i wrote a longer post. i wrote some caveats and context but they almost doubled the length before the readmore. anyway. lightly edited mostly stream of consciousness, circuitious repetitive core dump of my current like, year of thinking about being in this weird mirror universe position of having all the skills you want in more experienced people, but none of the skills (and slower than most people building them) you want in people entering the field, as I'm nearing being able to start maybe poking at looking for jobs within a year now that a combination of PT and learning about what I probably have and how to avoid the common failure modes and other things w/r/t the chronic illness that's kept me out of working in industry for a decade
I have no idea why I'm writing it, but judging by the strength of the impulse to delete the post I'm going to say I probably should post it. Don't be a dipshit, thanks in advance.
epistemic status: extremely intoxicated, an hour past bedtime
and to be clear this is surprisingly neutral. a lot of it is processing stuff I already know. I just need it to not be rolling around in my head, and I have a feeling it's a not uncommon cluster of thoughts.
i have the like, exact opposite skillset than what I need for a job Touching Computers these days because I can't just read some docs twice and then use them, i need to build a mental model. but I can do that faster than most who are tasked to do that.
I have huge, gaping self-taught knowledge gaps, and i'm also conversant or familiar with huge swaths of the field because I accidentally ended up barely knowing anything while surrounded by some of the most active and involved people in their fields, and I vaguely understood that but not until I noticed their names on the papers and books. And it's such a weird situation because I bounce off everything in every direction and have to stumble my way into things, partially because I can't hold many things concurrent in my head (and thus can't take things at their word, I have to understand how they work)
it's so useful for everything but the parts that involve getting paid as someone formally entering the field with basically nothing to show in terms of things i've done that are directly applicable.
this isn't really a complaint, just like, thinking about how this is sorta the view/skillset most missing from a lot of the pathological tech companies, the "reasonable soft skills (it depends), high concept, generalist breadth, gather opinion and information and then figure out how to best allocate it across the skills of a group, etc. but there's basically no route through that without like, me spending another two years grinding my brain against a lemon juicer to try and commit enough of the act of coding to muscle memory to be able to actually do it reasonably on the job without a whole lot of work. it'll come through use, but can't get that use without something to point me at, I'm terrible at choosing projects I actually stay interested in, spiralling around the various projects.
in a lot of ways it's like queer/labor/political organizing in microscale, knowing who knows what and who they need to be put in contact with to get something done. Assembling the heist team, knowing their skillsets, figuring out how to part it out to the places there will be the most application, etc. As a like, general role I find myself constantly ending up shouldering.
But that's not really something that's valued in that way, not without either a good chunk more coding muscle memory, or coming from the management path, which doesn't really fit what this does.
I'm terrible at routine and I excel at 'no one here knows how to do . figure out how to do and get us up to speed', though it's unclear how sustainable that is yet.
I'm not jobbable yet, I still need to work on the ADHD/autism organizational stuff to compress like 20% more space to hold concepts concurrently in my brain for that to work, or figure out a system for managing it, or solve part of the illness stuff. So I'm not like, looking for sympathy I guess, just reflecting on the absurdity of things. I don't really have fears about being able to end up somewhere in the industry I can manage to do okay at. Mostly I just wish I had any way of actually knowing where I stand, since most of the ways of judging that are off the table thanks to the skill distribution being almost the polar opposite of most people in the field in very big important ways.
and thanks, all of you who are in that unbroken chain of me somehow bumbling my way to the awkward position I'm in. I know just how lucky I am. so much that I can't really repay so I just try to accidentally do the same thing.
(but it is kind of funny that I thought I was really struggling when people got completely normal concepts until like five years into the friendships where I actually have to look up your website or something to try and find a post of yours from 2012 and realize that you've written 3 books and are very active in your field. Like it took me six years to like, fully grasp what that meant and I think i'm probably better because of it but like. lmao. thanks brain. yeah all the other people described as 'years ahead of their peers' are a few years ahead of you. you're four years younger than them you dork. Anyway that's the old realization but the new one is that I accidentally did a whole big project in two months on my own but was counting it as a failure, but I: triaged it as time sensitive so I wouldn't have time to learn dedicated tools, knew how to best apply myself to the problem with the tools I had, so other people could work on the other angles, hackjob after hackjob to brute force with vscode find and replace because it was faster than messing with regexes when things were this malformed by the PDF scrape, and do a lot of reducing steps to juice email headers into the skeleton of a wiki. and i then got hung up on trying to figure out how to turn it into a wiki so other people could contribute noiw that I had the skeleton and i could abandon it, and it's just languished because I haven't had enough room in my brain to fit 'make wiki happen'. So I parsed it as a huge waste of time, but the massive cannabis-fueled insight is that the reason for that is that every step of it came so naturally that it didn't feel like I was doing anything. I don't know how to deal with that but it sure is re-contextualizing a lot of my difficulties.)
yes I am -acutely- aware of just how adhd, autistic, and healed-over-cptsd this whole thing is lmao.
