and I’ll have burned whatever employability I had in the “normal” job market too.
This is probably moot, but I’d like to argue against this sentiment and share part of my own story.
I myself am a programmer and have a lot of anxiety about getting fired and being unable to find another job. And so I’ve spent a good amount of time trying to debug this. Part of that debugging is asking True Self what he actually thinks. And this is his ~answer.
It is totally implausible that my fears end up actually being realized. Think of it like this:
Plan A is to keep my current job. I worry about getting fired, but it is pretty unlikely to actually happen. Look at the base rate. It’s low. And I have control over my performance. I can scale it up if I start to worry that I’m getting into risky territory.
Plan B is, if I get fired, to apply to, let’s call them “reach jobs” (like a reach school when you apply to colleges) and get one of them. Seems somewhat plausible.
Plan C is to mass apply to normal jobs that are in my ballpark. It might take a few months, but it seems highly likely I’d eventually get one of them.
Plan D1 is to ask friends and family for referrals.
Plan D2 is to lower my standards and apply to jobs that I’m overqualified for (and perhaps adjust the resume I use to apply to mitigate against the failure mode of “he would never actually accept this position”).
Plan D3 is to push even further into my network, asking former coworkers, former classmates, and friends of friends for referrals.
Plan D4 is to just have my girlfriend support me.
Plan E is to do something adjacent, like work as a coding bootcamp instructor or maybe even in QA.
Plan F is to do something like work at a library or a coffee shop. I worked at a library (actually two) in college and it was great. It was low stress and there was plenty of time to screw around on my laptop doing my own thing.
Even if I get “knocked off track” and end up at D2 or whatever, I can always work my way back up. It’d be a setback, but probably nothing too crazy.
And that’s actually something I ended up going through. After doing a coding bootcamp and working as a programmer for about a year and a half, I took a year off to self-study computer science, and then about three more years working on a failed startup. It was a little tough finding a job after that, but I managed. From there I worked my way up. Today I actually just accepted an offer at one of those “reach jobs”.
Anyway, what I’m trying to say is that taking time off doing EA stuff might be a setback in terms of your ability to get back into the “normal” job market, but I expect that it’d only knock you down a rung or so. I don’t think it’d completely knock you of the ladder. Maybe your ladder doesn’t look exactly like mine with A through F — I’m pretty fortunate to have the life circumstances I have — but I expect that it’s a lot longer than it feels. And even if you do get knocked down a rung, I expect that for you too it’d just be a temporary setback, nothing that’d knock you off course too significantly.
This is probably moot, but I’d like to argue against this sentiment and share part of my own story.
I myself am a programmer and have a lot of anxiety about getting fired and being unable to find another job. And so I’ve spent a good amount of time trying to debug this. Part of that debugging is asking True Self what he actually thinks. And this is his ~answer.
It is totally implausible that my fears end up actually being realized. Think of it like this:
Plan A is to keep my current job. I worry about getting fired, but it is pretty unlikely to actually happen. Look at the base rate. It’s low. And I have control over my performance. I can scale it up if I start to worry that I’m getting into risky territory.
Plan B is, if I get fired, to apply to, let’s call them “reach jobs” (like a reach school when you apply to colleges) and get one of them. Seems somewhat plausible.
Plan C is to mass apply to normal jobs that are in my ballpark. It might take a few months, but it seems highly likely I’d eventually get one of them.
Plan D1 is to ask friends and family for referrals.
Plan D2 is to lower my standards and apply to jobs that I’m overqualified for (and perhaps adjust the resume I use to apply to mitigate against the failure mode of “he would never actually accept this position”).
Plan D3 is to push even further into my network, asking former coworkers, former classmates, and friends of friends for referrals.
Plan D4 is to just have my girlfriend support me.
Plan E is to do something adjacent, like work as a coding bootcamp instructor or maybe even in QA.
Plan F is to do something like work at a library or a coffee shop. I worked at a library (actually two) in college and it was great. It was low stress and there was plenty of time to screw around on my laptop doing my own thing.
Even if I get “knocked off track” and end up at D2 or whatever, I can always work my way back up. It’d be a setback, but probably nothing too crazy.
And that’s actually something I ended up going through. After doing a coding bootcamp and working as a programmer for about a year and a half, I took a year off to self-study computer science, and then about three more years working on a failed startup. It was a little tough finding a job after that, but I managed. From there I worked my way up. Today I actually just accepted an offer at one of those “reach jobs”.
Anyway, what I’m trying to say is that taking time off doing EA stuff might be a setback in terms of your ability to get back into the “normal” job market, but I expect that it’d only knock you down a rung or so. I don’t think it’d completely knock you of the ladder. Maybe your ladder doesn’t look exactly like mine with A through F — I’m pretty fortunate to have the life circumstances I have — but I expect that it’s a lot longer than it feels. And even if you do get knocked down a rung, I expect that for you too it’d just be a temporary setback, nothing that’d knock you off course too significantly.