Comment by daodedickinson | Hacker News Reader

Comment by daodedickinson | Hacker News Reader

A coworker at one of my jobs (I work 4 menial job / gigs, make 17k a year, live in parents basement, have no friends or lover, was top of my class in CS but left after a professor openly helped a student cheat to no consequences and another prof revealed CS grads from my school had less than a 50% postgraduation employment rate for ANY job, much less a CS one) had an idea she wanted to patent that would be helpful but would essentially be a metal pole in a specific shape. I had to be a downer and tell her of this story: http://qz.com/771727/chinas-factories-in-shenzhen-can-copy-p...

You're damned if you put your idea on the net and damned if you don't and it's all getting disheartening. I just want to find a career so I can go out and court someone but even the people with CS jobs that I know are constantly complaining of work / life imbalance and not getting to see their loved ones in person enough. Everytime I try to start studying some topic in the hopes of pursuing a living the shellshock of robophobia and the likelihood I will be too late overwhelms me. I can only cry at that leaked Clinton speech where she says we know what to do with the 120 IQ kids, but not the 100 or 80 kids. Well here I am at 145 mopping floors and literally shoveling shit despite only ever being excellent in school I guess it's just bad genes because my uncle could solve a Rubik's cube blind and built all sorts of electrical contraptions and has been a homeless drunk for decades. Here I am, another sandwich eater in front of thw trash pile as in Godard's weekend.

So you left school because one professor didn't have good morals? I mean... just because you have a high IQ doesn't mean you make the right decisions. In fact its a lot easier to fool yourself.

If the administration had responded to the complaints, I would have felt more hopeful. But instead it reinforced all the complaints of graduates who were saying they can't get a CS interview with their BS because of the grade inflation at the school. I was at this school because it is the only one I can afford without loans. So I stopped just short of the CS degree thinking maybe I will transfer to a school that might be able to help students get something in return for their degree, and maybe get a Ph.D. So if I become less depressed about our societal trajectory that is something I may end up doing. But today I am depressed and feel closer to ending up homeless because I got burnt out before getting a job. So today I think about maybe wandering homeless or seeing if there is still some job I could do that doesn't give me the feeling of absolute abjection that interviews do. At least I'm not Sufiah Yusof although maybe I would be if my parents had been more organized. I was successful in school mostly due to terror of my parents but now they feel bad about how they raised me and they don't push me at all. I keep hoping that some positive form of motivation will emerge for me but whenever I feel good about an idea, I feel awful about it the next day. I never know who I'm going to be tomorrow, or in the morning who I'll be tonight. I hoped university would be very demanding but they've been less so than my HS was. It's not like I'm more moral than that lecturer, I have no follow-through on anything and being on the debate team in particular turned me into a wandering sophist. So I agree.

Your best bet in this situation is probably entrepreneurial, in fact, because that path lets you believe in yourself and your ideas. But you will need the inclination to follow through and that is ultimately a matter of finding the ambition and direction when your environment discourages it, to which I have no specific advice, as it just takes time and reflection. I can share a bit of my own story: graduated, took one job, then moved back home and have stayed there for six years. In that period, gradually broke down my previous self image, based on what my parents instilled, and constructed a new one that was able to reevaluate their thoughts and advice in light of my actual situation, was less taken in by "business pop culture", and would put in the effort to make the appointments and write the documents and fill out the forms without panicking.

Finally, at 30 I started to push hard and have found some kind of start a little over a year later. What tipped me over the edge was knowing that I could, in fact, run out of time to try stuff abstractly as I had been doing. I had to commit in a more concrete way to my goals or it would just get harder. And the thought of not doing it, not making things happen, terrified me much more than any of the details of actually doing it. Have not looked back since!

Dude, go back and finish your degree.

Yeah, well, that would require getting letters of recommendation from people upset that I left. Also, when I left grad school the people that stuck with it and took on all the debt couldn't find jobs. And they could afford to live in CA where there still are a few relevant jobs, possibly.

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