A teenager's guide to avoiding actual work

This resonated with me. I actually took that road construction job as a flagger. I stood there turning that stop sign back and forth, directing traffic, for a whole summer. I felt, and still feel it was the lowest point of my career. My brain was starved in the truest sense of the word and it gave me new fire to complete my college degree.

Which was Electrical Engineering. I didn't learn that I really should have gone for computer science, computer engineering, or something along those lines until after 5 years of work in the industry. I was just carrying the family flag of engineering.

I contracted with a friend's company after telling them that I needed a change of work and was interested in software. After telling them I had zero professional experience writing code (two CS classes in college), they assured me they would get me up and running.

Now here I am as a full stack engineer just over a year later. I really don't know how I got here. But I do know that this type of work is incredibly gratifying and I should have pursued it early on.

Somehow as I grew up I got the idea in my head that work should be your personal crucible and that loving work was really a sign of workaholism. So I always took those jobs that were miserable just to get a paycheck. I hope I can help my kids find work best suited for them.

I should mention that coding had been an early interest of mine. In middle school I put custom firmware on my PSP so that I could use a homebrewed version of YouTube to watch a series of "Learning C++ From Scratch" videos at night. Had somebody noticed that interest I could have been encouraged early on that that interest could actually be a profitable job and not just a hobby.

I don't think it's insecurity all the time, although I have run into people who refuse to trust an automated process because they can't see the work getting done...

I think a lot of resistance is due to, like others have said in this thread, unexpected incentives.

If someone's career progress, financial incentives, or work politics require the status quo, no changes will be welcome, and might even be perceived as an attack. (Yep, been there.)

If you miraculously can get the incentives changed, then you can make progress...

If your position was independent enough, you could maybe get by with a "show me a mistake, and I'll acknowledge and fix it and eat crow. If you are just guessing, go look for an error."

Or if there was storage space enough, make a mirror directory with copies renamed, so there was obviously no loss of original files, then invite them to check as many as they wanted.

I do understand that many people don't trust automation like this, I've been there too.

I beg to differ. Using a rare and specialized skill to fix critical business software is "actual work". The example in this story created a fantastic amount of value. It was also probably the model for the author's entire professional life.

Maybe a more accurate headline would be "Deciding not to take a job filling potholes was a good move" "Show up and be being willing to try to fix difficult problems"

Other things of note: Character matters. If he'd lied to his mom about the outcome of the highway department job she wouldn't have known to connect him to the used car shop. She helped make a safe place for him to tell the truth. He made good by admitting a difficult thing. Gaining skills and learning to solve problems pays off. Being poised to take an opportunity that arises is probably a sound life strategy. $100 was actually a reasonable number. It recognizes that computer work is not equivalent to minimum wage labor, is a significant discount off of professional software work and gives the client room to make a compelling offer for continued engagement.

People ask if we'll ever run out of software jobs. My answer is, "will we ever run out of business problems to solve? Opportunities for efficiency, laborious tasks to automate?" Not in any future I can imagine. Maybe when AI learns to code. But at that point the world as we know it is over anyway.