Boss's boss emailed me yesterday saying my WFH would be temporarily changed for the next week, until the 8th, to only one day and that we would be meeting to discuss changes occurring in the office.
I came in today and found out my actual boss retired yesterday. I'm of mixed feelings about that but it's clearly the reason why WFH is changing. I just hope they don't try to saddle me with what she did, considering she was two full pay grades above me.
Meanwhile I'm still temporary full time because my job technically isn't open still, so if California decides to start with furloughs and layoffs I'm first up on the chopping block. Which has them led into extremely poor sleep and that added stress hanging above me.
So I'm hoping for something good to happen with this upcoming meeting. I need a good thing to happen.
Sorry in advance if this isn't the right place to ask about this.
So I have a BA in Sociology that hasn't gotten me anywhere in the almost ten years since I got it. I ended up working nine years at a plant and hating most of it. Now that my plant closed down I have the opportunity to go back to school and have it paid for with the TRA (Trade Readjustment Allowance). I've been having a lot of difficulty choosing what to do with this, though.
Representatives I spoke to at my alma mater tried to convince me into going for a Masters in Business Administration, but honestly I don't think I would be cut out for that sort of career because I am not an assertive person. I know there are a lot of jobs in Computer Science, but it seems to have a reputation for being particularly difficult and having a very high wash-out rate, so I don't know if I'd be cut out for that, either.
The liberal arts thing to MBA is fucking awful, in my experience
I have a bs in English with a focus on professional writing
(It's a completely worthless degrees and an albatross around my neck)
I would definitely suggest taking a business 101 type course before even thinking about an MBA
I somehow got accepted into an MBA program from SNHU and it was a complete racket, I felt
Do you enjoy things like micro and macro economics and all sorts of graphs and charts?
Also, the classmates I interacted with on the course message board were by and large absolutely dreadful folk, five out of 20 tried to rope into multi level marketing pyramid schemes within the first week
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Shortytouching the meatIntergalactic Cool CourtRegistered Userregular
all the people who said stuff like "what degree you get doesn't really matter, you can get whatever you want and have a job waiting for you" as recently as the 90's and the 00's are saying "just get an MBA" right now
there might be a job, there might not, but in any case you're still going to be competing with a lot of other people who had the same idea and you're gonna be busting your hump for entry-level shit jobs regardless
I somehow deluded myself into paying close to $2000 for an entry level MBA course
And blew a grand on a laptop that I haven't used since
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JedocIn the scupperswith the staggers and jagsRegistered Userregular
The kids next door have invented a new version of football that includes running onto my porch and then parkouring over the railing back into their front yard.
Even here, in the depths of quarantine, the teens haunt me.
I was never really into the MBA idea, mainly because I assume to be a successful business person you have to be at least kind of an asshole. I was starting to get into the Computer Science idea until I saw this on one of the school websites I visited:
Further investigation was more discouraging as I saw a number of commentators claiming that a person has to "naturally think a certain kind of way" to have any hope of succeeding.
I don't want to end up working at another plant, but I'm not really that enthusiastic about any of the career ideas I've looked into.
I was never really into the MBA idea, mainly because I assume to be a successful business person you have to be at least kind of an asshole. I was starting to get into the Computer Science idea until I saw this on one of the school websites I visited:
Further investigation was more discouraging as I saw a number of commentators claiming that a person has to "naturally think a certain kind of way" to have any hope of succeeding.
I don't want to end up working at another plant, but I'm not really that enthusiastic about any of the career ideas I've looked into.
If you're looking at just fully retraining I'd start by thinking about some combination of things you enjoy doing and that you feel comfortable doing and work into jobs from there.
Sorry in advance if this isn't the right place to ask about this.
So I have a BA in Sociology that hasn't gotten me anywhere in the almost ten years since I got it. I ended up working nine years at a plant and hating most of it. Now that my plant closed down I have the opportunity to go back to school and have it paid for with the TRA (Trade Readjustment Allowance). I've been having a lot of difficulty choosing what to do with this, though.
Representatives I spoke to at my alma mater tried to convince me into going for a Masters in Business Administration, but honestly I don't think I would be cut out for that sort of career because I am not an assertive person. I know there are a lot of jobs in Computer Science, but it seems to have a reputation for being particularly difficult and having a very high wash-out rate, so I don't know if I'd be cut out for that, either.
Does anyone have any advice?
The early learning curve is steep, but don't let that scare you off if you're genuinely interested. More and better resources are becoming available all the time, and folks on this here forum are happy to help
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WeaverWho are you?What do you want?Registered Userregular
We had some really nice weather a week or so ago and now today we've had ten or so callouts for illness.
I would add that of you are a weird dreamy creative type, rather than an analytical type, like most liberal arts degree holders, you probably won't enjoy analytical work
On the one hand, it's mildly demotivating to feel like we're busting a gut over here going through this massive increase in demand for social services and slamming it without the opportunity to be recognised in the usual manner for the significant effort and accomplishments we're managing to achieve under extraordinary pressure and stressful circumstances.
On the other hand, it's absolutely the right call; I'm not really in it for the money, I'm already well compensated, and as a public servant I enjoy stable, reliable employment, which is more than many other people have during times of crisis. All I really want is tangible evidence that the effort is recognised, and the affirmation of a job well done.
Maybe a printed certificate and a pat on the back?
That's unbelievably cool. Your new name is cool guy. Let's have sex.
+6
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Lord_AsmodeusgoeticSobriquet:Here is your magical cryptic riddle-tumour: I AM A TIME MACHINERegistered Userregular
I got a hard hat but realized it didn't really fit right this morning, ordered another which will be here tomorrow.
So obviously today is the day I got hit on the head by a wooden palette on a spinning palette wrapper
Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if Labor had not first existed. Labor is superior to capital, and deserves much the higher consideration. - Lincoln
I was never really into the MBA idea, mainly because I assume to be a successful business person you have to be at least kind of an asshole. I was starting to get into the Computer Science idea until I saw this on one of the school websites I visited:
Further investigation was more discouraging as I saw a number of commentators claiming that a person has to "naturally think a certain kind of way" to have any hope of succeeding.
I don't want to end up working at another plant, but I'm not really that enthusiastic about any of the career ideas I've looked into.
If you're looking at just fully retraining I'd start by thinking about some combination of things you enjoy doing and that you feel comfortable doing and work into jobs from there.
I don't buy it. Their "test" strikes me as equivalent to testing kids for innate reading ability by showing them combinations of letters and asking them to match them to sounds, but without first explaining what a letter is.
One of the reasons programming is traditionally so hard to learn is that schools tend to skip the "A is for Apple" part and jump straight into grammar. Then they decide that the people who aren't self-taught just weren't cut out for it.
The kids next door have invented a new version of football that includes running onto my porch and then parkouring over the railing back into their front yard.
Even here, in the depths of quarantine, the teens haunt me.
Programming isn't magic, it's not something inherently harder to learn than any other field that requires technical proficiency.
It's just a set of skills that require practice to become competent at.
Oh, also, CS isn't a programming degree or whatever, think of it as a sort of specialised mathematics degree.
^^ this, doing a CS degree is a useful thing to have as a programmer, because it gives you the algorithmic tools required to optimise your code performance, but it won't teach you how to program. It should, ideally, teach you how to think about programming at various conceptual levels.
I'm gonna second trying out some vocational testing and figuring out what you actually like doing. "I guess I'll be a coder" is kind of the fallback right now because it's a job field with huge demand and the pay levels are outrageous, but if you don't enjoy it at a fundamental level then even getting through a degree or certification will be a slog.
(the most recent advice I've been given is that MBAs are vastly oversaturated at the moment so unless you get into a top school you're just throwing your money away, because the real value in the degree is all in the networking and name recognition from the institute, not what you actually learn).
only tangentially related, but because of mandatory WFH I have no access to hardware or equipment to make hardware, so I've been doing nothing but coding and development for nearly 2 months. Every single day is a head-desking reminder of why I have actively avoided software engineering as a career, and it's making me hate going to "work" (aka getting out of bed) for the first time in about 5 years.
WeaverWho are you?What do you want?Registered Userregular
I finished up all the scheduling & other admin stuff I had to complete this week before I left today, so tomorrow all I've gotta do is go in, knock out the days bookkeeping in about four/five hours, and I'm out!
Oh also I ordered (on the company dime, of course) & built the big boss a new office chair. Like to make sure the current policy of "Nick does what he wants." remains in effect.
CS is great if you're a logical person that enjoys micro-optimization, problem solving and self-driving on improvement/craft. There's a high ceiling and a lot of interesting things. It's also terrible if you don't particularly enjoy sticking lego blocks of problem solving in new and asinine ways to satisfy existing architecture/vendor stupidity.
What do you like? Assertive just comes from confidence, which can be built in any field. MBA's are a good broad brush, but I have yet to have anyone say they taught them anything, most say they drank a lot and got a good management consulting or exec-track job out of it.
Think about types of work you have done and what has given you the most enjoyment, as while the pay will be different in different industries, being miserable 8+ hours a day is not worth really any price.
Oh, also, CS isn't a programming degree or whatever, think of it as a sort of specialised mathematics degree.
Oh, wait, really? What degree should I be looking for to get into programming, then? When I Googled "what degree to get to become a programmer" it suggested Computer Science, so I figured that was the right one.
Oh, also, CS isn't a programming degree or whatever, think of it as a sort of specialised mathematics degree.
Oh, wait, really? What degree should I be looking for to get into programming, then? When I Googled "what degree to get to become a programmer" it suggested Computer Science, so I figured that was the right one.
It really depends on what you mean by programming.
To give you an idea of the sort of range of stuff that requires programming skills, and the routes you take to get there:
I'm currently back in grad school, but prior to that, I was an observatory technician, a job which required programming skills amongst others. I got these through a B.Sc. in engineering physics and a M.Sc. in physics. I have friends who work for some of the big tech companies you probably use services from. They have CS B.Sc. degrees. I have friends who do control systems coding for large petrochemical companies. They have engineering degrees. I know a guy who works for a bank doing quantitative forecasting. He has a PhD in soft matter physics. I have friends who are dev leads and technical support team leads for game companies you have likely played games from. They don't have any degrees, but technical certifications.
This may sound mildly overwhelming but the answer is to find some vague field or topic you find interesting, and see what people who work in that area have for qualifications.
To get started on learning programming basics, I would suggest thinking of something manageable to start as a project (say, a twitter bot or something similar) and start figuring out what you need to make that happen. There's a programming thread in the technology tavern which is also a good resource.
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JedocIn the scupperswith the staggers and jagsRegistered Userregular
edited April 2020
I am contractually obligated by The Right Honorable Guild Of Book-Botherers and Find-Out-Aboutniks to encourage you to consider a library degree.
It's not for everyone, but it's a flat two-year Master's degree with no thesis, it's a good professional wage, and an ALA-certified program will open up opportunities all over the world.
You can work in a public library like me! I spend my days helping people get the information and technology skills they need to apply for jobs, get health insurance, and fax deranged manifestos to the governor! Plus a couple times a week I get to answer genuinely interesting questions using a great big room full of books.
Other librarians in the system get paid to run D&D groups, oversee knitting circles, and watch small children read picture books to trained therapy dogs.
It's entirely possible there will be no horrible teens in your neighborhood!
If you don't want to work what is essentially a retail job where we try to convince people to take away valuable products they don't want for free, there are a number of other specializations. You can sit quietly in a room by yourself as a government documents librarian, or gaslight students with classic Bill Murray films as a school librarian, or make serious cash money as a legal or corporate librarian. If you really liked being a student and don't mind a seriously competitive job market, you can try to get a job as an academic librarian and publish journal articles that nobody will read for the rest of your career. You can travel to New Guinea to help catalog and preserve the oral and kinetic histories of various tribes, although I believe you'll have to claw the genie lamp out of my Archives professor's cold dead hands first.
Librarians: we still seem to be getting away with it, somehow!
JedocIn the scupperswith the staggers and jagsRegistered Userregular
You can write a thesis if you want to, but hardly anyone does. Mostly they go for the comprehensive exam, which is a complete joke and has a pass rate in the high 90s at most institutions.
You can also take the portfolio track, which is sort of like a thesis but you're defending a cumulative summary of everything you've learned during your coursework. Quite a few people take that route, but mostly narcs and school librarians.
I'm gonna second trying out some vocational testing and figuring out what you actually like doing.
Well, when I got out of high school I thought I wanted to be an artist and went to art school. This was around 2007.
I dropped out after a year and semester because I was consistently making C's in all my classes. I came away with the impression that art school was for people with a higher skill level than what I had at the time, seeing as I was wanting to learn how to draw characters well in different poses but was getting assignments like "draw a page of Spider-Man webslinging through the New York Stock Exchange". I also found I just wasn't enjoying myself as much as I thought I would.
I went to another school and graduated with a degree in Sociology in 2011, but after getting out of school I couldn't find a job in it that would pay for both my living expenses and student loans. Eventually I had to get a job at a plant just outside my hometown because I had to pay my student loan payments, the majority of which each month are to pay for art school.
After a few years of working at a plant (probably in 2015) I decided to try teaching myself how to draw better, buying a lot of instructional books and finding tutorials online. For about six months or so I was optimistic and motivated and would spend a minimum of three hours daily practicing, but eventually I lost that optimism and motivation.
I tried to restart again late last year but quickly got discouraged again.
The idea of being an artist is still more appealing to me than anything else, but I just feel like I don't have some essential quality needed to be one. Plus, I want more money to be able to pay for my student loans and living expenses because I've long wanted to move from my rural hometown to an urban or suburban area where I hopefully don't feel so socially alienated.
"I guess I'll be a coder" is kind of the fallback right now because it's a job field with huge demand and the pay levels are outrageous, but if you don't enjoy it at a fundamental level then even getting through a degree or certification will be a slog.
Honestly most of the draw for me (maybe around 60%) is that I've heard coding has a lot of nerds working in it. The worst part of my job at the plant wasn't the actual work I was doing but the people I had to work with. They had nothing in common with me in terms of interests and their personalities were diametrically opposed to mine. About half of them had the temperament of a high school bully. One of my greatest fears is the idea of getting stuck working with people like them for years on end again. I'd love to work with a bunch of nerds instead, more than anything.
(the most recent advice I've been given is that MBAs are vastly oversaturated at the moment so unless you get into a top school you're just throwing your money away, because the real value in the degree is all in the networking and name recognition from the institute, not what you actually learn).
Yeah, I've heard this, too. My alma mater is by no means a top school and my social anxiety would prevent me from being able to network effectively.
Hexmage-PA on
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JedocIn the scupperswith the staggers and jagsRegistered Userregular
edited April 2020
Just make sure you don't become a branch manager. Sometimes a global pandemic comes along and your pile-of-turds-in-a-suit governor forces you to reopen too quickly and you have to deal with a bunch of questions from frightened staff members that you don't have the answers to.
Think I'll start drafting my deranged manifesto for the next time I have access to the fax machine.
only tangentially related, but because of mandatory WFH I have no access to hardware or equipment to make hardware, so I've been doing nothing but coding and development for nearly 2 months. Every single day is a head-desking reminder of why I have actively avoided software engineering as a career, and it's making me hate going to "work" (aka getting out of bed) for the first time in about 5 years.
In what way? I've felt for a long time now that I should learn to code on some level, maybe starting with Python or SQL but I just don't really know what to focus on and how that would actually apply to my career path.
I would add that of you are a weird dreamy creative type, rather than an analytical type, like most liberal arts degree holders, you probably won't enjoy analytical work
That one was floating around this thread in the recent past
I'm both of those things, but not at the same time. I can have a good time collecting data, analyzing it, and producing a report summarizing it but I'll also just sometimes hop around my ground floor apartment playacting out a scene from my head for whatever story I'm thinking of as I workshop the dialogue on the fly between two or more people in a low whisper with accompanying voice alterations.
Never heard of any job I can get that lets me combine both except the one I can't have because being a novel writer rarely provides a living wage
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FishmanPut your goddamned hand in the goddamned Box of Pain.Registered Userregular
My wife used to teach MBA business students.
Part of their course required them to take their business plans (they always had one) and her course was about teaching them how to crunch their numbers and actually analyse their viability.
When the government changed and closed immigration loopholes it was amazing how many of their students had to rapidly change their plans to accomodate the fact they couldn't exploit foreign worker forces by importing minimum wage workers for jobs they'd have to pay actual living wage to locals for.
I would add that of you are a weird dreamy creative type, rather than an analytical type, like most liberal arts degree holders, you probably won't enjoy analytical work
That one was floating around this thread in the recent past
I'm both of those things, but not at the same time. I can have a good time collecting data, analyzing it, and producing a report summarizing it but I'll also just sometimes hop around my ground floor apartment playacting out a scene from my head for whatever story I'm thinking of as I workshop the dialogue on the fly between two or more people in a low whisper with accompanying voice alterations.
Never heard of any job I can get that lets me combine both except the one I can't have because being a novel writer rarely provides a living wage
Eh, presentations are a form of acting, just usually poorly done. Building narrative is actually really important to presenting a business case as you need to help others see the whole story and their place in it. Most decision making is rooted in emotion,so being able to understand and appeal to it is often the x factor many lack.
only tangentially related, but because of mandatory WFH I have no access to hardware or equipment to make hardware, so I've been doing nothing but coding and development for nearly 2 months. Every single day is a head-desking reminder of why I have actively avoided software engineering as a career, and it's making me hate going to "work" (aka getting out of bed) for the first time in about 5 years.
In what way? I've felt for a long time now that I should learn to code on some level, maybe starting with Python or SQL but I just don't really know what to focus on and how that would actually apply to my career path.
oh it's just a personal thing, nothing against coding in general - I'm just not temperamentally suited to working in a purely digital domain. It's a large part of my job, and mostly that's fine, but if I don't get to spend some of the day doing something physical with my hands, then I get bummed out. Also I don't get very much joy out of tracking down and blasting obscure bugs, and I feel like that's integral to enjoying the coding process - you need to be able to get a little bit high off that diagnostic "aHA!" moment. For me software is just the irritating sudoku puzzle box blocking my access to the guts of the machinery, so we have a highly adversarial relationship.
If you're looking for advice on coding in general, I'd think first about where you're at and then about where you want to be. If you've done zip with coding before, then Python is a perfectly good place to start - the syntax is fairly intuitive, and it's softly object oriented so it will get you used to thinking about things like classes, methods, inheritance, etc.
After that depends very much on where you want to focus. SQL is great if you want to go into web development or deal with backend systems, I avoid the hell out of it but other people in here know lots. C++ is still the best gateway to engineering programming and real-time software development, Fortran and COBOL are for if you hate yourself but like making money off maintaining legacy systems. C# or Java for game design. Most languages were developed and adopted for specific reasons, so knowing what you want to do will help guide your development pathway, but programming skills transfer easily between them so it doesn't matter much where you start.
Went and shelved books for three hours this morning. Talked to my first humans since March 15, so that was nice.
I would like to clarify that I do consider the brave workers at Taco Bell to be human, but I don't consider "Would you please be the accessory to my beef mistake" "Yes of course that will be twelve dollars please drive around" to be really talking to someone.
I awesome'd this post because it's a great post, but there is one part I cannot parse - "beef mistake". I do not understand how anything related to eating cooked beef could ever possibly be a mistake?
Posts
I came in today and found out my actual boss retired yesterday. I'm of mixed feelings about that but it's clearly the reason why WFH is changing. I just hope they don't try to saddle me with what she did, considering she was two full pay grades above me.
Meanwhile I'm still temporary full time because my job technically isn't open still, so if California decides to start with furloughs and layoffs I'm first up on the chopping block. Which has them led into extremely poor sleep and that added stress hanging above me.
So I'm hoping for something good to happen with this upcoming meeting. I need a good thing to happen.
I'm sending this with the caption that "I finally got around to some deep cleaning I've been putting off."
edit: Demon image stolen from here: https://www.deviantart.com/sandara/art/Portal-77332076
A bit, that's why I wanna make another one with different wood types.
So I have a BA in Sociology that hasn't gotten me anywhere in the almost ten years since I got it. I ended up working nine years at a plant and hating most of it. Now that my plant closed down I have the opportunity to go back to school and have it paid for with the TRA (Trade Readjustment Allowance). I've been having a lot of difficulty choosing what to do with this, though.
Representatives I spoke to at my alma mater tried to convince me into going for a Masters in Business Administration, but honestly I don't think I would be cut out for that sort of career because I am not an assertive person. I know there are a lot of jobs in Computer Science, but it seems to have a reputation for being particularly difficult and having a very high wash-out rate, so I don't know if I'd be cut out for that, either.
Does anyone have any advice?
I have a bs in English with a focus on professional writing
(It's a completely worthless degrees and an albatross around my neck)
I would definitely suggest taking a business 101 type course before even thinking about an MBA
I somehow got accepted into an MBA program from SNHU and it was a complete racket, I felt
Do you enjoy things like micro and macro economics and all sorts of graphs and charts?
Also, the classmates I interacted with on the course message board were by and large absolutely dreadful folk, five out of 20 tried to rope into multi level marketing pyramid schemes within the first week
there might be a job, there might not, but in any case you're still going to be competing with a lot of other people who had the same idea and you're gonna be busting your hump for entry-level shit jobs regardless
And blew a grand on a laptop that I haven't used since
Even here, in the depths of quarantine, the teens haunt me.
Further investigation was more discouraging as I saw a number of commentators claiming that a person has to "naturally think a certain kind of way" to have any hope of succeeding.
I don't want to end up working at another plant, but I'm not really that enthusiastic about any of the career ideas I've looked into.
@Enc
I remember an article about this awhile ago you might find interesting: https://blog.codinghorror.com/separating-programming-sheep-from-non-programming-goats/
If you're looking at just fully retraining I'd start by thinking about some combination of things you enjoy doing and that you feel comfortable doing and work into jobs from there.
The early learning curve is steep, but don't let that scare you off if you're genuinely interested. More and better resources are becoming available all the time, and folks on this here forum are happy to help
Think about what drew you to sociology
Maybe take some of those ideal job finder tests
https://www.mynextmove.org/
That one was floating around this thread in the recent past
I mean, maybe? Throw in a cookie and I'm golden.
So obviously today is the day I got hit on the head by a wooden palette on a spinning palette wrapper
I don't buy it. Their "test" strikes me as equivalent to testing kids for innate reading ability by showing them combinations of letters and asking them to match them to sounds, but without first explaining what a letter is.
One of the reasons programming is traditionally so hard to learn is that schools tend to skip the "A is for Apple" part and jump straight into grammar. Then they decide that the people who aren't self-taught just weren't cut out for it.
It's just a set of skills that require practice to become competent at.
Oh, also, CS isn't a programming degree or whatever, think of it as a sort of specialised mathematics degree.
Have you searched the entire floor?
Teens will always make up bullshit games
^^ this, doing a CS degree is a useful thing to have as a programmer, because it gives you the algorithmic tools required to optimise your code performance, but it won't teach you how to program. It should, ideally, teach you how to think about programming at various conceptual levels.
I'm gonna second trying out some vocational testing and figuring out what you actually like doing. "I guess I'll be a coder" is kind of the fallback right now because it's a job field with huge demand and the pay levels are outrageous, but if you don't enjoy it at a fundamental level then even getting through a degree or certification will be a slog.
(the most recent advice I've been given is that MBAs are vastly oversaturated at the moment so unless you get into a top school you're just throwing your money away, because the real value in the degree is all in the networking and name recognition from the institute, not what you actually learn).
I figured searching the walls would be pointless.
Oh also I ordered (on the company dime, of course) & built the big boss a new office chair. Like to make sure the current policy of "Nick does what he wants." remains in effect.
What do you like? Assertive just comes from confidence, which can be built in any field. MBA's are a good broad brush, but I have yet to have anyone say they taught them anything, most say they drank a lot and got a good management consulting or exec-track job out of it.
Think about types of work you have done and what has given you the most enjoyment, as while the pay will be different in different industries, being miserable 8+ hours a day is not worth really any price.
Oh, wait, really? What degree should I be looking for to get into programming, then? When I Googled "what degree to get to become a programmer" it suggested Computer Science, so I figured that was the right one.
It really depends on what you mean by programming.
To give you an idea of the sort of range of stuff that requires programming skills, and the routes you take to get there:
I'm currently back in grad school, but prior to that, I was an observatory technician, a job which required programming skills amongst others. I got these through a B.Sc. in engineering physics and a M.Sc. in physics. I have friends who work for some of the big tech companies you probably use services from. They have CS B.Sc. degrees. I have friends who do control systems coding for large petrochemical companies. They have engineering degrees. I know a guy who works for a bank doing quantitative forecasting. He has a PhD in soft matter physics. I have friends who are dev leads and technical support team leads for game companies you have likely played games from. They don't have any degrees, but technical certifications.
This may sound mildly overwhelming but the answer is to find some vague field or topic you find interesting, and see what people who work in that area have for qualifications.
To get started on learning programming basics, I would suggest thinking of something manageable to start as a project (say, a twitter bot or something similar) and start figuring out what you need to make that happen. There's a programming thread in the technology tavern which is also a good resource.
It's not for everyone, but it's a flat two-year Master's degree with no thesis, it's a good professional wage, and an ALA-certified program will open up opportunities all over the world.
You can work in a public library like me! I spend my days helping people get the information and technology skills they need to apply for jobs, get health insurance, and fax deranged manifestos to the governor! Plus a couple times a week I get to answer genuinely interesting questions using a great big room full of books.
Other librarians in the system get paid to run D&D groups, oversee knitting circles, and watch small children read picture books to trained therapy dogs.
It's entirely possible there will be no horrible teens in your neighborhood!
If you don't want to work what is essentially a retail job where we try to convince people to take away valuable products they don't want for free, there are a number of other specializations. You can sit quietly in a room by yourself as a government documents librarian, or gaslight students with classic Bill Murray films as a school librarian, or make serious cash money as a legal or corporate librarian. If you really liked being a student and don't mind a seriously competitive job market, you can try to get a job as an academic librarian and publish journal articles that nobody will read for the rest of your career. You can travel to New Guinea to help catalog and preserve the oral and kinetic histories of various tribes, although I believe you'll have to claw the genie lamp out of my Archives professor's cold dead hands first.
Librarians: we still seem to be getting away with it, somehow!
You can also take the portfolio track, which is sort of like a thesis but you're defending a cumulative summary of everything you've learned during your coursework. Quite a few people take that route, but mostly narcs and school librarians.
Well, when I got out of high school I thought I wanted to be an artist and went to art school. This was around 2007.
I dropped out after a year and semester because I was consistently making C's in all my classes. I came away with the impression that art school was for people with a higher skill level than what I had at the time, seeing as I was wanting to learn how to draw characters well in different poses but was getting assignments like "draw a page of Spider-Man webslinging through the New York Stock Exchange". I also found I just wasn't enjoying myself as much as I thought I would.
I went to another school and graduated with a degree in Sociology in 2011, but after getting out of school I couldn't find a job in it that would pay for both my living expenses and student loans. Eventually I had to get a job at a plant just outside my hometown because I had to pay my student loan payments, the majority of which each month are to pay for art school.
After a few years of working at a plant (probably in 2015) I decided to try teaching myself how to draw better, buying a lot of instructional books and finding tutorials online. For about six months or so I was optimistic and motivated and would spend a minimum of three hours daily practicing, but eventually I lost that optimism and motivation.
I tried to restart again late last year but quickly got discouraged again.
The idea of being an artist is still more appealing to me than anything else, but I just feel like I don't have some essential quality needed to be one. Plus, I want more money to be able to pay for my student loans and living expenses because I've long wanted to move from my rural hometown to an urban or suburban area where I hopefully don't feel so socially alienated.
Honestly most of the draw for me (maybe around 60%) is that I've heard coding has a lot of nerds working in it. The worst part of my job at the plant wasn't the actual work I was doing but the people I had to work with. They had nothing in common with me in terms of interests and their personalities were diametrically opposed to mine. About half of them had the temperament of a high school bully. One of my greatest fears is the idea of getting stuck working with people like them for years on end again. I'd love to work with a bunch of nerds instead, more than anything.
Yeah, I've heard this, too. My alma mater is by no means a top school and my social anxiety would prevent me from being able to network effectively.
Think I'll start drafting my deranged manifesto for the next time I have access to the fax machine.
In what way? I've felt for a long time now that I should learn to code on some level, maybe starting with Python or SQL but I just don't really know what to focus on and how that would actually apply to my career path.
I'm both of those things, but not at the same time. I can have a good time collecting data, analyzing it, and producing a report summarizing it but I'll also just sometimes hop around my ground floor apartment playacting out a scene from my head for whatever story I'm thinking of as I workshop the dialogue on the fly between two or more people in a low whisper with accompanying voice alterations.
Never heard of any job I can get that lets me combine both except the one I can't have because being a novel writer rarely provides a living wage
Part of their course required them to take their business plans (they always had one) and her course was about teaching them how to crunch their numbers and actually analyse their viability.
When the government changed and closed immigration loopholes it was amazing how many of their students had to rapidly change their plans to accomodate the fact they couldn't exploit foreign worker forces by importing minimum wage workers for jobs they'd have to pay actual living wage to locals for.
Eh, presentations are a form of acting, just usually poorly done. Building narrative is actually really important to presenting a business case as you need to help others see the whole story and their place in it. Most decision making is rooted in emotion,so being able to understand and appeal to it is often the x factor many lack.
oh it's just a personal thing, nothing against coding in general - I'm just not temperamentally suited to working in a purely digital domain. It's a large part of my job, and mostly that's fine, but if I don't get to spend some of the day doing something physical with my hands, then I get bummed out. Also I don't get very much joy out of tracking down and blasting obscure bugs, and I feel like that's integral to enjoying the coding process - you need to be able to get a little bit high off that diagnostic "aHA!" moment. For me software is just the irritating sudoku puzzle box blocking my access to the guts of the machinery, so we have a highly adversarial relationship.
If you're looking for advice on coding in general, I'd think first about where you're at and then about where you want to be. If you've done zip with coding before, then Python is a perfectly good place to start - the syntax is fairly intuitive, and it's softly object oriented so it will get you used to thinking about things like classes, methods, inheritance, etc.
After that depends very much on where you want to focus. SQL is great if you want to go into web development or deal with backend systems, I avoid the hell out of it but other people in here know lots. C++ is still the best gateway to engineering programming and real-time software development, Fortran and COBOL are for if you hate yourself but like making money off maintaining legacy systems. C# or Java for game design. Most languages were developed and adopted for specific reasons, so knowing what you want to do will help guide your development pathway, but programming skills transfer easily between them so it doesn't matter much where you start.
I awesome'd this post because it's a great post, but there is one part I cannot parse - "beef mistake". I do not understand how anything related to eating cooked beef could ever possibly be a mistake?