A career ending mistake

The world is a huge place, and the variation out there vast enough to be hard to get your head around. It will always be a mistake to assume you have a good handle on "everything" based only on personal path.

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/51296/ithaka-56d22eef...

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Ithaka gave you the marvelous journey. Without her you wouldn't have set out. She has nothing left to give you now.

And if you find her poor, Ithaka won’t have fooled you. Wise as you will have become, so full of experience, you’ll have understood by then what these Ithakas mean.

Some people are chalking this up to depression, which is possibly part of it, but honestly I think this is simply the reality of a former idealist coming to grips with the big picture. You can't help but recognize that passion will come & go and it's all castles made of sand in the end. Whatever is most interesting for us to work on, someone else is almost certainly doing it better than you or I could without our help, and everything short of this feels like garbage when you only look at the work for its own sake.

All I can say is that what really makes anything worthwhile comes down to your relationships with people. Working a job which involves putting up with a lot of broken shit isn't so bad when you truly appreciate your team-- and on the flipside, working with the coolest bleeding edge stuff in the world will still suck when you don't. Localizing your focus and reinforcing bonds with the folks you enjoy being around can help a lot in getting through it. My two cents.

I dropped out of college early as I just wasn't mature enough / ready for that kind of thing / + I suspect ADD made it kinda hard to manage.

I got lucky and fell into a job where I worked in tech support, for some high end networking equipment for mainframes, later for data center related equipment.

Good career, very good pay, but still tech support. I found I worked with engineering teams really well despite being not the most technically proficient person among the teams I worked in (good documentation and being honest with the engineering teams gets you pretty far with them...). So much so that that I eventually rethought my college experience where I wanted to learn to code but at that time classes were "here's a book on C ... now I'll read from the book at you".

After 20 or so years company I worked for was bought out (that's a whole series of stories) and by then I wasn't so sad to be in the group that was being laid off. I got lucky and got paid out better than most people in the US receive so I felt like I had a chance to make a change.

Honestly I suspect money / comfort in changing is really the biggest factor in serious career changes, for me the payout took care of that to some extent. IMO rando promotion to management is not a "SERIOUS" career change. The changes that involve "starting over" to some extent is where the big changes are.

I wanted to stay in technology but also "make things" not just fix things for customers / sales who couldn't be bothered to config something correctly / and so on. So again I thought of working with the engineering teams and decided to take a shot at coding.

I found web development was surprisingly accessible / tons of resources on the internet compared to my "read the book at you" college experience. I started learning on my own and eventually took a coding bootcamp (oh man that's another series of stories). In the bootcamp class I found that older me responded to classes completely differently than younger me. I was now ECSTATIC to have someone drop some knowledge on me every day, it was a completely different experience than college. I was honestly very sad when it ended I was enjoying it so much. I would have loved going back to college on a more formal track after the camp, but family, income, just don't allow for it.

After the bootcamp I got a job at a fairly small company and have been happily coding away for a number of years now / expanding my skills / doing new things. I get to make things all on my own, apps, services, try new things etc. It's great.

So if part of what you love is working at cool cutting edge companies then yeah you have to keep learning new cutting edge things. But if you just want to bang out code in your preferred language there will almost always be a company somewhere hiring for that.