Ask HN: How can a unhireable person get a job?

That's spot on from the advice.

I'll add that OP — Your biggest issue seems to be extremely high intelligence, paired with a lack of empathy and social functioning, which created a self-expectation of massive grandiosity. But you keep failing to deliver on it because you can't get your highly powered brain on the streets, leading in self-pity and depression. Not good, but salvageable.

How do I know? My life story reads basically like yours into my late twenties — multiple college dropout, extremely high ambitions, always failed.

The only difference is that I started that low level support job in a company small enough that somebody saw my talent and got me on the path to second level tech support and then engineering as I continued automating my job away.

Had to chuckle as I pissed off quite a lot of people higher up in that job early on myself, but fortunately had a few people reflecting me instead of firing me, which made me understand how I made other people look and feel by my actions.

The good news: Empathy is a learneable skill. Aim far lower in a smaller, young and growing (!) company with good potential — but especially with a great boss. Then work hard, SHUT UP your smartass mouth for a year and work your way up while learning what's holding you back with the help of a good coach/therapist. When you apply with the company, read everything you can about what they do and make it about them.

Stop trying to impress. For that year, just focus on staying super humble and in the background, learning how value is created for that company and then go on creating that value even if nobody asked you to. Just for a year. Up your ante slowly and only when you feel you have established personal trust and leverage.

Empathy a skill where intelligence won't support you but be in your way because of your natural tendency of you showing it off. That makes people feel dumb, and nobody likes to feel like that. Also, some actions like you skipping line management will make them feel they can't rely on you on top. You'll keep failing if people keep hating working with you.

Your goal is to find a great manager first and make them look great. And then talk about that. Be the solution guy, not the problem guy. Be the one who goes the extra mile to bring a small win home, not the one who makes the snarkiest comment.

You'll never be a "normal" person, but that's ok. Having a sharp profile comes with its own set of (dis)advantages. You can be high functioning if you surround yourself with capable people who know how to work with your weaknesses in order to leverage your strenghts.

Your job is finding them, as you'll fail alone.

How does that compare ? One situation is trying to present yourself to a potential employer the other is low effort anonymous forum board - if you're approaching them the same either you're spending too much effort on forums or too little on your CV :)

Have you tried agency work? There are places where they just need hands on keyboards doing web front end for example, and the barrier to entry is not so high. Might not be glamorous, and can be a grind, but it's a decent entry point into the industry.

Open source might be another good avenue. I've hired for 8 technical roles over the past year, and one of the "requirements" we would have for going forward to the interview stage, would be that the candidate has 1) worked on software that people actually use, and 2) has done it in a team/collaborative setting. It sounds like you have done a lot of interesting projects, but doing something that just has to work for yourself has a very different set of constraints than building something in a team for someone else.

Since you've done linux admin, DevOps might be another good route. Getting AWS/GCP certification is not that difficult, and would add to your profile a bit of confidence that you have some experience and knowledge about industry standards.

It sounds like you've done a lot of interesting, creative projects, and there's one role we hired last year honestly you would have been a good candidate for as a lab support engineer. But the thing you have to understand is that hiring managers generally are not looking for "interesting" candidates. In a perfect world we would, but in a hiring process, you may be bombarded by dozens or hundreds of CVs, and you have to filter that down to a hand-full of candidates who you are going to interview. So the first round of filtering is just to weed out anyone who is potentially high risk of not working out. If you have to teach someone how to work in a professional environment for the first time, that carries risk, so at least you want to see some markers that this person understands how professional software development works and will fit into this environment.

Or, you can make friends with people in the industry, and get a referral.

Or, you can work on something interesting enough to get some widespread attention, and then hiring managers will call you.

just an observation: a person who is technically capable but who is unfocussed and all over the place feels like an apt description for a lot neurodivergent behaviour in people.

> FAANG

Viz. Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, and Google.

I had to look it up (I'm not from around here).