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I’m 22 and I’ve failed

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Re: I’m 22 and I’ve failed

#41

Post by spodek »

Twenty years and one week ago, I lost everything I'd worked for. As far as I could tell at the time several patents, millions of dollars in funding, Ivy League degrees, a fortune in equity, all lost with no hope I could see for the future. I couldn't talk to anyone about it for a long time. In fact, my podcast episode of last week tearfully revisiting the situation was some of my first facing some of it https://shows.acast.com/leadership-and-the-environment/episo....

Friends and family heard some of those things for the first time. It hadn't hit me then that I would still be recovering from the calamity over two decades later.

Re: I’m 22 and I’ve failed

#43

Post by drknow007 »

You have not failed. You don't need a degree to be successful in this industry. Just a computer, time, and focus. I am a developer and my son was never interested in what I did as a boy. At age 22, he decided he didn't want to serve drinks anymore and built an app watching a course on Pluralsight. Took him 4 months, but he learned enough to be able to say he had experience at each layer in the software stack and had a project he could show and reference in an interview. He then went to a Google hangout in his local area and spoke to the sponsors who were looking for new job candidates. He went for an interview the next week and got the job. He was the only one that showed up. He started out at $65k his first year, stayed focused, and 1.5 years later is now earning $150k with full benefits. If you think this story is unique to him, you're wrong. It's how this industry works. Dig in and good luck to you. Post back here when you are making bank!

Re: I’m 22 and I’ve failed

#44

Post by woofie11 »

cletus wrote: post #16

Picking an arts degree wasn't you first mistake. It was a consequence of earlier mistakes. Your mistake was thinking you could go into, say, a CS degree and have nothing to learn. I'm sure if you did a 100 Intro to Programming course you'd breeze through it but programming != CS. The worst thing you can do in college, at a job or even in life is to go into a situation thinking you have nothing to learn. That's just a…

Yeah. Virtually everyone is there at 22.

The problem here is metacognitive skills: knowing what you don't know.

The parents are right: "Parents went ugly, they said I was a careless, stupid, ignorant boy. I know they are not right." Acknowledging that is the first step. The second step is understanding that's true of most 22-year-olds. Age 0-12, you worship your parents. Age 13-19, ego really grows. You rebel, and do the opposite of what your parents want since you believe you know better. Early twenties is when you start to understand that you are, indeed, a careless, stupid, ignorant boy, and start to take advice from others. That's growing up in a nutshell.

Most of the more successful people I know get really good at taking advice from others, putting ego aside, filtering advice (not all of it is good!), and keeping an open mind. The executive version of that is delegating, and knowing whom to delegate to.

Constantly shifting focus is 100% standard for that age, and it's a fine way to grow. People at that age also really do mimic (usually stupid) role models. The "I want to be the cool computer wiz without a degree" is completely standard (only insert "rock musician" "soldier" "goth" etc). It's how your brain is wired.

I know this sounds like dime store psychoanalysis, but it's helpful to know you're not alone, and it's just how people are wired.

A few thoughts:

1) A CS degree should not be easy. If you're where you think you are, you can test out of the freshman CS courses. If you're a hotshot, you can start with a graduate-level class on sublinear-time algorithms or something. More likely, you can start with junior and senior classes. Those foundations are important, though.

2) Getting good at math is important. Social sciences degree was a mistake.

3) At 22, optimize for growth, not for profits. Profits can come later. There is an order of magnitude difference between a principal at Google and an entry-level coder. You don't get there incrementally.

4) There's plenty of part-time work, contract work, etc. available if you hunt around. A good path might be work half-time and school half-time. Both grow you in different ways.

5) It sounds like you have a good foundation to get wherever you're going. It doesn't feel like it, but you're on the right track.

Re: I’m 22 and I’ve failed

#46

Post by shp0ngle »

Just pick a junior job in some boring corporation, or startup with shit salary, and go from there?

The world is in desperate need for more good engineers. Every company I worked on always need more engineers. Especially now after COVID, the industry is doing great. It's not hard to find jobs now, even with no degrees.

Of course you need to lower your expectation, maybe you will work in some CRUD-shitting factory for a while, or work on some cryptoblockchain nonsense, but it's still an experience?

edit

also that arts bachelor sounds fun to be honest. And it can be useful if you decide to go, say, FE/full stack route. Or go more into UX/UI.

Re: I’m 22 and I’ve failed

#47

Post by KaiserPro »

You're 22 and have suffered a setback.

An arts degree I would argue is possibly of more use than a CS degree.

why? because a good arts degree is about collaboration, giving and receiving good criticism, stealing other people's ideas and making them better finally and most importantly, find a way to communicate.

Yes, you might not get in to a FAANG right away, but in ten years, you'll be perfectly capable of dominating the "CS computers are my life, and I know everything because I have a degree" types.

My degree is effectively graphic design smooshed into a bit of computer aided design. I now work for a large FAANG shovelling shit in front of people's eyes. so its certainly possible, and I don't think that I could have done it without my degree.

I have run a medium sized department, in that time I interviewed hundreds of candidates. On average, the ones that did the best were the people who didn't have a CS degree. They were the most willing to admit that they didn't know how to do x, but they had an idea that if you did y, it might be right.

This is a far better trait than "I know it, here is some fancy sounding bullshit"

Go find a medium sized company to work for (less than 1500 people) they are big enough to have a decent support system, but small enough to allow growth and flexibility. make contact with a recruiter, they will help you market yourself so that you get interviews.

good luck, and keep going.

Re: I’m 22 and I’ve failed

#48

Post by ironmagma »

jzellis wrote: post #30

Ah, man, kid, try being 43 with a Github profile full of half-finished repos. You haven't failed. Part of what's pathetic about the tech industry and culture, and why I've mostly bowed out of it, is that it makes you feel like you're a failure at 22. Christ, even rock singers get until they're 30 to feel that way. You're fine, man. You just need to decide what you really want. If that means being a coder, it's easy -…

Tangent, but JSX is a templating language, and templating languages don’t dictate whether your presentation logic is well separated. You can write well-stratified React code or poorly-stratified React code, the difference is whether you choose to separate it that way. For example, see the S convention in styled-components.

Conversely, you can have terrible Django templates that contain all your controller logic.

Re: I’m 22 and I’ve failed

#49

Post by ajsharp »

Failure is an end point; you're on a journey. A couple of thoughts...

On college: For many, there's no quicker way to crush a coding hobby than to study it via a computer science program. So fucking boring. Software development != computer science. That's where I started and I changed majors after my first year because I wanted to build shit and not write a fucking bubble sort. So I switched to economics and political science and kept teaching myself to code, got a coding job in college working for the university, graduated, didn't know what i wanted to do, until i stumbled into a 3 month "consulting" gig that morphed into my first job, which led to my first real startup job, which led to [on and on].

> And I began thinking about my career as a software engineer. How am I going to find a job?

This will sound petty bc you're at the beginning, but finding a job will eventually prove easier than you might think at this moment. Finding a good job (define "good" as you will) will prove considerably harder. Think of your first job as an internship. Do a great job and view it as a stepping stone to the next stone in your career. Do good work dispassionately. Don't mistake employment for loyalty.

Your parents, respectfully, don't have the slightest clue or context for understanding what it is you're trying do or how you'll make a living at it. It's annoying, but it's fine, bc it's your life not theirs. They really don't need to understand it and you don't need them to.

My advice...

To get good at programming: build something, anything. An idea you have. Don't have any good ideas? Try to build a clone of something else that exists. Also, and everyone says this ad hominem but it's true: contribute to open source. Offer your help. Any open source project of any size typically has quite literally a metric shit-ton of open issues, and not nearly enough people to fix them. So figure out how to fix one. Then do another. Keep doing it until the team makes you a contributor.

One brief note about career and "networking": contributing to open source is a very powerful form of networking. Every time you contribute to a project you are networking with others backed by your work. Don't take this for granted. You should also join discords and slacks and go to conferences when people do that again. I cannot stress this enough: your network is everything, and the more you invest in it the more you'll get out of it.

To get a job: fuck linkedin. Fuck job postings. Get "good enough" at programming (a much lower bar than you think), build a list of companies that you'd like to work for and cold email the founder (founder emails are almost always firstname@company.com). Shower them with praise about how much you love their company and think they're amazing. At the very least 80% will respond to you. There are several people on my team currently who got hired this way. This works particularly well for very early-stage startups; less so for larger companies.

Good luck, keep building, I promise you'll get where you want to go.

Re: I’m 22 and I’ve failed

#50

Post by [deleted] »

happystudent20 wrote: post #23

I feel the same way sometimes. I'm just about to finish Uni and I feel like I haven't really learnt anything over the last 4 years. I've worked on projects that I feel demonstrate I know what I'm doing more than most people in my year, however all employers are looking for is a perfect GPA and not what you've actually produced. I want to make my own business but I just don't know where to start.

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