site banner
PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   2337 thread views

Wellness Wednesday for May 31, 2023

The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:

  • Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.

  • Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.

  • Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.

  • Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).

3
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

I'm getting pretty tired of working minimum wage jobs after studying philosophy. Anyone have any advice on how to become more employable? This in Europe which I assume is relevant.

Can't you get into a trade or perhaps generic office work? If you are savvy you can do very well for yourself with most trades. Or otherwise becoming a teacher is usually a respectable middle class profession available to people with a college degree.

I've talked to some friends about office work and while they've said you can be dumb as a rock and still find a job my lack of experience in any office environment makes it seem like a big hurdle.

I've done a few interviews and I always struggle with the vagueness of what's being asked. I'm very comfortable in interviews where the question is "Can you do X, Y, Z" rather than "Tell me why you want to work here/what are you passions?" etc.

You should prepare answers to common interview questions.

Are you OK at math? I'd say learn to code. Programmers can be quite smart, but the low-performing ones (who still earn good wages) are pretty shockingly bad at basic reasoning in my experience. Take a few months and learn AWS + javascript and I bet you can find a remote job making like $20 / hr.

That seems like a good plan. I've got a lot of programmer friends and another friend who is being hired by a friend after spending the last year learning in his own time.

It will just take some discipline, I've tried to pick it up a few times and never found that pure interest that allows me to read books without needing to motivate myself. My dad is also fairly passionate about programming so I'm sure there's something to it but I haven't found it yet.

This is rather pessimistic. It's true you'll be competing with people from those abroad for high paying senior positions, but high paying in this field is leagues above minimum wage. For a well paying but perhaps more modest (or entry) position you'll be considered for hiring if you just have a grasp of the programming language you claim to and can solve a basic problem from first principles.

Leetcode is very useful. Get to a point where you can solve all the easy and most of the medium problems and you're at least on par with the average grad.

Yeah. You’ve got programmers that have been coding since elementary school and are posting good projects on GitHub in high school. By the time they’re out of college they have a decade of solid programming experience.

And that is table stakes for most programming jobs. Google? You’ve got to be close to world class if you aren’t connected.

You're competing not only with the local and regional talent but also those from India, China, Russia, and other countries vying for the few and highly coveted high-paying positions.

Sure, there are a lot of employees vying for jobs, but lots of jobs available too. At my last job I had a coworker who made $70k / year and wrote a while loop to find a remainder. It was something like:


function findRemainder(dividend, divisor) {

   let count = 0;

   while (count + divisor < dividend) {

      count += divisor;

   }

   return dividend - count;

}

Except much less elegant than that even. He lasted ~7 months there, his quality of work always around that level. The amazing thing was that it ever worked at all. Other coworkers have been better but still fairly bad at basic reasoning. I envy you if your company has a much better level of talent; sounds like you spend less of your time doing your coworkers' jobs than I do.

I've got a lot of programmer friends and another friend who is being hired by a friend after spending the last year learning in his own time.

That was what I did. I did take two semesters of programming classes in college, but honestly learned a lot more on my own, and got hired through some random hobbyist programming group midway through the second semester at $35 / hr. Since then I've gotten some big raises and nobody seems to care about my lack of credentials.

I never read any programming books, just built a few projects. It's easier, more fun, and more impressive. chatGPT is great at teaching coding so at this point learning to code is easier than ever. At some point it will definitely feel like a grind but hey, you can grind coding for a few months or grind a minimum wage job forever.

EDIT: just FYI this was like 2 years ago so I doubt much has changed since then.

so a substack as a side gig. there is a market for centrist-right philosophy

Funnily enough I just started one this week, though I haven't touched on anything philosophical or political yet and have just made one post on Irish history.

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats