Ask HN: How do you keep motivated if nobody supports you?

Learning to better communicate in written English, is huge. Event though I'm a native English speaker, I'd say written English has been the main thing holding back my career. Improving your business communication skills goes a long way. I'm still terrible, but every improvement I've made has lead to positive outcomes in performance reviews. Your coding skills become far more valuable if you have other skills to compliments them. If you can code and interact with clients you'll be a more attractive hire.

Right, but OP is in the Bay Area. But to your point, if you are willing to relocate (which, if you're trying to start a career at 26, you should be..) then geography doesn't matter that much. An email address, a phone line and recognizable skills will get you a ticket to SF/Seattle/Boston for an on-site interview in a heartbeat.

I thought OP was in Mexico?

Anyway, many of us have family situations that don't allow us to easily uproot and move across the country, as much as we might like to do so sometimes.

Ok, I know how you feel. You are 26yo and you are definitely a good programmer. The problem: You're not 10yo anymore, so no one will congratulate you for building your bots and games.

You realized that. You are intelligent like many others in this industry. You've understood that you had potential and now you've got the feeling that you wasted it. Otherwise I can't explain that all your writing is directed towards your past.

I get that you feel sorry for yourself, but this won't help you, it'll lead to a miserable life.

The solution is simple: Start to live your own life. Pack your stuff and go. And when I say it, I mean it.

Stop building these bots if you don't earn money with them. You can start later again if you have companies that want to pay your for this. Start asking for advice for your landing pages, your own website, Hivee and talkbot look like they have interesting content, but it's very inaccessible (e.g. Talkbot: would be a great chance to show the features instead of opening the mail client).

If you have experience doing web development, native app development, AR, NLP, ML and even Hardware/IoT, you are absolutely able to get a job that is paying you a rent and a lot more. Maybe your home city is not right to get a job there, maybe not even your home country. But you really don't want to waste your life feeling sorry for yourself.

So go out and seek opportunities. Use Github and show your projects. Talk to business owners, ask them if you can work for them and search for opportunities to implement software that help them and charge them for your support. Learn to do invoices, seek a mentor who can help you with your tax filing. -- you're not going to build your own life if you're not even able to learn how to get money.

Stop calling yourself a founder: say that you have some projects, but don't sound like a douche bag - having a business means getting revenue. Show people your projects and they will understand that your work can help them. Whining about missing support from people who don't know code is only the absence of creative ideas and valuable projects that even laymen can understand. Work a week for your father and you'll see how inefficient his processes are: improve them, you have the skills. -- When I was 12yo, I was crying once because nobody in my family understood my coding hobby. After I wrote some helpful tools and earned some money, they've realized that this computer stuff is good for me and supported me.

Regarding job interviews: The best way to get hired is to build trust and relationships. You don't have to do whiteboard interviews if you know the right people. I'm not suggesting that this works for Facebook or Google, but there are more than those 5 companies you've listed.

And if nothing works, make a nice CV, write some blog posts and case studies of your projects, create accounts at upwork, craigslist and similar pages and connect with other people through the internet.

So, back to your question: "How do you keep motivated if nobody supports you?" You start to give a f#?k about other opinions and simply hustle, we're not entitled to anything. Stop blaming other circumstances and gain control of your life. You may want to be the highly gifted man who talks about his businesses while living at home or you start to do the real thing - your choice.

> I would take your dad's offer. I would start working with him.

But, don't give up coding. You will succeed if you continue to practice.

Don't just write code for yourself or as an attempt to start a business. Instead, join a major free source project that you would use and find interesting by fix bugs and then submitting the fixes. Continue to do this and if you are good enough and like to work on the project enough, you may become a core part of the team. Eventually this will help you build connections for other work. Developing yourself is often more important than developing a product for a business.

Give that 5 years, then will have more experience to guide your business ideas.

This isn't the path for everyone. Some get lucky and work on the right product at the right time. But, if you've given it your best effort, try something else. Doing the same thing over and over expecting different results is the definition of insanity.