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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   2348 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.

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.

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