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Comment by jokoon | Hacker News Reader

I live in france, am 29, I worked 2 months in my life.

"what they do instead"

Trying to go back to school, I learned programming for 2 years in some technician school program, did not get the degree, after that I expanded my programming skills by myself, but it has been pretty bleak. I'm quite ashamed of myself. I have many ideas of projects, but they really seems to be out of my reach in terms of skill, experience, motivation and networking. I took anti depressants for 4 years but am not so unhealthy in term of mental health...

I'm back at school again, for some equivalent degree, but on 1 year, I have an internship starting wednesday, I really hope it will hook me to some job opportunities.

If I don't get the degree nor a job, well I could really try to start some crowdfunded game project or social network, but I don't feel the industry really needs that many programmers. Maybe I'm really incompetent.

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I'm really sorry to hear about your struggles. One wonderful thing about software development, is that credentials and pedigree are not required. If you can make software, you can get a job. Even if you can't write software, there are lots of related jobs. I've been writing software professionally for about 15 years or so. Before that I had flunked out of an electrical engineering program a couple times, and was waiting tables to get by. I considered myself a failure. There is always hope.

Writing software isn't really about intelligence, although it probably helps. It isn't really about knowing the "one right way to develop software." It is more about being willing to admit you are wrong. Learn from your mistakes. Also a good dose of stubbornness is needed to deal with tools that don't work properly. Sometimes the documentation will lie to you. It helps to not take the little failures too personally.

Best of luck to you.

thanks :)

> Even if you can't write software, there are lots of related jobs.

I'm more than a little frustrated that the tech sector hasn't taken this to heart more. There's a lot of day-to-day work that we expect developers to do that anyone with good grades in high school or a liberal arts associates degree could do.

I guess what I'm saying is that there's a low ratio of administrative assistants to developers considering how much developers are paid. Perhaps it would be better if developers were paid hourly or otherwise went home at 5 p.m. like normal professionals.

My suggestion for where you're at, is to start smaller projects. Completing them feels really great. You can then open source them if you care to, or shut them down if they don't go any further.

Take one of your ideas, scale it down to nothing more than its essence, and build the simplest form of it you can imagine to get it to work, so people can use it. Then add on to it if or when you care to.

Whatever you do, build within your means to complete; as otherwise, you'll never actually get anywhere. As you launch things successfully, your ability to build to a larger vision will likely expand.

> I don't feel the industry really needs that many programmers.

That's definitely false, at least in the US.

...which it's a relatively small part of the world.

For example in many parts of Europe, although it is relatively uncommon for a programmer to be unemployed, salaries are a far cry from the 100k+ of Silicon Valley, meaning that the (local) industry is not exacly "starving" for programmers.

I guess I don't have a lot of exposure since I did not announce any concrete project. But I'm not seeing a lot of hiring ads... Maybe it's because I'm not fluent in .net, javascript or java.

I don't answer so many stackoverflow questions, but I use bitbucket regularly, several stackexchange accounts, several programming-oriented forums...

I guess it boils down to immigration policy...

You know more than I do, and 97 percent of the world population. Start your own project and work to your strengths. This isn't a race or competition btw :)

That's definitely false, we aren't virtualizing brains, we don't have sapient AI, and Mesa still needs tessellation shaders. Plenty of work left to be done.

Priorities, man, priorities.

Are those the problems that are best solved by throwing more and more programmers at them? If anything, the people doing the grunt work would be PhD students (save the shaders, perhaps).

Pretty common in France, from my experience -- even more so than in other European countries. It would be more popular in the US, too, if school wasn't so damned expensive!

I'm sorry for your troubles. I do have a question: How do you pay for anything? Have you been on govt. benefits this whole time?

yes.

I only do my shopping at aldi, so I save a good amount of money.

don't forget that in france, government benefits are pretty good compared to other countries.

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