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by JakeAl 1316 days ago
That one thing you tell yourself, "If I was smart, I'd..." Do that and start right away.

Become a master of something you know better about today than you did when you started out. Seek out a mentor and ask them what that one thing is they would tell themselves to do so you can anticipate being here again. I've tried restarting careers 3 times and every time you lose your job you have to reassess your interests as well as skills because they change without you realizing it. That's why there's supposed to be growth path for individuals to move from individual contributor, to team leader, to supervisor to manager etc. It also helps the workers knowing they have someone who did it themselves and has been there too.

Right there with you. Been unemployed/self-employed for 8 years. Circling the drain can't get a job because I was working towards being a manager who worked their way up but never got the title and without it and the connections that come with it and keep getting discarded when the company pivots. Everyone else my age and experience became a manager and/or started their own company/studio and is all about schmoozing and has no time for anyone who can't bring them business or is competition for their own.

I like working in production, but unless you are the programmer doing all the work, it's not sustainable without an aggressive growth path.
2 comments
schappim 1316 days ago
>> "If I was smart, I'd..." Do that and start right away.

Great advice! I wondered what GPT-3 would do.

This is the output of the prompt "If I was smart, I'd":

   If I was smart, I'd know what to do
   If I was smart, I would've known better
   I'm not smart, I'm just a fool
   And I'm in love with you
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laidbutnotpaid 1316 days ago
Man, I really love that first bit of advice. You're right about interests changing, if I were to get a job again I think I want to do something low-level/backend/more dev oriented, possibly in golang for a company that makes a PaaS or hosting. Open to other industries/roles too but I wanna be closer to the dev side rather than DevOps (which feels like glorified sysadmin/server monkey a lot).

I have self confidence that is swinging between "I can do this, I can do anything, I can take something off the ground, I've made 10s of thousands of dollars in addition to my job! on the side! and I'm smart and capable." and "I am so dumb. Why would I try to take a shot like this, I don't even have a path or approach. What, I'm going to write blog posts every week? Or be a web designer? I'm mediocre at both of those. How could I ever do anything and make it happen and make it be profitable...I should just get a job and dip my toe in to this stuff...This self employment shit is so unrealistic and romantic."

Back to that first bit of advice, this is just me journaling to myself, and maybe I sound crazy and this is unrealistic

"If I was smart, I'd..."

- research industries and niches and pick one I'm interested in and can tolerate the people in it - talk to a load of people in that industry and learn their painpoints with some process they do daily - mock something up for them and have them help me develop it. just wireframe type stuff. - build real Software for them, quickly and leanly and get them to commit to paying. No crazy features or frameworks, just a bare MVP. - sell through outbound sales, make sure I have a big enough market and cost (which has to be backed by immense value) to support myself in ~6 months. - iterate - hustle like crazy

I realize the long slow SaaS ramp of death is a thing...and maybe this is all just so utterly stupid and naïve of me. But it is my gut reaction to that sentence hah.

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