Advice for a Sick Hacker with Nothing

[cure8]

Hey folks -- if you have it to spare, please allow me a couple minutes of your time.

I absolutely love Hacker News. I started lurking here in 2009 or 2010, pointed here by Paul Graham, whose excellent essays were absolutely a staple in my early software development self-education. Let's call it 15 years, that's satisfying. All of this 15 years, I've lurked. I've never made a post here, and I don't believe I ever even created an account to utilize the voting features until a few days ago. That said, this is my favorite place on the internet. The interests displayed here very much overlap my own (or force my interest), and so many of you all are straight-up geniuses. I wanted to get that out first; it has bubbled inside me for 15 years.

One of my favorite things is programming, ever since I requested "C For Dummies" as my 14th birthday present (frankly, great language choice, awful book choice.) Another love is using/learning Linux (I had to be the odd bird and choose Slackware, which I still love and use as my daily driver.) I love cool and clever ideas and quality tools. I love math, too -- I double-majored in CS & mathematics, and kept a 4.0 until I got overwhelmed by family strugggles and had to call it quits about two years in. For all those reasons, I am here and I feel that I fit. I never did bite the bullet and try really hard to transition to a job that even touches on these interests -- I felt like my steakhouse serving job I kept for ten years completely drained me and left me unable to do anything but recover each night. So, in an absolute pit of despair, ignoring the fact that I was poorer than ever, I just quit about a month ago. After, I actually got extremely depressed and I haven't yet found it in me to do the jobhunting grind, even though I'm not far away from starving-poverty. I've still been programming random shit, though, in about 14 different languages in that month, because I just love it. Unfortunately, a portfolio is nowhere to be found, as while programming for pleasure, my ADHD-tendencies flit from cool thing to cool thing to cool thing and I never seem to get a project really presentable.

I'm a 38-year-old man who, by all accounts, is a total fuck-up -- especially now that I'm unemployed. Early last year, one of my legs just stopped working. I went to the hospital, and after a couple days laying there, I was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. The doctor told me the oldest lesions in my brain were about ten years old (I thought, "oh, explains my memory issues"), but the problem with my leg was caused by a new, very large lesion that had developed. I saw the MRI and it looked pretty damn gnarly. A lot of my brain had just checked out, and I had known nothing of it besides a mysterious difficulty remembering everything! It was pretty humbling news. Once they let me go, I learned to walk again pretty quickly and got back to serving tables.

What I really need is some money (I'm going to have to get a quick, shitty job again because my finances are an emergency), but also a job where I can sit down, that won't destroy my sensitive super-introvert soul. Thankfully, I just got medicaid and medicated for the depression, and it's helping a bit. I don't have great credentials -- I am A+ certified (the last of the lifetime certs), I have an expired MCP cert for Windows Server 2000 administration, and as I said, no portfolio. However, I do know dozens of very different programming language, I know the linux shell very well, I use git, I consider myself a Python expert, and I have digested many many books on software development -- the "Code Complete"s and "SICP"s and "Poignant Guide"s (why??) and what-have-you.

My question to you all is, what the hell do I do with this? What would you do? I really need some guidance.

If you like, you can contact me at: car bonru te (at) gmail. Thank you all for your time, and any advice you can give.

[hardwaresofton]

Hey sounds like youre having an incredibly difficult time, I hope things turn sooner rather than later.

> language, I know the linux shell very well, I use git, I consider myself a Python expert

It sounds like applying to every python job you can find is probably your best bet.

No job too low, no company too boring. Hope you find something

[TheMongoose]

Right now you're competing with people that have years of actual experience writing code for companies and an army of new grads who know nothing but have the degree and are desperate/young enough to work for nothing or near enough to as makes no difference.

You're also doing this somewhere in the vicinity of the peak of the "AI will replace all the programmers" stupidity.

> Unfortunately, a portfolio is nowhere to be found, as while programming for pleasure, my ADHD-tendencies flit from cool thing to cool thing to cool thing and I never seem to get a project really presentable.

Long term I'd say that you should fix this. You need to produce something that is either real or real adjacent. Now maybe all your half finished projects are the most impressive Python ever written, I don't know you. But nobody is really going to crawl through the graveyard of half started , half baked, and half finished projects looking for a reason to hire you these days. If they are HR they might not even look at your GH at all.

It's also worth considering if you're even suited to a corporate job coding. Mostly you're going to maintain and/or write old boring crap a lot. If you can't stay excited about your own ideas for long enough to finish anything, will it destroy your "sensitive super-introvert" soul to write yet another CRUD app or go change the crusty old TPS report collection system to add the new field?

Short term, get a crap job (like you said you plan to do) and apply for all the crap coding jobs if you still really want to, maybe you get lucky.

Here's a linkie for you if you so choose: https://ludic.mataroa.blog/blog/ludics-guide-to-getting-soft...

It's written for the Australia job market, but I've noticed an up-tick in response rate since I started applying his tips.

[cure8]

That's some clarity, you're mostly right. I figured a corporate coding job would often be quite boring, but still 10x as preferable as serving tables.

Maybe what I need is a job that doesn't suck much out of me, code or otherwise, so I can implement some cool shit on the side. Maybe something will take hold and I'll escape.

Thank you.

[_wire_]

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44112357

[gus_massa]

Why is that relevant?

[TheMongoose]

Because the AI bros can't imagine a world in which they don't outsource every single thought to the slop factory.