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Comment by NewOrderNow | Hacker News Reader

It is kind of a product of a society when jobs no longer involve skill. I can say the same thing (12 years with similar hours. I imagine I am younger than you) but I don't have anything monetary gain and absolutely no work experience to show for it. No family and spent most of those years working out of a car. I am currently about to be evicted and have made most of my money flipping things and working service jobs and I will never pay off my student loans (which was promised to paid by backstabbing parents) because I spent 15 years as a professional application applier only to never get a job. I will most likely never have a family because of this. I am 35 and haven't really started any life that is worth calling a life. I am just a slave to the system and shitty people in my life.

But please do tell me rich person that I should smile and be happy.

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I'm sorry that your life has turned out the way it has.

I'm probably not smarter than you. I probably didn't work harder than you. I probably didn't make better decisions than you.

I fully admit to and embrace the fact that most of my blessed life has come as a matter of fortune and good luck.

And this comment proves a lack of confidence by apologizing to a random person, thus demonstrating that confidence also doesn't matter in this modern world.

I do not see any apology in the GP's comment. What are you talking about?

"I'm sorry that your life..."

It appears people just don't pay attention and need it showed to them which is pointless on my end because you are just going to downvote it

Why do you think that jobs no longer require skill? Most startup interviews are 100% based on merit. I have worked at 2 startups where we have people writing code that never finished a CS degree and they where some of the most valuable members of the team.

I am not telling you to smile and be happy. I was just trying to understand your thoughts in your comment. At one point in my life my wife and I had our cars repossessed and were a month from being on the street. I had a job for 9 months where I drove 300 miles a day to get to because we lived so far away (with family) and it was the job I could get that paid the bills for my family. We all do what we have to do. The world is not fair.

I had a friend that was a high school drop out that got a job with an A+ video game company with no experience. An ex girlfriend got a job as a Designer at Microsoft with a portfolio of a essentially stick figures. An old college friend got a PM job at google with a sports science degree. SPORTS SCIENCE. This isn't about skill, it is about falling in line.

Those people aren't in my life anymore because of that. These people succeeded in life without trying and is unacceptable for companies to hire in a world with an abundance of skill.

Forget about passion. That has never mattered when people with not understanding of how software works gets a position in a software company. Plenty of people are passionate about tech, but also want to work in operations.

> I had a friend that was a high school drop out that got a job with an A+ video game company with no experience. An ex girlfriend got a job as a Designer at Microsoft with a portfolio of a essentially stick figures. An old college friend got a PM job at google with a sports science degree. SPORTS SCIENCE. This isn't about skill, it is about falling in line.

> Those people aren't in my life anymore because of that.

You ended your friendship because they got good jobs? Am I reading this correctly?

How do you know why they were hired? Were you here?

I feel lot of hate and frustration in your comments. If people got nice jobs, celebrate.be happy for them. No time to be a hater, love is the answer!

Yeah my parents tried to kill me when I was 12. Why would I be happy for anyone? Why would I be happy for people I grew up with that failed upwards?

I'm not sure if you're open to feedback, but based on what I'm hearing I would take the following actions if I were in your shoes:

1) Look into transitional housing facilities or permanent supportive housing programs near you, so you can stop worrying about rent for a period of 6-12 months.

2) Find a reliable source of food that is free or very cheap

3) Dedicate 2 days a week to learning and further development of your front-end dev skills

4) Dedicate the remaining days of the week to finding and completing contract work on Upwork.com. Start out by offering your services for a very small fee. The objective at the beginning is to just get good reviews (if you do a good job, people will come back and give you more work, but that's just a bonus). Once you have a few solid reviews under your belt, winning larger contracts will get easier.

5) Stop trying to flip things or doing anything else that doesn't reliably pay above $15/hr.

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