I’m 22 and I’ve failed | Hacker News Reader

I’m 22 and I’ve failed

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Picking an arts degree wasn't you first mistake. It was a consequence of earlier mistakes.

Your mistake was thinking you could go into, say, a CS degree and have nothing to learn. I'm sure if you did a 100 Intro to Programming course you'd breeze through it but programming != CS.

The worst thing you can do in college, at a job or even in life is to go into a situation thinking you have nothing to learn. That's just a recipe for being in exactly the same place 10 years from now. Do you really think your professors, your future colleagues or even your fellow students have nothing to teach you?

Even if they don't, you're alienating and isolating yourself by dismissing other people so flippantly. That alone will deny you mentors and friends.

I can't speak to what you do now because so much of this depends on circumstances eg where you live, what your financial situation is, etc. But 22 years old is not by any measure too late to turn things around. You may have to make some uncomfortable choices (eg working a shitty help desk job while studying part time) but the only limit here is whatever mental barricades you erect for yourself.

> Your mistake was thinking you could go into, say, a CS degree and have nothing to learn.

I made this exact mistake at 17/18 and even had a very similar line of thinking as OP, but my decision was not to go to school at all.

I ended up in the industry a few years later, but have had a mostly crippled career. It was unfortunately drilled in my head around the time that people were handing out six figure salaries to anyone who could remotely program regardless of education.

Being self taught doesn't have to cripple your career. I'm self taught and doing reasonably well, and there's another guy I worked with a few years ago who's also self taught and studied music in college who's now an engineer at Facebook making I don't know how many zillions of dollars. Looking at LinkedIn just now, I discovered that another self taught engineer I know, who doesn't even have a high school diploma, is now working at Netflix.

In a sense, we're all fortunate that we lucked into a career in an industry that de-emphasizes credentials in favor of knowledge, ability, and track record.

You’re right, the “crippled” career part was as much due to other circumstances at the time, but a certain benefits of the degree program could have still helped alleviate those issues.

> In a sense, we're all fortunate that we lucked into a career in an industry that de-emphasizes credentials in favor of knowledge, ability, and track record.

Agreed, though I think there are costs to this as well, but most people probably will never worry about them.

You can still get a degree. I know someone who went tot law school at age 50, and back when I was in school I roomed with someone who was 35 self taught programmer who came back to study.

Technically yes, but it will be made significantly more difficult and more expensive that going at the culturally acceptable time and a lot of the value with fade overtime. I’ve tried to go back and I’m not even particularly old.

> Your mistake was thinking you could go into, say, a CS degree and have nothing to learn.

Thousand times this. I'm 33, programming since 8, working in the industry since 18, and can confidently call myself at least a senior, with a lot of leadership experience. And yet, I routinely go through CS courses from Stanford, MIT and CMU on YouTube (intro to databases by Andy Pavlo right now), and really envy people who have got to go learn at those institutions.

There's a lot of knowledge to be gained by doing projects and tutorials and working. But there's so much "hard CS" stuff that is just not that easy to learn on your own.

> Your mistake was thinking you could go into, say, a CS degree and have nothing to learn.

More generally, (at least) two things obtain for the serious IT practitioner:

- One never graduates from being a student of the subject, even after the 'I Love Me' wall is fully covered in diplomae.

- One always lives in a glass house, even if Duff's Device makes sense at a glance.

I'm 41, been coding since I was 10, working since I was 17. I've been at the top of my specialisation as a developer. I absolutely love coding but am finally moving away (coding is not the most valuable use of my time - however much I enjoy it).

I learn something every day. Try to read a paper a month (although it's more like 4 a year nowadays). I still regularly read books and like the OP go through courses from the top unis.

Unlike OP: I've had no trouble learning on my own (thanks to the amazing courses available online). Actually, I do a lot better. Sure, I hit roadblocks - but surpassing those roadblocks is where I learn the most.

Maybe it helps that I started on the 8-bits and spent a couple of years in my 20's studying for a BSc in CS (partially via the Open University, but mainly by reading/practise/Coursera/MIT).

Yeah. Virtually everyone is there at 22.

The problem here is metacognitive skills: knowing what you don't know.

The parents are right: "Parents went ugly, they said I was a careless, stupid, ignorant boy. I know they are not right." Acknowledging that is the first step. The second step is understanding that's true of most 22-year-olds. Age 0-12, you worship your parents. Age 13-19, ego really grows. You rebel, and do the opposite of what your parents want since you believe you know better. Early twenties is when you start to understand that you are, indeed, a careless, stupid, ignorant boy, and start to take advice from others. That's growing up in a nutshell.

Most of the more successful people I know get really good at taking advice from others, putting ego aside, filtering advice (not all of it is good!), and keeping an open mind. The executive version of that is delegating, and knowing whom to delegate to.

Constantly shifting focus is 100% standard for that age, and it's a fine way to grow. People at that age also really do mimic (usually stupid) role models. The "I want to be the cool computer wiz without a degree" is completely standard (only insert "rock musician" "soldier" "goth" etc). It's how your brain is wired.

I know this sounds like dime store psychoanalysis, but it's helpful to know you're not alone, and it's just how people are wired.

A few thoughts:

1) A CS degree should not be easy. If you're where you think you are, you can test out of the freshman CS courses. If you're a hotshot, you can start with a graduate-level class on sublinear-time algorithms or something. More likely, you can start with junior and senior classes. Those foundations are important, though.

2) Getting good at math is important. Social sciences degree was a mistake.

3) At 22, optimize for growth, not for profits. Profits can come later. There is an order of magnitude difference between a principal at Google and an entry-level coder. You don't get there incrementally.

4) There's plenty of part-time work, contract work, etc. available if you hunt around. A good path might be work half-time and school half-time. Both grow you in different ways.

5) It sounds like you have a good foundation to get wherever you're going. It doesn't feel like it, but you're on the right track.

> Do you really think your professors, your future colleagues or even your fellow students have nothing to teach you?

This is so important. When looking for a job, make sure you're not the smartest/most knowledgable person there. Seek out an environment with people who know more than you, at least in some fields.

Another big thing (at least for me) is to always challenge yourself. Work on stuff you don't know how to do in advance, things that require you to learn new skills. I find I get bored and burn out quickly if my work is just doing the thing, instead of figuring out how to do the thing.

> you really think your professors, your future colleagues or even your fellow students have nothing to teach you?

I really like this. I mean, it happens often that I learn something from colleagues who have less experience that me just because while they searching for a correct way to do something ( which I already know ) they find interesting logically based solutions that maybe are not the best, but bring with them experience of some function or logic that I do not know

Ah, man, kid, try being 43 with a Github profile full of half-finished repos.

You haven't failed. Part of what's pathetic about the tech industry and culture, and why I've mostly bowed out of it, is that it makes you feel like you're a failure at 22. Christ, even rock singers get until they're 30 to feel that way.

You're fine, man. You just need to decide what you really want. If that means being a coder, it's easy - figure out the framework du jour, learn it, get paid to build stuff with it. You'll probably be able to keep up for about another fifteen years before you realize you have no idea what the hell this new thing is that all the 22 year olds are clamoring about that runs entirely contrary to every good habit you've ever learned. (Say, separation of code and presentation - I'm looking at you, JSX. )

But you can do a lot in fifteen years. My advice is to have something else after you age out of tech, though, which you're nowhere near doing yet. Me, I'm a writer and musician, and though neither pay as well as they used to, it's still something to do other than my part time Node coding day job.

You got this, man. Sky's the limit. Just be smart about your choices, because that time moves much faster than you would ever believe. Nobody believes that until it happens to them, but nonetheless, it's true. Make the most of these days.

And for God's sake, don't spend all of your best physical years sitting behind a laptop. There are hot singles in your area, my dude. Go find some. Life is too short and this industry does not love you the way you think it will. Find a person to do that instead.

Tangent, but JSX is a templating language, and templating languages don’t dictate whether your presentation logic is well separated. You can write well-stratified React code or poorly-stratified React code, the difference is whether you choose to separate it that way. For example, see the S convention in styled-components.

Conversely, you can have terrible Django templates that contain all your controller logic.

this was a really good post. youre not going to get the top job at google, but you can make a lot of money by just getting good at one backend language + sql.

also great advice to get some excercise

Almost no one failed at 22; failing that young can basically only mean you are in jail for 20+ years or with a needle under a bridge. All the other 'failing' will be a faint memory in 10 years, if you remember it at all (besides from posting this blog post, which, personally, I would remove).

You did not fail: you just started trying things.

It takes around 27 years to properly fail. (I'm thinking of the 27 club)

I don’t think you failed, you just haven’t found the groove you fit into yet. In college I made a similar series of missteps and even found myself sitting alone at a Dunkin’ Donuts outside at 3 AM when a drunk guy came up and harassed me with his terrible app ideas.

I had no friends at the time and that was halfway through my college career. Things only went uphill from there. Well, not really because they went momentarily downhill as well. But overall it has been positive.

Keep working at finding your fit, and flesh out that portfolio with at least one finished project.

Happy to chat, pc.peterso at the Mail of G

Which toxic world have we built that let people think that tinkering, exploring different facade of life, and not being able to find a programming job at 22 is called failing?

The glorification of 400k packages right after graduation, of founders becoming paper billionaires before they have their first gray hair, the lack of representation of various software dev career paths... All this (and more) is giving an unrealistic and fake vision of what we do and become as software engineers.

Many of us here like to look down on what social media does to the life of teenagers, creating insecurities and disturbing development, but we’re doing the same exact thing in our industry.

The last sentence in the post gives a glimpse of hope, but the general tone resonates with something I’ve heard too many times around me. Life is short, yes, YOLO if you want, but no, not being a top software dev at 22 is not “having failed”.

22 years old is young man. I don’t know how many bad decisions I’ve made at that age

You’re not failing, that’s just consequences of repeated bad decisions.

Software engineers never stop learning, so it’s a mistake thinking there’s nothing else to learn in colleague. There’s a reason why reputable universities have try to structure curriculums and subjects to earn that degree. Many people said that you don’t need uni, but there’s a reason why we (human) created education system, evolve, and try to get better for hundreds of years

With that said, many other software engineers doesn’t have a degree as well. Go finish up cool personal projects, work as junior SE, enhance your skill, and climb the way up

Enjoy the drill my friend. It’ll be fun and hard at the same time

I was incredibly close to being you. I was close to getting into Arts but my dad smacked sense into me (don’t regret it. Turns out you can paint after work.)

I work with people similar so my advice (take it with a grain of salt) is (if you can’t go back to get your degree or get into a bootcamp) is to just start building something. Go work at an early stage start up which is absolutely desperate for some hands. Write articles, blogs, cultivate a personal brand. And be nice to yourself: you’re still incredibly young. There’s so much time you have left to choose your destiny.

This is not a failure. This is just someone seeing a small slice of their life and having some disappointment.

I have a different but parallel story - in college, I got a degree in fine arts. I studied philosophy. And I worked in the computer labs to keep a small skill set in tech. And it worked out just great - after college, I started working full-time in tech. At 22, I was not a hugely successful software engineer. Quite the contrary, I could not code a single line. I was doing deskside support at a hospital. This was not a failure, it was a beginning.

Because at 49, I've been a software engineer for over 20 years, done startups and large company work, mostly successfully. There have been more successful years in the software world than the number of years I had even been alive at 22.

22 is a starting point, not a missed goal. No matter where you are at 22, most of your adult life is ahead of you.

Hey, when I was 22 I had a laptop which I had taken in exchange for work which I hadn't delivered due to my poor work habits, an honours program that I'd dropped out of, no money, no one successful project I could point at, and some experience in a computer shop and the helpdesk on campus as my entire work experience.

Once the shop that had provided the laptop threatened to repossess the laptop I finally got off my backside and delivered the project for them (an online directory of lawyers written in PHP, would you believe - in 1999).

At 22 is definitely the best time to fail! If you've learned skill that will make you valuable somewhere, then you definitely haven't failed for ever.

P.S. do come back and post about your success in 20 years, and let the next 22 year old "failure" know that failure at 22 isn't that big a deal even if it feels like it right now.

You've not failed. You're 22. You probably know as much as any graduate does.

There are companies out there who don't put a lot of emphasis on a degree. A degree is a good filter, but that's it. You have good programmers with a degree and you have people who really make you wonder how they got a degree.

I'd recommend not exclusively looking for jobs through job seeking websites but instead email directly as an enquiry. Just say upfront that you don't have a degree, you know how to code and you're looking for a junior position to get the professional experience and learn from your peers.

Write this up in a cover letter and send it with your CV.

Don't focus on the glamorous tech jobs, they seem nice, but there's just as many interesting challenges to solve in many other companies. And remember, this is just a career starter.

Why would you say upfront that you don't have a degree? That's not wise IMO. If they ask, sure, don't lie. But better avoid that question and sell yourself without focusing on issues. And when you're sold, got work offer, now they won't really care.

Because their job posting say they want you to have a degree. Applying for a job and just ignoring that requirement and making a remark like "yoU dIdN't ask!" in the interview is as good as lying in a lot of people's eyes. They asked in the job posting.

Honesty is the best policy. If they are willing to interview you with that knowledge up front then you're more than halfway there.

If you match 40% of a job posting, you should apply. Those requirements are there as an ideal, not actual requirements.

> You probably know as much as any graduate does.

Does not sound like it:

> They were right in a way, all these years all I was doing was having fun, I wasn't prepared for a job.

Agree with this. I’ve hired hundreds of software engineers and I don’t give a flying flip where you went to school or even if you got a degree. What I do care about is whether or not you can do the job, and that comes from actually doing the job (whether you’ve been paid to or have pursued your own projects). Most new grads are totally useless TBH. I’ll take a GitHub showing you’re passionate about building and a solid interview over a robot with a degree nine times out of ten.

It's only failure when you give up, I see this blog post as a part of your success story that you'll laugh over some years later. You're only 22.

The 8 years of tinkering experience you have puts you ahead most, if not all, devs who started in college.

Do some side projects to completion (google for ideas; but things like to-do lists, unsolicited redevelopments of some existing apps/games, etc) and pick a stack to focus on. Work on it every day.

If you do that, I'm sure you'll get a job within 6-12mo, and I don't see the harm in staying with your parents for that time. Good luck!

You haven't failed at all. There's nothing wrong with being a generalist. Everybody who is into programming has a bazillion empty and half-finished Git repos with ideas that went nowhere. It shows you have been exploring, experimenting and learning a lot in the process. It may be a bummer that you don't have an official piece of paper to prove it, but any employer willing to look past this will see that you have a lot of potential.

In my opinion specializing in only one skill early in life is only going to limit your possibilities later on in life. Right now it's important that you have broad interests and are able to learn new skills quickly, and to me it sounds like that's exactly the case. College doesn't really fully prepare you for working life anyway; personally I wish I had spent a little less time on college and started my career just a little bit earlier.

Finding that first job is going to be a challenge without a degree but once you find a company willing to take a chance on you, you'll likely find that you have more than enough knowledge to do the job and are flexible enough to adjust yourself to whatever the needs of the company are. Once you've got that first bit of work experience, any missteps you may have made during your college years will simply stop mattering.

Dude, most developers who come from Uni are also totally clueless. They have to spend a week getting started with Rails/Django and three months getting fast at throwing together mediocre software using their framework de jour.

You've been coding since you were a teenager - and I assume that you understand the stack from bottom up?

Are your age, ability and willingness to learn + attitude is, in almost all cases, is the important factor. That's why a lot of graduates fail (or spend 5 years making the same little websites then move to management). They never had the interest to learn in the first place.

Get a job, find your limit, and surpass it. Do things that force you to learn something - they'll seem impossible at first, but you' d be surprised how fast you develop. The resources are so insanely good nowadays, you can literally follow a top class CS bachelors at home.

I'm almost twice your age, I didn't go to uni - I didn't need to, I have no trouble learning. I've remained as close to the code as I can, and have always been in the top couple of % of my profession. The only thing that really holds you back is having kids - you can't throw weekends into doing geeky things and 5-10 years of chronic lack of sleep is a killer.

You have not failed. You don't need a degree to be successful in this industry. Just a computer, time, and focus. I am a developer and my son was never interested in what I did as a boy. At age 22, he decided he didn't want to serve drinks anymore and built an app watching a course on Pluralsight. Took him 4 months, but he learned enough to be able to say he had experience at each layer in the software stack and had a project he could show and reference in an interview. He then went to a Google hangout in his local area and spoke to the sponsors who were looking for new job candidates. He went for an interview the next week and got the job. He was the only one that showed up. He started out at $65k his first year, stayed focused, and 1.5 years later is now earning $150k with full benefits. If you think this story is unique to him, you're wrong. It's how this industry works. Dig in and good luck to you. Post back here when you are making bank!

Actually yes, you did fail relative to the standards and expectations society and you have placed for yourself. And you have tasted the potential brutality of life and the fragility of ego at an early age, your parents were right.

And that might be a good thing...in fact it could be the best thing that ever happened to you. What happens next depends on your attitude toward this failure.

Grow and improve your independent thinking that led you there, sharpen your understanding of life, build more skills, deliver to people and make an impact and you'll go really far, or stay in self pity and perpetual cycle of defeat and you'll sink further and further in life.

Also, getting a job is not that hard if you are good at coding. Your art education and early failure will give you different perspective to life and this will be a value add to many companies and people if developed correctly.

I wish you the best of luck and look forward to see great things from you :).

Twenty years and one week ago, I lost everything I'd worked for. As far as I could tell at the time several patents, millions of dollars in funding, Ivy League degrees, a fortune in equity, all lost with no hope I could see for the future. I couldn't talk to anyone about it for a long time. In fact, my podcast episode of last week tearfully revisiting the situation was some of my first facing some of it https://shows.acast.com/leadership-and-the-environment/episo....

Friends and family heard some of those things for the first time. It hadn't hit me then that I would still be recovering from the calamity over two decades later.

You made mistakes. Welcome to life. Please take a seat. The stewardess will be with you shortly.

Sit down, concentrate on one main tech, continually make things, make imperfect but usable products, learn by mistakes, show employers.

Try to have fun.

Don't be dramatic. You made a mistake. That's all.

Man I feel this guy. After my past startup failed I just have not had the energy to find any work and its been almost two years. No math/algo experience, seems like everyone and their mother can build shit with react. The only industry I find interesting is simracing (simulated racing) and I'm trying to find some sort of "in" in this industry, or any motorsports. Applied to some formula1 web development jobs, red bull etc, but no luck.

OP I like the ending of your post, 22 is young and you have no failed yet. I'm 28 and "failed" but I am also still young so there is hope.

I started on a computer science degree when I was 28. Graduated at 30, had several job offers before the end of my last year.

It was tough to go through those 3 years working part-time while trying to keep up with a high load of university assignments, but at the same time, I never learned so much in my life and had fun while doing it, met lots of incredible people and campus life was pretty nice.

But now, all that is just a distant memory and I am just thankful to myself to have had the energy to do what I needed to find myself in a better position, and today I am happily working for over a decade in the software industry and could probably move anywhere I wanted, but am very happy where I am.

Hope this motivates you as you seem to be in a similar position I was in 15 or so years ago.

Thanks. I don't think motivation is what I need, I have it in droves, I think my wires are just fried right now with no way to recharge, it is tough to do anything.

I am thinking of doing a mechanical engineering degree but it is rough to have worked 15 years in the startup industry with nothing to show for it, all equity turned to dust, opportunity cost etc. Could have had a house and a family at this point.

Good luck in your journey, it's great you finished and so quickly too!

22 and talking about failing at life, there is more then enough time to straighten out life.

Just be that kid that does the introductory course of python and help your fellow students get up to speed that experience alone might set you up to become a good team mate. Just because you had 8 years of hobby coding doesn't mean you know how to finish a multi year or multi team project, finishing a degree/internship is like a persons first big project they will finish in life. Professional coding is more about planning and communicating with other people then it is about writing coding.

You're 22 and have suffered a setback.

An arts degree I would argue is possibly of more use than a CS degree.

why? because a good arts degree is about collaboration, giving and receiving good criticism, stealing other people's ideas and making them better finally and most importantly, find a way to communicate.

Yes, you might not get in to a FAANG right away, but in ten years, you'll be perfectly capable of dominating the "CS computers are my life, and I know everything because I have a degree" types.

My degree is effectively graphic design smooshed into a bit of computer aided design. I now work for a large FAANG shovelling shit in front of people's eyes. so its certainly possible, and I don't think that I could have done it without my degree.

I have run a medium sized department, in that time I interviewed hundreds of candidates. On average, the ones that did the best were the people who didn't have a CS degree. They were the most willing to admit that they didn't know how to do x, but they had an idea that if you did y, it might be right.

This is a far better trait than "I know it, here is some fancy sounding bullshit"

Go find a medium sized company to work for (less than 1500 people) they are big enough to have a decent support system, but small enough to allow growth and flexibility. make contact with a recruiter, they will help you market yourself so that you get interviews.

good luck, and keep going.

The degree doesn't really matter that much, formal work experience is key. They want to see prove that you can do the work. The degree wont really matter that much for most companies.

And no, pet projects don't count. I don't think most companies even looked at my Github account. While having done some hobby projects is better than nothing, those projects don't tel anything about how you can work in a team. And yes, soft skills are way more important that coding skills, the later you can always learn on the job but if you not a good cultural fit, that will be difficult.

So just get some job. Sounds difficult? Apply for some jobs that might not use your preferred tech but might be desperate to hire people. Join that shitty start up that is sure to fail. Or if you really can't get anything, find some friend to found a start up together. (And yes you need a friend or well at least someone else, if the start up only consists of you, nobody will be impressed.) You only need to work part time on the start up while you do some non tech related work for money.

Don't get suckered in, that is only a temporary measure. After roughly six months to a year, you will have gained proper work experience and will find the job market to be way easier.

So nothing failed, you just need to hustle for a bit to get back on track.

A theme that runs through this post:

* "we even tried to make a shooter game"

* "constantly shifting my focus, different programming languages, different platforms, cool new technologies"

* "I don't want to deal with introductory python courses"

* "I choose an arts bachelor for fun and easy scholarship" ... followed by low grades

I recommend you figure out how to FINISH things, and check your ego at the door. Those are pretty much the two skills every entry-level developer needs.

I’m 59, and I still learn new stuff, every day. It’s difficult, humbling, time-consuming, and often frustrating.

And more exciting than I ever imagined.

Also, I’m a high school dropout with a GED. I ran a pretty intense engineering team, for one of the top imaging corporations in the world. I had Ph.Ds on my team, and regularly worked with some of the top engineers and scientists in the world (and wanted to strangle some of them).

I actually feel like I’m just getting started, now.

There's no age to start afresh. From [0]:

> Colonel Harland Sanders created the world’s largest fast-food chicken chain, Kentucky Fried Chicken or KFC. From an early age, after his father’s death, Sanders was responsible for looking after his siblings. He worked numerous jobs including being a streetcar conductor and a railroad fireman. When he was 40, he was running a service station in Kentucky which he eventually shifted to a restaurant across the street. A fried chicken recipe he came up with became so popular that the governor of the town named him a Kentucky colonel.A while later, Sanders began franchising his business. Over the next few years, he traveled to restaurants across the country, striking franchise deals. In 1964, with more than 600 franchised outlets, he sold his business to investors for $2 million. From a farm boy in rural Indiana to a fast-food chain mogul, Sanders had come a long way.

0: https://os.me/hard-work-beats-talent-when-talent-doesnt-work...

Oh Boy! Life is a marathon, not a sprint. You are still young (revisit these words when you reach 32, 42, and 52). So, hear me out. You need to work on developing habits, habits of winning, winning every time, develop a process of learning and improving and trust the process. Ignore failures, you might look boring and unsuccessful to some people, but once your habits start to work, it can change your orbit.

You’re not failing, boy. You are growing up and this is how life look like. If you read a lot of books/biographies, you will realize how some very successful people have had setbacks. Ignore these negative depressing whispers, and learn, read more. Most of us were in that spot before, do yourself a favor, and take some time to watch this talk "Last Lecture: Achieving Your Childhood Dreams", Randy Pausch https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ji5_MqicxSo&vl=en

I got fired at 22 from visiting WikiLeaks on a bank computer. That, and changing the printer status messages to display "Out of ink: Please insert more blood" via the telnet HP JPL hack.

Young and stupid, I thought my life was over especially explaining to parents what Wikileaks was. Now 32 and still employed; just another 50 to go until I can retire.

I don't know anyone who wants a job for its own sake. Maybe there are some people desperate to eat and so will think a job is essential but what you really want is freedom. Money facilitates that freedom and a job is the poorest way to get it so don't feel bad that you had fun coding.

* Maybe there are some people desperate to eat and so will think a job is essential

Maybe? I feel like this describes virtually every living human being. Only the most fortunate of the most fortunate have the luxury of not struggling for survival.

Depends how you define the most fortunate. It seems to me like if you are disciplined enough to work for a while and be frugal while you do it, no matter how smart you might be, you can save a month of living expenses for every month you work - at least. So you might work 5 years then get 5 years of freedom, and that's at the lowest level. The most fortunate might work for a year and get 3+ years of freedom

I was still working at the checkout in a supermarket at that age, and I dropped out of university because my mental health was plummeting at that point and I hated it and I hated everything else I was dealing with. I beat myself up for a while about that, which was also not great for me.

I hear you, it's a frustrating and hopeless-feeling experience for sure. All of us older people are coming in to say it's not a big deal. They're right, in the grand scheme of things, because they've had the extra years to realise that. I have, too. But you haven't and it's a raw feeling, so I don't want to be dismissive of that.

Nonetheless, there's a lot of support in the comments here, and it's worth a read to see what you can relate to.

Art major with a 15+ y career in software development here. It can be done. The market may have changed since I got situated though. I think if I had to do it over I would do cs or business degree. Or aerospace. I sometimes think I missed my calling and would love to work at spacex or nasa.

Anyway, never look back too long. We all wish we’d done things different, and it’s good to learn from mistakes. But no good harping on them.

Get good at the basics: js, css, html, and a few backend languages. Learn all the frameworks etc on your own and never stop learning new ones. They’re all free to try and have plenty of tutorials. If you need a piece of paper saying you know stuff go get that degree too.

Just pick a junior job in some boring corporation, or startup with shit salary, and go from there?

The world is in desperate need for more good engineers. Every company I worked on always need more engineers. Especially now after COVID, the industry is doing great. It's not hard to find jobs now, even with no degrees.

Of course you need to lower your expectation, maybe you will work in some CRUD-shitting factory for a while, or work on some cryptoblockchain nonsense, but it's still an experience?

edit

also that arts bachelor sounds fun to be honest. And it can be useful if you decide to go, say, FE/full stack route. Or go more into UX/UI.

I'm a bit on the fence here. Yes, arts degree is far not the wisest solution but not having a CS degree is not the end of the world. It will however dramatically slow you down in the job market(unless you are truly exceptional). Which goes for anyone reading this: you are better off having a CS degree than not, so unless you have some life circumstances which prevent you from getting it(which some employers would be willing to understand and turn a blind eye), you should do it. I've personally given the green light on hiring people without a CS degree on two occasions and on both occasions it was a good call. However, seeing that someone doesn't have a degree raises less flags than someone having a degree in a completely different field: degrees are expensive, even if the education in your country is free - you still need to invest 4+ years of your life. The fact that you have one and are looking elsewhere might look like someone who simply whats to deep dive into an industry for the larger paycheck and nothing else: There are individuals which are motivated only by money and have 0 interest in anything beyond that. I'm not going into the "romance and passion for your work" type of thing - that's all bullshit. Yet you have to an absurdly curious individual in order to have any value in the IT industry. An example would be one of the people I picked at an old job without a degree. He had only done small, unfinished personal projects on github. 3 years later I had full confidence in him to give him any task. Telling him "hey we are going to experiment with X, wanna give it a shot?" resulted in him reading the entire documentation of X, buying books and literally not going to sleep with days. You can't imagine how many people with masters degrees in cs have been unable to answer a simple question like "what's heap and stack and how do they differ". My advice: don't shoot for the stars(yet) - look for a very entry level job(yes, django, rails, even php) and prepare yourself for a lot of surprises. I remember coming out of university, thinking I'm on top of the world and half way through my first day at my first serious job as a software engineer feeling like I was dropped on another planet. It took me at least 4-5 months to start feeling somewhat comfortable. With this in mind, your jump would be magnitudes larger and slower.

I switched from an electronics engineering degree to a fairly poor music degree. I had a lot of fun doing the degree, but looking back, it probably crippled my early career.

On the other hand, I tried something different which has its own rewards, and I've never stopped learning. Eventually I did a master's degree in a technical subject. Partly to help get more interesting work, but also because I enjoyed the subject.

There is no failure here, only different choices, which may be sub optimal at different stages of your life. Keep learning and trying things out.

Please take this piece of advice from a 30yo me who "failed" the same way you are. Scroll down if you just want an advice and don't care to read my story. ↓↓↓

Just in case I started having fun in computer-related stuff more than 15 years ago and finished my first paid freelance project around the same time. Unfortunately I didn't get any education for the similar reasons and until this day haven't been to a single job interview.

And my interests changed dramatically over decade and half and I jumped from some terrible arbitrage / SEO (back in 2006) to cybersecurity, then to making attempts to run my own business and then back freelance programming. Also went through PHP -> C++ -> Java with tons of other skills in between. Without ever doing proper full time or offline team work it's extremely hard to estimate my skills against what people have on market.

At the same time I never ever felt lack in options or possibilities to earn money. For me as freelancer it's was always just me against my lazyness. My last amazing one-year-long single man project that paid me well and let me dip my toes into world of Java. Now after half a year of downtime I started to look into Kotlin as well as Ethereum-based projects and Web3 which have a lot of opportunities.

I never stuggled financially for a long periods of time, but not having stable source of income is obviously feels like a problem at my age. While I have a wish to try having "proper job" sometimes it's still as scary for me as it's for you. And yeah I'm planning to find and try some interesting full-time job in team at some point this or next year.

...

So the advice is: you never really failed until you decide to give up and do nothing. There is abundance of opportunities to learn, earn money and work on interesting projects. Not all of them require you to have tons of full-time job experience and able to pass complicated interviews.

And if you really need this job. I know plenty of people who find their first job as frontend developers after learning basics just for a 3-4 months. They just hated their previous jobs and put a lot of effort in this short periods of time. It's not like being fancy ML expert or software engineer at FAANG, but it's a job and it will pay your bills.

As long as one haven't been stripped of all control of one's life and well-being, I'd say there exist but one true failure. It's the conscious choice of not ascribing to anything anymore. Giving up on all hope and deciding to be miserable.

Every other failure to achieve some goal is simultaenously an opportunity to learn. Being able to step back and look upon one's conceived failure with perspective and draw out positive experiences from it is an essensial life skill.

I feel the same way sometimes. I'm just about to finish Uni and I feel like I haven't really learnt anything over the last 4 years. I've worked on projects that I feel demonstrate I know what I'm doing more than most people in my year, however all employers are looking for is a perfect GPA and not what you've actually produced. I want to make my own business but I just don't know where to start.

> I'm just about to finish Uni and I feel like I haven't really learnt anything over the last 4 years. I've worked on projects that I feel demonstrate I know what I'm doing more than most people in my year

Lol I’ve done a little over 4 years in the industry and feel like this.

You only "failed" in the sense that you picked the wrong major, lost interest or will-power, and hit the eject button against the will of your parents. It's not really a failure, it a common dilemma for people your age.

Take some time to discover yourself. 22 is very young. It's probably a good idea to finish the university degree, find some work, and get yourself to another country as soon as possible.

You wot mate? You haven’t even started. I got my first half decent job when I was 23 right after half-assing my useless railroad automation degree in Russia. It was a Java programmer for 500 bucks a month. I’m 33 now. I had my Australian citizenship ceremony today in the comfort of my own house with my wife and baby daughter.

Relax, mate, I’ll all happen.

Why are we seeing so many whinny early-20-something 'I failed, I'm doomed' posts on here recently?

Is there something wrong with the education system and culture that teaches, if you're not perfect, you're a failure?

Honesty, at 22, you haven't failed, you've barely started. Come back at 40 and 60.

Have you been unemployed in the early 20s without a degree and desperate to find a job while nobody takes you seriously and you only get ghosted or turned down, while job ads seem to keep raising the bar all the time? It is a horrible horrible feeling.

Yes. And again late 20s. And 30s. Each time, I lived. And adapted (and improved).

I am agree with ironmagma. Everything has just started. A long journey is waiting for you. For me a bachelor degree is so easy but keeping the passion in programming like you is very hard. So keep your passion, keep going with clear plan. You are able to achieve your goal. Good luck :)

hi !

You could try to find apprenticeships.

Some companies are smart, and specialize in hiring qualified workers that don't have the right degrees, because other companies wouldn't and hence they're cheap. I'm working for a company like that

It's frustrating for the above-mentioned reasons, and because you know you're just disposable once your internship ends and they would have to pay for your work

But at least you can get virtually any kind of job you would like through internships, if you want to do dev, security, devops, ... It's also a first experience to write on your resume, and you will meet contacts who can recommend you. Because once you have experience, degrees become irrelevant

I knew what I wanted to be early on, but sucked at maths and physics, so I dropped out of the best university in the country.

You're so young. You can still get your degree in CS. I'm near 40 and I'm just now writing my bachelor thesis.

University is kind of soul sucking, and not a great meter for real world success.

But do put in the work to find a friend group. They don't have to all love programming. Pick up a sport or hobby and use that as your social bridge if need be.

You may find this talk[1] interesting.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gLt_yDvdeLQ&ab_channel=TEDxT...

Am I the only one to worry this person explicitly has suicidal thoughts? Hey HN, is there something we can do? "I wish I'd die" is quite an alarming signal for psychological distress.

I didn't start my first degree until I was 21. Life is long...

Advice from fellow college grad: stick to whatever you find less irritating. In last 6 years I've jumped from Android development to ML to backend on Elixir. You got it!

As a 22 year old, you still have all your options open in life.

I wouldn't take that too much to heart. It's best to stop comparing yourself with others. I think you live happier.

Failing is part of an interesting life. Obviously, it sucks at the time, but you gain a lot out of it. Read atomic habits and don't be hard on yourself.

Before you can decide if you're failed -- even temporarily, you need to decide if you've succeeded. What does success really look like to you?

Don’t aim for big companies, but a little ones that are just starting. That’s how I got into industry after failing just like you.

You're 22. You've just started.

Many of the job roles in Tech don't need a CS degree. Such as QA, Program Manager, Document writer.

This blogpost shows that good writing is honest writing, and this post felt brutally honest.

If you're 22 you haven't even started.

"I have failed. I can't get a teaching job and I am just a stupid patent clerk at 22. No one will ever even know who I am!" --Albert

Hey, I'm 22 and 'failing' too! Let's talk, hit me up thru my username + ".com/about"

Okay.

Then learn from your failures and go on.

Hmm. Being 22 with not very supportive parents, (possibly) no marketable degree, probably not a very good job, and needing to support oneself is certainly not an ideal situation, but not insurmountable by any means.

Based on the non-English text on the page, I will guess the author is Turkish. I have no idea how the Turkish university system works, or if they even went to school in Turkey, but, going back for another couple years and getting a CS degree might be the simplest thing they could do right now. That solves the marketable degree issue, might get the parents back on their side, and, with a little bit of hard work and luck, can definitely lead to a solid career in software development.

If that's not a great possibility, then, filling up that empty Github with useful, original projects, then using that as evidence they can work with Android, Rails, Django, or whatever, could just be enough to get a junior developer job. That solves all the issues, except for the bit about not having a marketable degree, but that becomes a non-issue after the first job, from everything I've seen. I'm not sure if the situation is different in Turkey, but there is definitely room out there for an ambitious, self taught developer. I'd estimate this plan should take between 6 months and 2 years, with a median estimate of 1 year, to execute and end up in a junior dev job.

If the author thinks they've failed because they haven't been able to land a software development job, this isn't failure, by any means. At 22, a delay of a couple years is a blip, not even a real setback in the grand scheme of things.

The one thing I'd caution them is that if they choose to go the full self-taught route, do not neglect their CS education. That includes stuff that looks like math that you might expect you'd never use. Whether or not these courses look boring or overly difficult, most CS classes will contain things you can use on the job. At the very least, they will teach you the language of CS, which is helpful as a shibboleth when talking to software engineers.

Just remember: CS is nearly unique in that there's literally nothing in the CS curriculum you can't easily and effectively teach yourself, on your own. In that way, it somewhat resembles math, but, in CS, you get the benefit of being able to test your understanding by writing code.

On either of these paths, I'd also advise working through a selection of LeetCode problems at some point. They're not very real world type problems, and you may never use anything you learn from LC directly on the job, but, being familiar with LeetCode will definitely help when interviewing.

There are, of course, many other things the author could choose to do that would lead to a good career, but, given what they've written, it certainly seems like software development is the path of least resistance, and, it's certainly achievable in a fairly short time with sufficient dedication.

Oh, and, BTW, if you have trouble getting in the door to a corporate job when the time comes, a couple contract/freelance projects can really help. Companies like to be able to see that you've written code professionally, preferably on a team, and, without SWE internships, you might need this little extra boost to your resume to get things kick started.

Failure is an end point; you're on a journey. A couple of thoughts...

On college: For many, there's no quicker way to crush a coding hobby than to study it via a computer science program. So fucking boring. Software development != computer science. That's where I started and I changed majors after my first year because I wanted to build shit and not write a fucking bubble sort. So I switched to economics and political science and kept teaching myself to code, got a coding job in college working for the university, graduated, didn't know what i wanted to do, until i stumbled into a 3 month "consulting" gig that morphed into my first job, which led to my first real startup job, which led to [on and on].

> And I began thinking about my career as a software engineer. How am I going to find a job?

This will sound petty bc you're at the beginning, but finding a job will eventually prove easier than you might think at this moment. Finding a good job (define "good" as you will) will prove considerably harder. Think of your first job as an internship. Do a great job and view it as a stepping stone to the next stone in your career. Do good work dispassionately. Don't mistake employment for loyalty.

Your parents, respectfully, don't have the slightest clue or context for understanding what it is you're trying do or how you'll make a living at it. It's annoying, but it's fine, bc it's your life not theirs. They really don't need to understand it and you don't need them to.

My advice...

To get good at programming: build something, anything. An idea you have. Don't have any good ideas? Try to build a clone of something else that exists. Also, and everyone says this ad hominem but it's true: contribute to open source. Offer your help. Any open source project of any size typically has quite literally a metric shit-ton of open issues, and not nearly enough people to fix them. So figure out how to fix one. Then do another. Keep doing it until the team makes you a contributor.

One brief note about career and "networking": contributing to open source is a very powerful form of networking. Every time you contribute to a project you are networking with others backed by your work. Don't take this for granted. You should also join discords and slacks and go to conferences when people do that again. I cannot stress this enough: your network is everything, and the more you invest in it the more you'll get out of it.

To get a job: fuck linkedin. Fuck job postings. Get "good enough" at programming (a much lower bar than you think), build a list of companies that you'd like to work for and cold email the founder (founder emails are almost always firstname@company.com). Shower them with praise about how much you love their company and think they're amazing. At the very least 80% will respond to you. There are several people on my team currently who got hired this way. This works particularly well for very early-stage startups; less so for larger companies.

Good luck, keep building, I promise you'll get where you want to go.

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