from Hacker News https://ift.tt/YV9WJO
via IFTTT
| Experience and connections don't seem to matter when you're old and crazy. I'm 40 years old, and I've been working in tech in some fashion since I was 12.
I've managed a dozen datacenters, implemented CFEngine, Chef, Puppet, Salt. I've started 2 failed web apps, a boutique bicycle company, a successful "devops" consulting company that I sold, and a dns company that I sold. I'm also crazy, bi-polar 2, and have burned many, many bridges. I'm unable to learn to code at this point, I'm unable to focus on anything for more than 10 minutes at a time, and that's a good day. I've tried most attention drugs, meditation, every other armchair psychology technique you might suggest. I'm just incapable of becoming more than just another old sysadmin who writes shell script and a cut and paste coder. I was fired from my last job for daring to ask my boss to narrow the $50k gap between me and everybody else in my team who had the same title as me. I was desperate to find a job and had to accept an insultingly low salary. Now I've applied to about 500 positions with exactly 5 responses. 2 lead to embarassing coding interviews with 22 year old children. The other 3 were polite "go away, old men". What do you do when you're too old to learn like a 20 year old kid, you're too worn down to pimp yourself out, and you can't deep throat a shotgun because you have a kid to support? |
||