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this post was submitted on 27 Oct 2024
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Asklemmy
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I was never going to "find myself" and so I should have just gone to college with my friends for computer science and made the good money when jobs were easier to get even though I had no interest at all in it. Hindsight is 20/20 and all that jazz. Now I'm a worthless schmuck in a factory living in someone's garage paying their mortgage in rent prices.
All my interests are hobbies, some of them even too expensive for me to do lol they're nothing you can monetize.
Work is for making money, hobbies are for spending money. I think a lot of people mix that up and lose their enjoyment; money changes your perspective on why you're doing something.
Take heart: had you done comp sci just for the money, you'd be where you are now. Comp sci isn't for people in for the money but for people who find it exciting and have no idea their career is timesheets. :-p
No, really: I saw a LOT of people flame out of the programme, and most of them admitted they were in it for the payday.
That's so true. I studied Ba. Information Technology for two years in 2004-2005 and dropped out due to family reasons, then I went back 10 years later and did Ba. Software Engineering in 2013-2016.
In both instances, it was clear about half those enrolled in the programme were only in it for the money, you could tell that some people were just not excited about software. They were the ones who had dropped out by the end of first year.
The other lot were those who did find it exciting, but severely underestimated the difficulty of the discipline. These were the kind of people who have can edit game config files to add a bunch of mods to Skyrim, they consider themselves a tech wiz want to study to be a game developer. But they barely pass intro to Web programming with html and JS in the first year and fail the first oracle database course in second year. I had some good friends who failed out hard in second year of software engineering for that reason.
Yeah there’s an old saying in engineering school: “look to your left, look to your right. One of you will drop out, one will switch to a business major, and one of you will be an engineer.”
People who go into engineering and tech fields for the money rarely cut it. I love engineering and spend my last year contemplating dropping out to do sex work or something anything but the toll I was putting on my body and mind. If it was just a paycheck I wouldn’t’ve graduated.