... and now I'm job-hunting in earnest and jfcsstrrssfgchujbgfryhgftyhgerswww. I hope this is the right place to vent about this sort of thing, but I'm feeling so incredibly stressed and frustrated because I really want to change careers (TEFL teaching is a dead end, and the conditions have got so much worse in recent years) and I know I could do a junior frontend job perfectly well — I've put so much with into getting good at it in my own time — but it's beginning to dawn on me that there's basically no way in to the industry unless you know someone who can help you get a foot in the door.
I don't know where I'm going with this tbh — I just needed to vent somewhere — but it would be nice to hear any advice anyone can offer, or even just the lamentations of anyone with similar experiences...
It's all just having an in or "right time right place", literally chance and luck lol, and the number of times and places are shrinking with automation and shit.
I didn't know anyone going in, not sure if it's helpful experience though. I wouldn't say I have any particular acumen and the experience only reaffirmed my prior socialist tendencies
I was basically obsessed with the computer as a kid. This led to me as a minor contributing to P2P software, getting involved in the operation of a torrent tracker+website, ultimately getting charged with lots of felonies which were luckily expunged at 18. But I learned infinitely more doing all of that than I did in a year and a half of uni before I left. I did computer repair in the area and then my first office job was a company with 40K employees in the country. Just migrating people's shit from busted/failing PCs when they took PTO or the device had become unusable. I buddied up to the ancient infosec team who would come around if they needed to grab/image hard drives for investigations/legal holds. I spent some down time at work on one of their big projects, that involved 20 years of asset->employee relationship history that wasn't of super high quality. I think they were originally trying to figure out how to do it with Excel. I moved from infosec to data engineering/legacy migration consulting off that experience and the referrals at that org.