It was nice to be reminded that sometimes the Internet doesn't suck. Thanks for taking the time to write that reply.

As it turns out, being unable to get a job (at least one that pays a reasonable wage) is a common cause of "struggling with personal finance".

Less than a year of school, even 100% paid with loans, can easily be paid off on $30k/yr.

Plenty in our industry if they have the right set of skills (including soft skills). It might be unreasonable for OP to expect more but lets not pretend that there are no very highly paid young people in the software industry.

To turn this into an advice for people interviewing without a safety net: get a safety net. It can be a job that is easy to get, a rent that is easy to pay, just make sure that you can live by that situation indefinitely. You need to leap from there. You need to be able to turn down job offers to be able to negotiate.

With nothing to light a fire under your butt, you have to sometimes create your own crises because simply setting deadlines when you don't need to pay for anything doesn't have any real stakes. This is coming from personal experience- I've been constantly job hunting since 2015 with no FT offers in software development, despite having 8 years experience from 2007-14. Job hunting now just feels like going through the motions and I'm burned out from so much interview practicing.

I have the potential to turn down offers because of my situation of not needing to pay for almost anything, but I can only take advantage of that if I get offers to begin with. Whatever approaches I took in the early 2010's to get work aren't effective anymore and I'm still in the process of discovering what will work for me today.

It's an unfortunate reality that it's become impractical to match this advice in all circumstances. When I was young I found that

a) I had to live within an hours drive of a city with jobs to get jobs in that city b) There were 1/100th to 1/1000th the number of jobs available if I stayed with my family. c) Minimum rent + student loan payments + heating bills exceeded what an "easy" job could cover.

I ended up not paying the student loan debts for about a year and recking my credit, but I was ultimately able to get a job. People with mortgages, families, or other fixed expenses can likewise not stay unemployed forever in the modern world.

As an experienced hire, if you take a big down-level for expedience employers will question it in the future.

Just 5 years ago I was making 6000 USD per month and with almost 250K in debt, and ~50% of my income going to debt payments. Now I’ll be debt free in a couple months, and I have 12 months of savings in the bank & a rapidly growing retirement account! It’s super nice to feel this way, and it’s only been possible with a lot of hard work and even more luck.

[1] I lived way beyond my means, overestimated the value of my expensive education, and had an expensive bicycle accident.

> and had an expensive bicycle accident.

I mean, the health aspect was probably bad, but the financial implication is even worse :-(

I really don’t know what it’s like in other places, but the first few years of a mortgage are like this, but with a larger debt. It’s grim.

In the US, it would be both legal and common for federal government jobs (that require any sort of security clearance). Banking & finance (investment/securities & retail banking).And some jobs on the periphery of banking/finance, where handling PII related to finances is common.

I'm sure there are other places that run credit checks, just because they can (it is the US after all, we're king of treating employees like we're in a dystopian movie). But, there shouldn't really be a need.

(This might have changed. Too disenfranchied to even look it up.)

But mostly it's clothes. If you're having a hard time financially, the interview clothes you have (if any) will likely fit poorly, be worn out, poorly constructed, or all three.

By the way: For anyone who finds themselves in this situation, check out local food banks, churches, and your local DoL office. These groups will typically either have an interview clothing program, or will know of one. Nearly every city in the US--even the small ones--will have some kind of charity like this. If you're having trouble dressing or getting rides for interviews, reach out. It never hurts to ask.

I remember 15 years ago working in fast food. Many, many of the employees do exactly this. But it isn't comfortable. I worked with a brother-sister pair from Brazil. They lived together, worked two jobs each 70 hours per week (Dunkin Donuts, McDs, and a hotel between the two of them), lived in a shit apartment with no cable, and still only sent a couple hundred bucks back to Brazil every month. The sister was around 50 years old.

With that money their family was able to afford a house in Brazil.

You sound very presumptuous. I challenge you to find someone you're describing who works in America to support overseas family and ask them how "comfortable" their living situation is.

First of all - you are almost never 'fortunate'. Jobs offers do not fall from the sky usually.

Second - you many live well within your means and then have a car accident, or an ill relative, or something else that will make you into piss poor indebted fella real quick.

The core problem is that a median income lifestyle is a relatively unstable state due to unforeseen circumstances like your example. A poor person stays poor (if whatever happens doesn't kill them) which means that poverty is a stable state. A rich person can weather at least a couple disasters, so that makes it a mostly stable state. If you're in the middle, you are in a more unstable position compared to the extremes.

If everything was just easy we'd all just do it.

obviously he won't be able to solve his financial problems in any way without a job. if your assessment is "well he's screwed for the rest of his life" then a) I think you're wrong b) you can keep that to yourself

> You said you quit a job at EA, quit a job at IBM ...

Approach small startups, they judge much less. In fact a very early stage project (3-4 people) might be very happy to hire you because you seem very smart. The salary might be bad but will give you valuable in-depth job experience that will help you further down the road.

Also about the executive thing: I wouldn't approach executives because they usually hardly know what the company is doing. (They are there to talk with investors, external stakeholders...) Only exception small places. (< 30 ppl)

If I was you I would focus on a technology you like, maybe RoR or Python/Django and develop a small test project. If you feel confident enough even publish it on Github, but that's not a must. Just the muscle memory is good enough and that you can talk about it during interview. (Should be something mundane, like a Todo list or a news article search) And then just look for early stage startups and write them. Or perhaps NGOs, they are also much more open.

Once you've stayed at one relevant job for a year or two you can "double-down" on that and apply somewhere else for more... Most places don't care if you are ultra smart but rather that the usual tasks get done in an acceptable way. From past experience that's what managers are complimenting.

I'll add that OP — Your biggest issue seems to be extremely high intelligence, paired with a lack of empathy and social functioning, which created a self-expectation of massive grandiosity. But you keep failing to deliver on it because you can't get your highly powered brain on the streets, leading in self-pity and depression. Not good, but salvageable.

How do I know? My life story reads basically like yours into my late twenties — multiple college dropout, extremely high ambitions, always failed.

The only difference is that I started that low level support job in a company small enough that somebody saw my talent and got me on the path to second level tech support and then engineering as I continued automating my job away.

Had to chuckle as I pissed off quite a lot of people higher up in that job early on myself, but fortunately had a few people reflecting me instead of firing me, which made me understand how I made other people look and feel by my actions.

The good news: Empathy is a learneable skill. Aim far lower in a smaller, young and growing (!) company with good potential — but especially with a great boss. Then work hard, SHUT UP your smartass mouth for a year and work your way up while learning what's holding you back with the help of a good coach/therapist. When you apply with the company, read everything you can about what they do and make it about them.

Stop trying to impress. For that year, just focus on staying super humble and in the background, learning how value is created for that company and then go on creating that value even if nobody asked you to. Just for a year. Up your ante slowly and only when you feel you have established personal trust and leverage.

Empathy a skill where intelligence won't support you but be in your way because of your natural tendency of you showing it off. That makes people feel dumb, and nobody likes to feel like that. Also, some actions like you skipping line management will make them feel they can't rely on you on top. You'll keep failing if people keep hating working with you.

Your goal is to find a great manager first and make them look great. And then talk about that. Be the solution guy, not the problem guy. Be the one who goes the extra mile to bring a small win home, not the one who makes the snarkiest comment.

You'll never be a "normal" person, but that's ok. Having a sharp profile comes with its own set of (dis)advantages. You can be high functioning if you surround yourself with capable people who know how to work with your weaknesses in order to leverage your strenghts.

Your job is finding them, as you'll fail alone.

I think you're also perhaps projecting a bit. You stopped (very) short of giving the OP a diagnosis of ASD ("high functioning"). Again, that's way, way too much to read into 1590 characters (not counting spaces) on an HN post.

Personally I think there's no way to answer OP with anything approaching good advice when going only by what they have posted. I understand that everyone will want to try anyway, but sometimes the best asnwer is to say "I don't know".

______________

[1] Funny aside. Suppose Alice has "extremely high intelligence" (EHI). Her EHI will make her aware of two facts: a) everyone seems to think they have EHI, or at least intelligence above the mean; b) only a tiny minority of those people can be right. The obvious corrolary is that Alice herself must be of average intelligence and only feel like she has EHI because that's a common cognitive bias of people with average intelligence. Therefore Alice will assume she has average intelligence and discount evidence to the contrary. In other words, people who have EHI will very rarely believe they have EHI, let alone say they do.

The alternative, I guess, is that everyone correctly realizes they can't understand the full context of OP's position, and no one gives OP any advice and they continue down the road they're currently on. Just my view :)

By contrast, people who have not learned to put so much value on their being "above average" don't have as much trouble pushing further into that painful territory because to them, everything is pain anyway.

That way I've seen people with little talent go further than, or at least catch up to others who have it in abdundance, through discipline and work. My formative experience in that respect is from a different life when I was studying for a modern drums degree.

For example, perhaps people are telling you you're smart because they like your er other assets. Or because they feel obliged to because you're their boss. Or because they know your parents. etc etc.

Bottom line, there's confounding factors that can throw the calculation way off.

Would she also conclude that because some fruit in bowls is hollow plastic that there doesn't exist any real fruit in bowls?

I learned at all early age the only thing appearing like the smartest guy in the room was good for was paining a target on your back. I also learned how to emulate empathy, it's not perfect, but it makes up for the natural broken/missing wiring in my head.

Also early in my career I talked my way out of several jobs, You might have the best ideas in the world, but if powers that be don't want to hear them, don't belabor the matter, give your suggestions and move on.

I started out too in customer support, 20 years later I'm making an engineers salary, with an engineering title, which isn't too bad for a drop out.

The best advice on jobs I have, take a bad shitty job that's good for your resume, work there till you have the book experience to work someplace else, rinse and repeat,

Please don't. I know a guy who does the same. It comes across as utterly condescending.

I do genuinely care about people, I just cannot for the life of me understand why things upset others.

Failing to do it, makes me less employable, and less successful socially.

Around 25, i was really disgusted by computer and IT Job, even tryed to recycle into soft medecine.

At this exact time, the best things in my life occured: My (first) girl friend cheated on me after 2 years of love story. It forces me to consider that maybe im not always right. I had a wonderfull journey into psychology, pick up artist technics, self-improvement, and started to practice Systema (Russian Martial Art) where indeed i learn empathy. Im mean, i didnt learn it, i was over sensitive and over empathic. I was the too good to be happy, and my angry burst were just expression of my frustration accumulated by peoples abusing me.

Instability was coming from that. Quitting was an easy solution, escaping stupidity and predator instead of facing them was my main strategy.

With training and helps from great peoples, i improved my social skills. I learn how to say NO. Around 31, i was desperate with my job interview, my professionnal experience was expressing instability and induced fear to potential recruiters.

I had to makeup my resume. And i got the opportunity to work as a lvl3 support team. This was the way i came back into business. With my improved self, i spend 3 years (the first time i worked that long in a position) taking care of big problem in a critical application.

This was an honey moon, first time ever peoples were thanking me for saving their ass and cleaning their shit (we talk hundreds of million in electronic payment industry). Im still friend with this specific manager who was able to see potential in me, 12 years after.

I started a consulting company. Im 42, married, father of three. Im happy.

Just remember: Humans are not computer.

They often work in IT jobs, and for all their lives have heard how smart they were because of stereotypes around computers, science and nerds. Knowing how to use command line tools and put together a computer does not often equal extremely high intelligence.

How does „extremely high intelligence“ lead to multiple college dropouts? For the OP it was a lack of money to pay US study fees. I doubt that several other points you mention (like „don’t be the one who makes the snarkiest comment“) are comparable to OPs experience.

Also, being the solution guy/girl is good advice.

Once you have that experience you know what to look for in your career. Keep in touch with the good managers and colleagues, as that network is worth gold.

I suspect people call it intelligence when they see themselves in the behaviour. Since we all think we're above average https://priceonomics.com/why-do-we-all-think-were-above-aver...

Things like this are very important. Job hopping is a giant red flag for lots of companies.

Nobody wants to hire an employee whose replacement they have to hire under an year.

I noticed that after a year or 2 I get bored because things become a bit too routine. After the third job I decided to just become a midlancer (in a few years want to go full freelance) so I can hop whenever I hit that wall.

I’m saying this only for people who are in utter shit jobs and have the talent to find another one, but are afraid to be classified a job hopper.

Most hires will take a year to get productive (where they produce more value for the company than they cost).

I would never hire someone if I expected them to leave in a few months (except an intern).

There are exceptions. An experienced consultant may be hired only for short, specific projects. But if you're struggling to get hired, you don't fall in that category.

Anyway, I was productive within a week at my current company. Have you heard of companies trying to reduce the time to impact (or git commit) of an employee, some are proud that their employees commit go into production on their first day. If it takes one year to make back the money it costs to pay them, that sounds like we should improve that process or get more value from developers, rather than expect people to stay for longer to earn back their cost.

This is clearly a tough topic for some people on HN. I would recommend you just do some interviews (this is not treason), and see what offers you get (this is fair, you might get a nice increase). Then you'll realize its not a big deal for companies (especially the one thats making the hire), it might be bigger in your head and in your existing company.

I never fully understood this. In pretty much any company I worked, if by the end of the month you weren't productive (almost fully independent) you would get the boot. Do companies really expect for new employees to take a year to be consistently productive? In startup land, that is like 2-3 product launches, how the hell companies find the money for this?

I am not talking about someone not doing anything useful -- that should come quickly. But it may take several months or a year for them to start creating more value than their salary+benefits+other costs. And as long as the new hire shows progress to this I am perfectly OK if the process takes a year. My 2c.

I would encourage you to rethink this idea.

Devs are in the lucky position that you can obtain some aspects of 'real job experience' outside of a job. Create a project, or contribute to open source project in an area that interests you - it will hone your skills and give something concrete on your resume.

[edit] And make the projects very directed to the jobs you want to get, if security interests you try some hacker bounties - even documenting how you looked for exploits in a blog may be of use.

A guy got hired at Google once because he spoofed an email from Larry to Sergey using an unknown DKIM hack he discovered. The OP said numbers so I'm assuming he spoofed caller id. That's kind of like stealing the silverware as far as hacks go. So it doesn't surprise me that would come across poorly.

When I was a hiring manager, I specifically designed an interview process that procured me candidates that were great devs that didn't do well in leetcode style interviews, and as a result was able to hire a much better team than I should have been able to at my budget level. We did this, by doing no-brainer things like, actually reading the resumes.

But good hiring practices are hard to scale. Reading a resume or a person is difficult to teach. But a minimally competent leetcode style interview session can be run with some success by most engineers, so it scales. Which means it worked great for some quickly growing tech companies with large amounts of cash and little need to filter questionable resume lists (usually because their name brands guaranteed high level quality applicants). This then became a fad as every company copied the name brand engineering company without wondering if their hiring process had the same constraints as name-brand co, and is now what the industry thinks is 'the one true way.;

It might be a deciding factor if you get an interview at all, which team you are interviewing with and for which level. Those decisions are made by recruiters, not interviewers or hiring committees.

There are many tricks you can use to get an interview. However nothing abut OPs past shows that he can actually be a productive programmer.

>Dev job at IBM

No details what he did or for how long. I've been in teams with fresh juniors who are amazing. They bring in new knowledge and new perspectives and over all crush the job. Then I've seen juniors who "work" on something for weeks and weeks and when we start for them to demo how far they are we find out that they haven't been able to produce anything working.

>QA at EA

While with normal software I'd say this requires at least scripting skills with games I don't know if that is necessarily true and again probably not a good skill set for getting hired as dev in FAANG

>Cybersecurity team at college

I immediately assume this is some kind of CTF team, which might teach you to use some tools, but again I've seen people in college just "pass through" without really learning anything

If the job OP could do and do well was Amazon help desk then he should aim somewhere between FAANG dev and that position and probably erring on the side of the help desk. The new job will teach them more and in a year or two they can apply for a higher position.

If this is the case the gap in skill required to pass a FAANG interview may be too great to overcome in a reasonable timeframe.

Hustle culture pushes the unqualified person changing their life by taking a big risk. But most of the "success" examples are people moving into high turnover, metric driven, entry level positions such as investment advisors performing cold calls, entry level b2b sales etc.

Aced all questions, except the one that ALL of their inverviewers asked, that was how I had shown leadership solving a problem in a team situation in my past jobs.

See, in all my past jobs, I never been in a large team.

Didn't pass the interview, they have a policy to not tell you why but I can guess why...

They just wanted you to have shown some modicum amount of leadership skill. For a normal position, this doesn't mean that you have to act like a CEO. A simple case where you took the lead to solve some issue and maybe guided a colleague or even a customer would have sufficed.

To me that raises a flag on how you may not have a good grasp on what really happened in your interview. You don't ace questions in the onsite interview at Amazon. You are there to provide data for the interviewers to decide if you're a valid candidate. If you were rejected then the data your interviewers collected on you led them to that decision.

Source: I know a few people who went as far as onsite interviews at Amazon. Some got in, others didn't. None of the guys who were left out were cut because of their hard skills.

Or for that matter, what kind of job he's looking for and what his skills are other than QA @ EA (was he writing automation, or doing gameplay testing?), an 18 year old developer (intern?) at IBM, and customer service at Amazon. And maybe that's part of the problem -- hiring managers don't know what he wants to do. (which is easier to get away with at a small company since you'll do a bit of everything, but larger companies are generally looking for someone to fill a specific role)

If he's consistently getting first interviews but not getting past that, then maybe his resume sounds better than his actual skill level.

I second other comments elsewhere in the threads here to get a candid friend to help with interview practice.

From the other side of the fence, if a candidate has an atypical resume, the best course of action will be to interview to check their level.

You can't ignore the possibility of them being good autodidacts, but it will also lead to a very quick rejection if they're below those high expectations. It creates a cycle of quick interviews at prestigious places and quick rejections.

Once you have an interview, presumably its something that they learned from it that gets you rejected.

Viz. Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, and Google.

I had to look it up (I'm not from around here).

The past doesn't matter. Building skills could be enough

Edit: reason for my down vote? I think my argument is fair, it is wrong to look into the candidate's past. Just look at their skills and nothing else

Edit 2: down voting without a reason forces me to assume the decision was not rational and thus invalid.

STOP CALLING YOURSELF UNHIREABLE.

STOP WITH THE SELF-PITY--

Why?

You can't simultaneously focus on two things: such as focusing pitying yourself while simultaneously focusing on building & completing your strategy.

_____________________

WHATS THAT YOU SAY OP?!, you say you want to CONQUER THE ROMAN EMPIRE, but you only have a dozen pals WITH NERF GUNS? Yeah, guess how that'll work out :P Doesn't sound like a reasonable strategy, does it?

Yes, you failed because YOU LACKED A REASONABLE STRATEGY.

ANYONE WILL FAIL when they LACK A REASONABLE STRATEGY REGARDING ANYTHING in life, that should be obvious.

The solution? Develop a reasonable strategy and fulfill the work involved in the strategy.

______________________________________

Now for the rest of my intended comment:

This.

PragmaticPulp is speaking about STRATEGY.

You need a reasonable strategy, OP.

Check out my recent comments for my lengthier reply of advice, but here I'll summarize:

* Make small pivots. Don't try to jump to the top, as Pragmatic mentions

* Market yourself. Want to be a programmer? Show the world you're a programmer then! How? You need to build an open source project with in-demand programming languages & frameworks. You need a Web Portfolio to show off your projects. A LinkedIn presence. And, put your resume up on job sites. This is basic marketing strategy, OP.

Want a dev job? Well, how do you show the world you're a dev? Again, click my name to read my recent replies if you can't find 'em here on the first page of 300+ replies.

So, focus on crafting your strategy and then completing the strategy.

Keep your head up. Stay positive. Find motivational music & speeches on spotify & youtube-- that helped me get through 4 months of building my full stack app (no one paid me to make it, I simply built it b/c I knew I needed to show the world I had the skills)

What part of my comment do you dislike?

To be fair, I don't expect everyone on HN to appreciate my perspective. The tech world seems to be majority snowflake, or pretend snowflake (go along to get along, in that case).

I'm not a politically correct type of person-- I tell people what I actually think and prefer brutal honesty to sugar coated messaging.

The master said "You're too young, you need to start with more modest projects."

"But master" said the boy "you first composed a symphony when you were half my age!"

"Yes, but I didn't ask anyone how."

---

What I mean by this is that "hustling" is something of a unique, rare, or hacking like thing. You can't ask people how to do it, because if they could tell you then everyone would do it and it wouldn't work. I don't mean that like people are keeping a secret, but more like hustling means going through a dynamic and unexpected route and it's not something people can easily reduce to instructions.

We need to stop idolizing hustling. Getting shit done without pretending it's a gambler's game will get you far.

I like to say. At a job you get compensated three ways. Money, experience, and contacts. There are more ways but those are the top three.

Coding-camps?

Also bootcamp is very overhyped. There's some great people that come out of them, but I think mainly the hype is the fact that college is overrated (this is a cliche opinion I know) so bootcamps are there to try to exploit some of the delta that the myopic focus on college degrees creates. But many boot camps are super myopic in their own ways.

Right on. I'm self taught before bootcamps were a thing. I learned by doing by launching a bunch of startup prototypes. Then I ran out of money so I started interviewing, went 1 for 1 and got a good 6 figure Rails job at a big corporation (skipping junior level), all with less than 1 year experience.

Many people getting into coding I talk to think this path is too hard and that a bootcamp somehow looks good on a resume and is therefore safe.

The same arguments can be made for startup accelerators. You really don't need one if you're a hustler who can build businesses. Thus they also attract some percentage of people who want a "safe" approach for their resume.

I wouldn't describe it as a hack or hustle though. It's basically learn the skills required, demonstrate your knowledge, then interview and get a matching job.

Well are they hustling or looking for steady employment in tech?