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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   2350 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:

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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.

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.

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.

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