Comment by throwaway787544 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by throwaway787544 | Hacker News Reader

throwaway787544

I was an underachieving ADHD having bad-at-math kid with no prospects for the future. I dropped out of high school and taught myself programming and system administration, by reading two programming books and going through HOWTOs (remember those? Sorry kids they don't exist anymore, you'll have to make do with 1000 random blog posts) to set up server software and networks etc.

Because of my unstructured learning and random hobby type direction it took me a couple years to get proficient, but eventually I knew more about systems admin than people who'd been doing it professionally for years. I got hired for peanuts by a startup, and networked through User Groups to a better job that paid more.

My career's been nearly 20 years with no higher education or any other skillset whatsoever, bad at concentration and memorization, no bootcamps or teachers or mentors. I'm not a genius. If I can do it, you can do it.

An unlimited amount of free information and learning is out there on the internet. Go and get it, learn it, practice it. Network and find someone who wants to pay you chump change and build that resume.

Also remember there are a lot of roles today in tech. Many don't require a ton of technical chops. Figure out what they are and what they entail, and target your learning towards one. Even lower end roles pay better than most other jobs, and you can always pivot to another role later once you have some work on your resume.

It’s under appreciated what having a specific passion - and continuously exercising it over time - can do. It does wonders. It’s essentially finding reward in the journey itself.

ADHD, dropping out, etc are all beliefs that society labels as “non-productive”, but when somebody has passion and determination and a lot of time doing what they enjoy doing with no reward other than feeding this passion, then that’s all it takes. Consider yourself lucky because in my experience a very small number of people can do this, nobody wants to put the time it takes. Sometimes it takes decades. Coincidentally my form of ADHD disappears once I am in the flow, makes me wonder if ADHD is just aka for “I just don’t fundamentally enjoy what I am doing therefore my brain needs to reward itself in other ways”.

Even better if we end up pursuing a nice hobby in a booming field like technology.

Reality is that most people give up, because ultimately they pursue fields they are not deeply interested in to begin with. The ultimate curse: to dedicate our life to something we don’t care because we didn’t spend enough time exploring what we really cared about.

I’ve got basically the identical back story. High school dropout, ADHD/ASD, can’t handle structured learning.. but I sure as hell liked staying up all night playing with code, exploring the depths of the internet and every single aspect of how it all works from hardware to software.

Did freelance stuff for a few years making websites for local businesses, graphic design for nearby restaurants and retail stores, fixing computers from my share-house bedroom, etc. Ultimately got some pretty dead-end tech support jobs in telcos and SMEs which taught me workplace etiquette and how to deal with clients/stakeholders. Then did some 3-6mth contracts with some pretty big companies from there, including government. One of those had a manager who understood ASD and took my under his wing, and I got a full time 6 figure role there founding an internal web team (taking over the main website and intranet from an outsourced company, building/deploying whatever web apps departments needed). Workplace training programs moved me up from there to a variety of roles and into security then management.

Still never finished high school or any tertiary education, I like to say I fell my way upwards. I have no idea what I’m doing professionally, I just like playing with computers.

There's an important caveat that a lot of people overlook: 20 years ago the hiring environment was totally different. Nowadays, you can't even get an interview without a degree unless you have somebody recommend you. The types of low-end work that hire uncredentialed people (help desk and cable grunt mostly) pay about the same as stocking shelves at the grocery store.

Nobody wanted to hire me back then either. I was a kid with no experience or education.

Now I remember! I was also doing home PC repair through my parents' friends for $14/hr. Put flyers in Barnes and Noble. Got hired by a friend to write some Perl scripts. Two different guys who also went to the LUG hired me to fix some Linux servers they had at their small business. I set up a website and organized marketing materials and did project management for my dad's realty business.

All these little gigs I padded my resume with showed I was doing something, showed what tech I used, what I accomplished. It was a hustle for sure. But it convinced a small startup to give me a shot, and that was the gateway to a "real job". But I did start with dozens of tiny one off jobs over a couple years.

For sure, nobody is going to hire you if you can't show that you can apply your skills, that other people have also given you a shot, that you are self-directed and show a willingness to work and learn. But I mean, this is Life! If you can't or won't do those things you're gonna end up a bum. Even back then I didn't imagine anyone would give me anything, I had to do the work and hustle to make it. So maybe I just assumed other people got that part of it... It's definitely work and takes time, but it's also very much something everyone can accomplish if they put a small amount of brain power and a lot of elbow grease into.

I think you may not be appreciating your ADHD hyper focus (speaking from experience). It may be that sysadmin type work was interesting to you in a way that allowed you to use that to your advantage.

Other people, however, may very well not have that same interest. Maybe what gets them hyper-focused is art or literature or who knows what. Not to say of course it is not possible but you may be smarter than you think.

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