I wrote software professionally for almost 20 years, from age 14 to age 33.
Then I had a mental breakdown due to nearly 20 years of abusive employee/employer relationships, coupled with a rapid series of devastating life changes.
I’m afraid I’m virtually unemployable now, and can’t really manage to do any kind of quality work even if someone wanted to pay me for it.
This sounds unhelpful, but I’ll try anyway: did you try working without the abusive relationships? I’m pretty sure most programmer work isn’t like that.
You’re right, it isn’t—but often, in the corporate environment, you wind up in a situation where your previous employer’s reputation taints your resume, and thus the only kinds of jobs you can get are ones with equally abusive relationships.
Also, sometimes you can flip a coin 10 times and come up 9 heads. It may not mean that the coin is stacked, but try convincing the amygdala of that.
There aren’t very many viable startups in Oildale, CA, and the Bay Area was always too expensive to break into. Most of the startups I participated in in Arizona were run by egomaniac scam-artists, and my own ego issues prevented me from just taking my paycheck and going home when there was actual work to be done. So, yeah. Fully disillusioned.
Have you ever tried writing software? Like they say: “a programmer is a machine that turns coffee into money,” or something like that.
I wrote software professionally for almost 20 years, from age 14 to age 33.
Then I had a mental breakdown due to nearly 20 years of abusive employee/employer relationships, coupled with a rapid series of devastating life changes.
I’m afraid I’m virtually unemployable now, and can’t really manage to do any kind of quality work even if someone wanted to pay me for it.
This sounds unhelpful, but I’ll try anyway: did you try working without the abusive relationships? I’m pretty sure most programmer work isn’t like that.
You’re right, it isn’t—but often, in the corporate environment, you wind up in a situation where your previous employer’s reputation taints your resume, and thus the only kinds of jobs you can get are ones with equally abusive relationships.
Also, sometimes you can flip a coin 10 times and come up 9 heads. It may not mean that the coin is stacked, but try convincing the amygdala of that.
Yeah, the corporate environment should be avoided at all cost. Startups FTW.
There aren’t very many viable startups in Oildale, CA, and the Bay Area was always too expensive to break into. Most of the startups I participated in in Arizona were run by egomaniac scam-artists, and my own ego issues prevented me from just taking my paycheck and going home when there was actual work to be done. So, yeah. Fully disillusioned.