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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.

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.

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