Feel free to be economic with the truth by using aliases for organizations and products wherever it protects your privacy or your contracts. I’m mainly interested to hear about your unique experience.
Example follow-up questions: What was most rewarding, what was not? What was not a great use of your time but maybe still a learning experience? What were you interested when you were younger (for hobbies or otherwise) that may have helped guide you?
Be 18. Get scholarship. Study literature. Drop out. Run away. Join a protest movement. Be homeless at MIT for a while. Find job. Get hurt at said job. Get workers injury insurance payment after 2 years of recocery. Go back to school for math. Be good at math. Found tech related non profit. Spend 6 months in Kurdistan, setting up wifi. Finish math school. Fuck it, get masters because good at math. Get hired by foreign company oversees to work on self driving cars. Doesn’t work. Won’t work. Quit. Go to Greece, teach refugee kids how to us MS office. Watch neo Nazis burn down refugee school and computer lab. Suddenly it’s March of 2020 (COVID) and nothing to do because Nazis and no more computer lab. Oh fuck. Find PhD program in “trustworthy ai” to figure out why car not work. Prove car never work. Get PhD. Get paid to critique AI and play on super computers while working from home and having zero day to day oversight. Get paid to travel the world. Get paid to shit on Google, Facebook , Openai, and Tesla.
I went from homeless to visiting my 40th country in 10 years, while having a PhD.
No regrets.
Based as fuck. Shame about the Nazis though, those poor kids didn’t deserve to have their school burnt down for existing.
well, the German Neo Nazi who came to town maaaaaay have gotten assaulted by somebody using a big ass bicycle lot and escorted off the island.
https://www.stonisi.gr/post/7411/eftasan-kai-oi-germanoi-neonazi-pics
yes, yes violence is bad, but literal Nazis are worse.
Nice. More of them to get a taste of their own medicine. The time line is awful, I didn’t know Greece had so much violence against immigrants. Second link was broken though.
IT in general.
Don’t pigeonhole yourself to a technology. Move with the times to stay relevant.
Alternatively, be extremely good at something hard.
- Hischool dropout
- Repeatedly try this school thing again without much success. Learnt some electronics, though.
- Spent a few years picking up temp jobs while I tended to my hobbies. Linux and electronics, mostly. Some programming.
- Broke as fuck, desperate for a stable paycheck
- Started applying to anything that seemed vaguely interesting
- “WTF is offshore seismic survey technician?”
- Get a phone call out of the blue with an interview offer. Well, I sure wasn’t gonna get the job, but they offered to fly me in for the interview in The Big City, and I had some friends there that I hadn’t met in years
- Immovable event shows up, and I was looking forward to attending that.
- Fired off an email to the company asking if it was possible to reschedule. I wasn’t gonna get the job anyway, so I didn’t feel like I had much to lose.
- To my surprise they rescheduled. Updated flight details arrived shortly after.
- Eventually flew down, went through with the interview. Didn’t perform particularly well or poorly. Nothing noteworthy, really.
- Before leaving I asked what their estimate was for reaching a conclusion.
- Had a beer with the friends down there for the first time in a year
- Flew home. Waited.
- Conclusion date arrived. Clock passed 16:00, when most businesses closed.
- “Meh, fuckit. Can’t say I’m surprised”
- 21:30 or so I received an e-mail from the company with a job offer, already signed. Monthly pay far above what I imagined I’d ever be able to pull.
- Remember those hobbies? Yeah, turned out that they liked my linux and electronics hobbies, combined with me already being used to heavy machinery due to growing up on a farm.
- Kicked in the door to my flatmate. “I need you to lend me 100$” (equivalent in my currency)
- “Why?”
- "We’re going out to celebrate that I won’t have to borrow money from you anymore.
I left the industry in 2012 to get a “normal” job, but came back in 2019 after realizing that I hated normal jobs, and that normal jobs are for normal people. After a few promotions and being poached by a competitor I am no longer offshore, but I support the operation from wherever I am. There’s still some travel to the far corners of the world for mobilizing for a new survey and that sort of stuff, but I’m mostly in my home office these days. Pays quite handsomely, though.
As for recommendations, I’ve been extremely lucky. Most of my coworkers have a masters degree, either in something technical or in geophysics. I guess one of those is a better choice.
But after having taken part in some of the interviews, I’ve learned that there aren’t really that many hard requirements when it comes to skills or diplomas. It’s better to find the right kind of personality who knows something useful. The rest can be taught.
Got IT training during my time in the military that ended up opening the door to a network engineer position with a defense contractor after I got out.
I was a pretty poor engineer, but I was good at explaining technical details to non-technical people. The bosses liked this because they wanted constant updates on what was happening, the other engineers liked this because they didn’t want the bosses to bother them, and I liked it because going to sit in briefings got me out of doing real work, so I ended up in management.
My entire career has basically been an accident. I majored in history thinking I’d be a teacher because it was my favorite subject and I was 18 and didn’t know what else I could do with my life. Three years in, I realized I didn’t want to be a teacher and most history-adjacent jobs didn’t pay a living wage, so I dropped out. A bit later, I started a temp job working for the state because I needed a job and had call center experience, did a good job and managed to get hired full time. Almost 20 years later, I’m doing work I never expected to be doing but it turns out that I like paperwork and I’m pretty good at navigating bureaucracy and explaining it to laymen. Can’t imagine working in the private sector at this point. I eventually finished my degree (in human services this time) but tbh it was mostly just so I’d have one for my resume.
The biggest lesson from all of it for me has been that kids really don’t need to go to college right out of high school, or at all in some cases, and I’m glad the tide is turning on that to some extent. I’ve enjoyed pretty much everything I’ve done in my career and I’ve benefited enormously by not having a “dream job” in mind. Education is great, don’t get me wrong, but so is flexibility and a willingness to learn new things outside of school.
