I have 2 college degrees and install cable tv for a living.

Figure out what you want to do. Dont wait until grade 12 to start thinking about your future.

IT in general.

Don’t pigeonhole yourself to a technology. Move with the times to stay relevant.
Alternatively, be extremely good at something hard.

TBH I stumbled into it and fell in love with it upon finding it. Not exactly how I recommend people find their career but it worked for me!

Out of highschool I quit my fast food job and my mother told me to find a new job after a week or so. A friend of a friend invited me to check out their work place (machine shop) and I was in love with the machines, so I applied there. I’ve been in the industry since!

It’s been well over 10 years and I’ve only had 4 jobs so I can’t really give advice on where to look or how to find anything that fits for someone. Especially not in an economically viable way

Graduate high school at 18. Work on a vineyard as a farm hand with exclusively middle aged Hispanic men for a year. Went to Europe for a month with money saved by living in a large shed. Return to the States and attend university studying mathematics. Decide math isn’t the route for me. Transfer to another university and study horticulture, winemaking, and vineyard management. While studying, got a job at a hazelnut farm. Worked there for 1.5 years while finishing degree. Decide farming isn’t quite right for me. Decide to try law school. Take LSAT. Score well enough. Apply and obtain scholarship at a law school a few hours away. Move to new city and do law school. While in law school, worked at several firms and distric attorney offices. Graduate and study for the bar exam. Pass bar exam. Work full time as solo attorney. Very stressful, not very much money (was making around $40,000/yr). Decide to try district attorney office. Get job offer for $80,000. Move closer to new job. Now been working at DA office for two years and am making $106,000. Much less stressed. Really good support from colleagues and staff. In line for promotion. Life is pretty good. In the future, looking to potentially become a professor/law professor as long term career to hopefully have even better work/life balance.

Tried to GED in 10th grade. Weasled through the rest of high school making deals with teachers to just take final exams. 3 years of linguistics studies in college with no clue where that was headed. Boyfriend, pregnant, married, and random jobs as we moved to different states for his job. Burned my arm and had to go to physical therapy. Stoned on painkillers and amazed by how cool the gym was, i applied to therapy school. Now i work with school kids with physical disabilities. I’m in my car driving from school to school most days and my summers are free. I love that i have an office but don’t have to go there, i get to go outside and see the sun every day, each day is different, i get to work with/on some cool equipment, and working with kids is better than working with adults. I hate my special ed leadership team because they’re selfish, disrespectful assholes who care more about moving up than taking care of our school kids. If i had to do it over, i would change nothing. I would have been to immature to do this job and appreciate it as a younger person.

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Got IT training during my time in the military that ended up opening the door to a network engineer position with a defense contractor after I got out.

I was a pretty poor engineer, but I was good at explaining technical details to non-technical people. The bosses liked this because they wanted constant updates on what was happening, the other engineers liked this because they didn’t want the bosses to bother them, and I liked it because going to sit in briefings got me out of doing real work, so I ended up in management.

I would recommend leaving on a good note. Over half of my jobs were recommended to me by people I worked with in the past.

Be 18. Get scholarship. Study literature. Drop out. Run away. Join a protest movement. Be homeless at MIT for a while. Find job. Get hurt at said job. Get workers injury insurance payment after 2 years of recocery. Go back to school for math. Be good at math. Found tech related non profit. Spend 6 months in Kurdistan, setting up wifi. Finish math school. Fuck it, get masters because good at math. Get hired by foreign company oversees to work on self driving cars. Doesn’t work. Won’t work. Quit. Go to Greece, teach refugee kids how to us MS office. Watch neo Nazis burn down refugee school and computer lab. Suddenly it’s March of 2020 (COVID) and nothing to do because Nazis and no more computer lab. Oh fuck. Find PhD program in “trustworthy ai” to figure out why car not work. Prove car never work. Get PhD. Get paid to critique AI and play on super computers while working from home and having zero day to day oversight. Get paid to travel the world. Get paid to shit on Google, Facebook , Openai, and Tesla.

I went from homeless to visiting my 40th country in 10 years, while having a PhD.

No regrets.

(Engineer, for reference.)

Loved legos as a kid. I guess that kind of showed where I was going, huh? Also got lucky that my high school still had design and tech-related electives, so I got a leg up on that before I even hit college.

Worked in a tool & die shop for a small company while I was in college. It was a rough job - small business operating on the razor’s edge - but it was a good introduction to real-world manufacturing processes and environments. Having to actually machine and assemble stuff by hand taught me more about designing for manufacturability than any course ever could, and I think every engineer should spend some time making things before they try and design them. Definitely wouldn’t call that particular business enjoyable, though.

Got my first real engineering position at a power generating company. Interesting place. Burned literal turns of garbage to generate power and recycle almost anything they could. Very safety-focused. Honestly, if the commute hadn’t been absolutely awful, I might have stuck it out with them longer, but “spend two hours of your day driving” was just terrible.

Then found my current position, which is as an engineer at a smaller high-tech company in aerospace. Hours are great, co-workers are fantastic, the job is interesting, I like my boss, pay and benefits are absolute dogshit.

The engineering field is definitely one of those where you’re “encouraged” to shop around and switch jobs every few years. I don’t know why. It’s terrible. Terrible for employees and terrible for businesses, who are perpetually losing institutional knowledge. I don’t know why they don’t fix this. I’m coming up on the point where I’m going to have to choose between “a comfortable job” and “a well-paying job”, and I don’t know what I’ll do.

This one starts back in high school:

Have plans to enter West Point, build a military career, retire from the military at 50 and do civilian work for fun to pass the time. Get shot in the eye with a bb gun at 14, which ends all military aspirations. Pick the second choice college because they accepted me first with a scholarship. Go to college for physics, but listen to the guidance counselor about the 7 week intro web programming course. Drop out of physics and change major to computer science at the last possible second in the first semester of the first year. Continue to take various history courses throughout college that don’t count to a history degree. Graduate and move back in with mom for the summer. Apply to relevant jobs for over a year without success, pick up some work in grocery stores in the meantime. Quit the hometown grocery store at the end of the summer after publicly confronting the store owner about threatening to illegally deduct from my paycheck. Move in with college roommate and friend in the big city while still applying for relevant work and working at Aldi. Work with a communist store manager and have political discussions with him during the George Floyd protests and COVID. Get hired into QA for a big video game company. Walk out with the others when a major sexual harassment lawsuit is filed against the company. Walk out again when the CEO is discovered to be complicit and enabling the harassers. Walk out and go on strike when workers get laid off. Start organizing a union. Win my union.

I feel like I should have pursued my first choice college more, because it was a big 10 public college while the second choice was a private liberal arts college (take a guess which one was cheaper). By far the most rewarding thing in my career has been my part in winning the fight to organize my union. I didn’t realize it then, but now it seems clear that my interests and actions throughout my life have led me to a career as an activist.

Second generetions software engineer. 19 years. It’s been good. I’d recommend folks try writing software one time somehow and if they like the puzzle solving bits look into it more. The market is really saturated for new grads now so it has to be something you love.

I’m a software engineer because I’m bad at everything else. Barely made it through college physics class and highschool chemistry. Wanted to do English but can’t write. Didn’t want to follow in my mom’s footsteps but I just can’t so anything else well. Came around in college after a pretty bad first semester.

I was kind of a slacker in school. I did ok, but the pressure I see on kids these days would have killed me.

I made it through a computer science degree because it was fun for me. So much puzzle solving. Even the theoretical stuff was fun. I had a professor who everyone thought was really easy. Folks were getting like 98/100 in the whole class. I think, though, he just tought well. We got it. He made it easy.

These days I work on data things. Nothing fancy. All open though so googling my name will find it. It’s honest work. I got here accidentally. I was taking random tasks and worked on search once time. Was kind of fun. When that job went belly up I spent a while working for something cool. I found a job I was unqualified for but sort of bluffed my way into. Learned a lot.

While I was there I built a search thing that, terrifyingly, is built right into Firefox. Go to the location bar, type @w, hit tab, and type a word. That was me for a while. I’m proud of it. It’s no google, but it’s honest.

Been working in search and data stuff ever since. I don’t deserve it. It’s been good. But I got lucky.

I dropped out of college with 30 hours to go, worked a job in construction that was more or less a go-for job and I wasn’t very good at it. I had a friend who did EEGs and needed another tech. I worked at $30/hr doing EEGs. Studied my ass off and got registered, studied more and got a second registry. That enabled me to make $48/hr which is my starting pay adjusted for inflation. Long story short, I should have gone into computer science or finance and been rich. Neurodiagnostics is rewarding in it’s own way, but there is better money out there that isn’t going to make you work your ass off and claw your way back to where you started.

• Hischool dropout
• Repeatedly try this school thing again without much success. Learnt some electronics, though.
• Spent a few years picking up temp jobs while I tended to my hobbies. Linux and electronics, mostly. Some programming.
• Broke as fuck, desperate for a stable paycheck
• Started applying to anything that seemed vaguely interesting
• “WTF is offshore seismic survey technician?”
• Get a phone call out of the blue with an interview offer. Well, I sure wasn’t gonna get the job, but they offered to fly me in for the interview in The Big City, and I had some friends there that I hadn’t met in years
• Immovable event shows up, and I was looking forward to attending that.
• Fired off an email to the company asking if it was possible to reschedule. I wasn’t gonna get the job anyway, so I didn’t feel like I had much to lose.
• To my surprise they rescheduled. Updated flight details arrived shortly after.
• Eventually flew down, went through with the interview. Didn’t perform particularly well or poorly. Nothing noteworthy, really.
• Before leaving I asked what their estimate was for reaching a conclusion.
• Had a beer with the friends down there for the first time in a year
• Flew home. Waited.
• Conclusion date arrived. Clock passed 16:00, when most businesses closed.
• “Meh, fuckit. Can’t say I’m surprised”
• 21:30 or so I received an e-mail from the company with a job offer, already signed. Monthly pay far above what I imagined I’d ever be able to pull.
• Remember those hobbies? Yeah, turned out that they liked my linux and electronics hobbies, combined with me already being used to heavy machinery due to growing up on a farm.
• Kicked in the door to my flatmate. “I need you to lend me 100$” (equivalent in my currency)
• “Why?”
• "We’re going out to celebrate that I won’t have to borrow money from you anymore.

I left the industry in 2012 to get a “normal” job, but came back in 2019 after realizing that I hated normal jobs, and that normal jobs are for normal people. After a few promotions and being poached by a competitor I am no longer offshore, but I support the operation from wherever I am. There’s still some travel to the far corners of the world for mobilizing for a new survey and that sort of stuff, but I’m mostly in my home office these days. Pays quite handsomely, though.

As for recommendations, I’ve been extremely lucky. Most of my coworkers have a masters degree, either in something technical or in geophysics. I guess one of those is a better choice.

But after having taken part in some of the interviews, I’ve learned that there aren’t really that many hard requirements when it comes to skills or diplomas. It’s better to find the right kind of personality who knows something useful. The rest can be taught.

As an engineer who is well off with a wife and a dog and a house, it was pretty much:

• Work hard in high school
• Hard enough to get a full ride to my state’s major public university
• Choose an engineering degree that seems interesting enough
• Turned out to be a great choice, motivated me to work hard enough to get a 4.0 through college
• Had a few internships throughout college at various {industry} companies
• Eventually managed to get hired out of college at the most prestigious {industry} company, working with people with much fancier colleges’ degrees, PhDs, MBAs, the like
• Now I’ve been working there for {n} years, have taken multiple roles, have had field assignments, and I’m still loving it and learning every day / week
• My wife (who I met in my degree program) has also had a great and fulfilling career as we’ve moved together around the country

The best thing about engineering, as proved out by both my wife and myself, is that you can get just about any job even tangentially related to your degree so long as you have the right work ethic, strong enough people skills, and you can pick up whatever skills you need on the job.

If we ever got bored or didn’t like the company (which has happened to my wife twice now), you can just switch companies or in my case switch roles in the (multinational) company and be doing something entirely new until you find what really clicks, be that company or role or both.