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@owu

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any/all

ᒪᑫᓯᐢ @owu12/7/2023, 6:00 PM

How DO you get a job anyway?

I have bad learned helplessness and I feel like i do everything "the wrong way"
so i'm just trying to get a feel for what it really means to "look for work"

And I mean a "not toilet scrubbing" job, cause, like,

i've cleaned houses
i've cleaned hotels
i made fast food
i've done enough odd seasonal / 1-day jobs

but anything more academic i'm lost on. so to anyone who has/had an office / data-oriented job, um, how did you do it? lol

did your school recommend a company?
did a company offer you a position
how did you find employers?
how did employers find you?

and what about the actual skillset? I ALWAYS feel under-experienced, but I have loads of programming experience (it's been my hyperfixation for years)

#unemployment #looking for work #money #capitalism #job hunt #programming #education #academia #Jobs #idk what tags to use #sorry about all the tags #i just am very confused sometimes

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ᒪᑫᓯᐢ @owu12/7/2023, 6:06 PM

I'm also scared cause I hear shit like "no-one will ever hire you if you don't know how to implement [SOME_ALGORITHM] in Haskell on the spot"

but.... ....... I don't know if I'm just dumb as nails, but I have to consult the docs or the web like 90% of the time cause I wanna make sure I'm getting the syntax right.

I'm just scared I'm finally going to get an interview and they'll be like "You have 3 minutes to make an LZW compressor in Modula 2" and everyone is shaking their heads going "such a simple rudimentary task. we all did it in junior high. does your brain not work or something?"

ᒪᑫᓯᐢ @owu12/7/2023, 6:10 PM

Actully much of my lack of self-faith is this.
I was homeschooled through grades 0-12

sometimes I get people going "what? you haven't read [SOME_BOOK]? did you NOT go to school or something?"

And I wonder just how bogus my education even is. I'm an academic at heart; I love to learn, but.... Maybe I'm OOTL on too much "common knowledge" that i look like a total moron to the outside world

(breaking down a little rn sorry lmao)

John Colagioia @jcolag12/7/2023, 10:48 PM

It depends a lot on your specific situation.

I mean, sure, you can go the route of applying for literally every job that looks reasonable, and hoping that some hiring manager sees something in you. I've gotten the majority of my jobs that way over the years, but it seems to become more difficult every outing, as companies make the application and interview process overly complicated and dramatic.

That's all a substitute, though, for having someone credible vouch for your abilities. Whether that's a recruiter, a college career office, or a friend with a job at the company that you want to apply to, that will generally get you past a lot of the screening steps and the requirements, because someone they trust saying "yeah, this person will learn the parts that the don't know" carries more weight than the candidate's ability to regurgitate some drivel from some class.

In fact, a lot of advice for aspiring programmers is just "cargo cult" versions of go meet people to grow your professional network. Why would you go to college instead of learning faster on your own? To meet your future peers and (in the case of adjunct professors) possible bosses. Why would you get involved in open source projects? To have a community of people who know your work. Why would you join professional organizations? To attend the local meetings and meet people who aren't in the other groups...

(:@kdx12/17/2023, 2:12 AM

hey, i have a somewhat similar profile to yours and i have very bad times looking for jobs

a relative recently pointed me towards auticon, a consulting firm in IT that exclusively employs adults on the autistic spectrum

most of their team is neurodivergent and they seem to understand our troubles with the typical job hunting world pretty well (i haven't applied yet so i can't vouch for it)

the chance this might fit your expectations is small (i don't know if you're on the spectrum after all), however in the case it does help i figured i might as well share it with you

good luck with all that

ᒪᑫᓯᐢ @owu12/17/2023, 2:23 AM

THIS IS ACTUALLY REALLY COOL!

I don't have an official diagnosis and am not actually sure how to go about doing that in Canada, but I'm going to keep this bookmarked and read into it more cause it actually looks decently promising (and is available in my country).

Thank you, kdx <3 <3 <3

(:@kdx1/11/2024, 11:25 PM

hey! went through (most of the) process earlier this month, the person i interacted with was quite honest and transparent, they listened and understood my constraints and made the candidature as effortless as it can get. this was in france, so i don't know if they're 1:1 in other countries, but if you have questions about it feel free to hmu

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