Anonymous User asked: saw the ask about code tutorials so i might as well give this a shot... i was pulled out of the school system at a young age and instead i spent most of my time doing stuff on my PC. as a result i loooove designing websites with html/css/php/js (alongside creating music and graphics and videogame stuff) but i have no professional knowledge of webdev stuff or any job experience. i wish i could find a company willing to properly train my neurodivergent self so i could do this for a living, but without any experience or degrees or even a high school diploma, i worry that it's impossible to find that. do you have any advice on how to approach this?
I'm sorry to say that I don't, really. Even though I haven't been at my current job long, I have seen the opportunities change so wildly (mostly cause pandemic) for current job-seekers that I feel like my advice today would be similar to advice received a decade ago ("just walk in and hand 'em your resume!" style things).
Companies can easily become actively hostile to neurodivergent employees if they cause any sort of perceived friction to the "system." Mitigating that is a minefield, at the very least. I'm not really the person to talk to on that.
The good news, when I was starting out, the importance of "having a degree" or other formal education was pretty low, and it seems like it has dropped lower(?). I remember there was a sort of "bootcamp bust" recently, where coding bootcamps were revealed to be the moneygrubs that they turned into1, and the "diplomas" they offered were not worth a lot. So if you can show the skill, that could be enough to get in somewhere (if you can get through a labyrinthine interview system) without needing to go through a formal program.
Also, if you have the mental energy to do so, freelancing / contract work is a thing. I really don't know how that side of things is going as far as finding work (nvm that that would be different depending on region, as well).
Kind of like the rest of the job market, it's not great from what I hear. Would love people with more recent job searching experience to sound off in the comments, however!
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I don't think they started off that way, and I'm sure there are still some good ones out there now, but that's something that requires a lot of research if you do. They can also be pretty expensive (and in insidious ways, I think some can make claims to a future paycheck if you get a job through them), so I mainly want to stress that formal education / bootcamps aren't necessarily the only way.