptable because they're able to change languages and environments yet carry over their skills in the process.
Good luck finding your path, don't forget to have fun along the way!