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Comment by orionblastar | Hacker News Reader

I worked too hard on developing software and got stressed out and developed a mental illness and became disabled.

I went back to college to take a business management degree and earned one. Thinking that I might do better as a manager. But since I have no experience as a manager, no luck in getting a job.

It is very hard to work on your own, and earn money. You need a team of people, you need investors, you need social and people skills. You need to market your product and SEO your website to get clients and customers.

I've worked on software projects that went nowhere because I couldn't get anyone interested in them.

I'm 47 now and figure my career is basically over. I could try Freelance after updating my skills to modern languages, build new projects and a portfolio, but I don't see the point when everyone else is doing that and there is a lot of competition.

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> everyone else is doing that and there is a lot of competition.

You're assuming that there are more programmers than jobs, but at least for now there appear to be many more jobs than programmers.

Being 47 (I'm older!) gives you a perspective that younger folks simply don't have. How many SV startups are targeting people a few decades beyond their teens?

I do have a perspective on how things work better. How to better debug programs. How to make ADO recordsets work faster. How to make Crystal Reports generate reports faster. How to cache an ASP website using a text file and using the system time to update it every day at midnight to update the data and load the HTML from a text file.

I'm sure these things can work in modern languages as well in theory. I might be able to mentor other programmers as well and manage them.

Why not get a normal 9-5 job?

I tried and could not find any and ended up on disability as a result of my mental illness.

I went back to college to study business management to get a job with any business and combine it with my computer skills. I could do Excel or MS-Access work and VBA programming if I had to, but no company wants to hire me for a 9 to 5 job because I am mentally ill.

I was diagnosed with a serious mental illness 6 years ago, but I have no problem finding jobs. I just never tell anyone that I have it. I was diagnosed with bipolar 1, was in a psychiatric hospital for 2 weeks, and on short term disability for about 2 months.

It's possible it was a misdiagnosis though. I think a lot of it was from anxiety and stress. I stopped taking medication in 2011 (against the advice of my doctor).

You might have had a temporary mental illness. Mine is so severe that it stops me from working. Just getting up in the morning is hard, and I can't even drive a car anymore.

Stuff that used to be easy for me, got very hard to do. Everything changed when I became so mentally ill that I was disabled. Hard to understand.

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