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.
Damn. That’s sick. What an amazing story.
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.
must be your client. the link works fine for me. If you see the timeline, locals mostly weren’t involved and lots of local anti fascists organized and fought back. This island was nominated for the Nobel prize when the crisis started, but there’s only so much people can take when the refugees kept coming, the island couldn’t support thousands of extra people, and refugees were forced to cut down centuries old olive trees for cooking fuel. Greece is not a wealthy country and they felt betrayed by places like Sweden and Germany that have robust economies and a much smaller proportion of the refugee crisis.
Something had to give. Moria camp is essentially an open air prison without running water or showers. Most people who arrive are children, or were before they walked to Turkey from the Congo or Afghanistan or whatever and boarded boats for a chance at a better life.
I heard stories from teenagers who had escaped slavery or been forced to work in fast fashion factories in Turkey without pay or had their passports stolen in Iran or picked up by a militia in the Syrian civil war and handed a weapon. And the EU just leaves them there. They get like €200 a month, if and when their legal case ever concludes, but that’s not enough to actually live and they’re not allowed to work. Not like Greece has extra work anyway.
Maybe the countries that make a fortune by selling arms to conflict zones (France, Germany, Sweden, Belgium, Italy) should step up and take care of the crises they manufactured for profit. But nah, they just elect far right parties because brown people are scary.
Oh that’s nice it wasn’t a hugely shared sentiment. I skimmed a lot since I was trying to find the specific incident and all the details like deaths of babies and lynchings made it seem like the people of the island were for it since, like you mentioned, practically an open air prison. Unfair the island was burdened with so many but the conditions of the camp are awful.
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.
*highschool dropout
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.
Volunteered in a life science research lab in high-school due to a mix of high school requirement and parental connections.
Went to college, had some personal shit that meant I didn’t really do internships or the like. Liked mol bio but had been aiming for vet school since I was like 5. Tried for vet school and got very denied (meh grades and probably subpar rec letters relatively speaking not to mention a lack of spots for out of state residents).
Got a job in bone research (~25k/y) and moved back to the south. Dad convinced me to try for med school but I realized patient interaction was not for me. Then decided on PhD(30k/y). Got in and moved up north. Finally finished (fairly recently actually), met and married wife during the PhD but had to stick in the area for her so started a postdoc. So now I get 54k/y until the university catches up to the NIH saying 60K (after the recommending committee said at least 70k to stop losing everyone to industry and let people be able to live…).
After wife is able to move, not sure what’s next. I’m going to try for professorship or I’ll have to go to industry.
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I spent twelve years in a support job I hated, but I learned every new thing I possibly could, and being able to create things that did the jobs of two-to-three people got me the job I have now, which I love.
So my advice is to say yes any time new technology is introduced and learn how to use it. Any time you feel like something takes to long, go online and research ways to simplify it and find fixes.
That work can and does pay off. People will see it.
Also, if a job is making your life hard, be more willing to change than I was. I’m glad things turned out well for me, but being in a job that stressed me so much could have created real health problems over time.
(Engineer, for reference.)
Loved legos as a kid. I guess that kind of showed where I was going, huh? Also got lucky that my high school still had design and tech-related electives, so I got a leg up on that before I even hit college.
Worked in a tool & die shop for a small company while I was in college. It was a rough job - small business operating on the razor’s edge - but it was a good introduction to real-world manufacturing processes and environments. Having to actually machine and assemble stuff by hand taught me more about designing for manufacturability than any course ever could, and I think every engineer should spend some time making things before they try and design them. Definitely wouldn’t call that particular business enjoyable, though.
Got my first real engineering position at a power generating company. Interesting place. Burned literal turns of garbage to generate power and recycle almost anything they could. Very safety-focused. Honestly, if the commute hadn’t been absolutely awful, I might have stuck it out with them longer, but “spend two hours of your day driving” was just terrible.
Then found my current position, which is as an engineer at a smaller high-tech company in aerospace. Hours are great, co-workers are fantastic, the job is interesting, I like my boss, pay and benefits are absolute dogshit.
The engineering field is definitely one of those where you’re “encouraged” to shop around and switch jobs every few years. I don’t know why. It’s terrible. Terrible for employees and terrible for businesses, who are perpetually losing institutional knowledge. I don’t know why they don’t fix this. I’m coming up on the point where I’m going to have to choose between “a comfortable job” and “a well-paying job”, and I don’t know what I’ll do.
Pilot.
Went to college and learned to fly at the college flight school. Going to college isn’t totally necessary but having a degree is helpful, going to a college flight school is a terrible idea, local mom and pop flight schools are faster and cheaper for equally good training. The worst mistake I made in my career was flight instructing at the college flight school after I graduated. It was in a bad weather state so I couldn’t get a lot of hours, I was supposedly paid $21/hr but the way it was structured I averaged out at around $7/hr with no benefits as a 1099.
I got hired by a small cargo op in 2019. They’d hire me about 6 months earlier than when I would have qualified for a regional airline. It seemed like a questionable move at the time, but $50k to fly a little tiny jet seemed like a fortune. In retrospect it was a really good move when all my flight instructor friends got furloughed by the regional airlines when covid started. Normally I’d say airlines are the right move, but timing is everything.
After 3 years flying cargo I was tired of having my circadian rhythm get obliterated every week and I got hired to fly for a big bizjet company. Fun job, went to lots of cool airports and flew some interesting people, new hire pay was great, top end pay was terrible and the benefits were awful.
I got hired by one of the big US airlines in the hiring rush from 2022-23. Pay is amazing, benefits are really good, the work is somewhat boring but easy, and I have a strong union. 10/10 big airlines are great, I’m not leaving unless the company goes under, which is always a possibility. Now the only problem is that Boeing can’t seem to get their shit figured out so the industry has stopped hiring again because there aren’t enough new planes even though demand is fine.
TLDR: timing is everything.
TLDR: timing is everything.
Boy do I hear that.
I’ve always heard that the local/regional airlines are absolutely miserable in the pressure they put on pilots, but also the only good way to get a career started. Do you have a sense that the big airlines are looking to have any kind of rookie hire / training program, or are they content to use the regionals as a filter / feeder unit?
That’s common in other countries, but I’ve never heard of any impetus to do it in the US. A lot of airlines have some sort of cadet program, but none that actually put any serious money into developing new pilots. For what it’s worth, the hurdles in becoming a pilot are a big part of why being a pilot in the US is so much better than the rest of the world, there’s a lot of benefit in being your own professional and not having the company own you in a training contract.
My career path has been pretty straightforward. I went to a state science and engineering university with a starting major in physics but switched to electrical engineering after two years. While there I had a few student jobs at the various campus labs, helping with research projects and doing some simple programming.
After I graduated I got a job at a small nearby observatory where several friends worked. I started by operating and maintaining the telescopes then did some software work to expand our capabilities.
Once my partner graduated, I found a job in the nearby city at a small engineering firm that mostly did subcontracted work for the big defense companies. I split my time there between electrical engineering and embedded software development.
After several years there, I realized that there was no real path forward due to living in one of the big square states so I started looking and found a job with an established Bay Area company through a friend. Since then I’ve worked at a few different companies, from tiny startups to the FAANGS. I’ve generally moved up every couple years and now manage a large team at a mid sized startup. Like most engineers, I’ll probably never be really rich, but always comfortably employed.
There are three things that really helped my career.
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College - I know, it’s expensive and such. But even so, it is so worth it. Sure if you get a degree in underwater basket weaving at an expensive private university or it’s probably a financial waste, but STEM degrees are an excellent investment. It’s not just the paper, but the experience, contacts and friends that come from a traditional on-campus in-person university.
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Friends - The majority of my jobs, and in particular the ones I’ve needed and enjoyed the most came from friends and colleagues. Make those connections, be a good friend, and good things will happen.
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Hobby programming - I started writing code in elementary school in BASIC. Later in college I would experiment with small programs to scratch an itch, learning C++ and Python from books on my own. Those experiences were vital in my ability to learn how to tackle new problems and learn how to execute when I had to.
Bonus point 4) Reading “Getting Things Done” by David Allen. Seriously, learn to plan and execute. Don’t be a flakey “ideas person”, get shit done.
Other thing about an engineering degree is, if it’s a good school, it’ll teach you as much about how to go about figuring things out as the specific topics themselves. Not even field-specific technical stuff, but “Here’s my goals, how do I figure how to get to them?” or “I don’t understand this; what is my strategy for acquiring more information about it?”
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TBH I stumbled into it and fell in love with it upon finding it. Not exactly how I recommend people find their career but it worked for me!
Out of highschool I quit my fast food job and my mother told me to find a new job after a week or so. A friend of a friend invited me to check out their work place (machine shop) and I was in love with the machines, so I applied there. I’ve been in the industry since!
It’s been well over 10 years and I’ve only had 4 jobs so I can’t really give advice on where to look or how to find anything that fits for someone. Especially not in an economically viable way
I dropped out of college with 30 hours to go, worked a job in construction that was more or less a go-for job and I wasn’t very good at it. I had a friend who did EEGs and needed another tech. I worked at $30/hr doing EEGs. Studied my ass off and got registered, studied more and got a second registry. That enabled me to make $48/hr which is my starting pay adjusted for inflation. Long story short, I should have gone into computer science or finance and been rich. Neurodiagnostics is rewarding in it’s own way, but there is better money out there that isn’t going to make you work your ass off and claw your way back to where you started.
I’m underqualified for this thread but I have to say, these perspectives are amazing.
If you exist you are not underqualified! I want to hear everyone’s version of the human experience and making things work in our societies.
If you aren’t satisfied with where you’re at, it may put things in perspectivefor other readers just as much as the earlier portions of someone else’s story who is pleased with their career progress.
I recently heard an idea that “success is a lagging indicator”. You cannot know that you are not currently on a path to success.
It has been interesting. I wanted to teach at university so I went straight into a PhD program after my 4 year engineering degree. Found out that being a professor, at least at an ivy league school, was 10% teaching and 90% funding and politics, also did not mesh well with available projects and support, dropped out with “half a PhD”. Worked 12 years at steel mills, the first one sucked but I learned a lot, the second one really developed me into who I am now from an entrepreneurial and leadership POV. Went to business school at night and simultaneously got a Manager job at a shitty company, got fired, got an engineer job elsewhere and quickly promoted to manager where I rocked the house. Left for a senior engineer role elsewhere with better pay and work life balance and I am loving it so far.
Lots of luck, lots of effort, lots of learning through failure and success. Best thing I did was probably business school. The engineering degree is what gets me in the door but the tools I learned in getting my MBA have proven more valuable because most of the problems I need to solve are not exclusively engineering problems.
It was really weird to go from a high performer at one company to getting fired at the next. Thankfully I’ve had two great experiences since then, so I guess it was probably them not me. Getting fired messed with my concept of self worth for a bit but I have worked through that now.
There is always an element of luck, but we do have to be prepared to leverage that luck. Thanks for sharing!
