Personally, I’ve always loved the process of taking things apart, understanding how they work and putting them back together. I turned that into a degree in mechanical engineering and eventually a career in power plant operations. Couldn’t be happier with my work than I currently am. Its WORK but I don’t hate it and I feel like I’m doing something important.
I’ve always been unable to ignore bullshit from management at work. It’s cost me jobs and promotions in the past, but now I work for a trade union, where the ability and desire to argue with bosses is a benefit rather than a liability.
Unions are a good thing, unfortunately I’ve only had bad experiences in my professional life.
Unions are made up of human beings, and unfortunately most human beings suck. Unions are the only way we know to fix bad workplaces though.
I know, I like/support them conceptually and hate them in anecdotal experience.
I was on CL looking for an N64 controller and this drunk guy posted an ad for an English teacher in Beijing in the for sale part of craigslist.
I thought that misplaced ad was funny, applied, got the job and flapped over to Beijing to teach.
Rocked. made more than in the states working less than half as much ($2500 USD/month for 9-20 teaching hours a week), cost of living was insignificant, great food, learned mandarin, started traveling and never stopped, and a lot more!
I wish I had known about overseas teaching when I was younger. My kids about to be a teenager and am trying to get him to get the hell out of this country and go visit Switzerland or go teach English in Beijing something like that too. Just to get some experience outside the US. Once he’s old enough of course, just planting seeds now.
That’s great, let the notion simmer. I heard about teaching overseas multiple times before the right opportunity struck at the right time.
Teaching English is such a quick, comfortable route out of the US rat race, and travel is a wonderful way to build curiosity, respect and tolerance.
I worked with a 67 year old English teacher in Beijing, so with a teenage son, you’re probably well within the comfortable age range for English teachers. With 2 billion English students, they aren’t saying no to many native speakers.
You can always start with an hour or two a week on an online platform too, if traveling isn’t in the cards right now.
Thanks for reaching out, someone else from the US I’ve been talking to just let me know twenty minutes ago they’re moving to Portugal with their wife! I hope these posts stay useful, and I’ll be here to offer advice and encouragement as long as I’m able.
If you or your teenager have any questions about travel now or later, let me know!
Thats a great story!
Thanks, it was definitely the pivot I needed at the time. I recorded a podcast episode with the full story, retelling it makes me laugh every time.
IT.
Injured out of infantry and poored out of college but landed a shitty little ISP job. Started one to beat that one, because they were sleazy like used-car salesmen. Left embezzling biz-partner to do coding-adjacent job in NJ and stop being startup-poor. Kept working. Fast forward.
I only regret I was unable to use my skills to relo for new jobs farther away like some of my peers.
Basically because of video games.
It first started with doing some admin work for a very early online StarCraft tournament. Keeping the roster/grid up-to-date and posting results … by literally editing the html file. Started out helping out more and eventually got into PHP code of this early tournament software and helped with that.
Then later it turned into writing scripts and addons for World of Warcraft, as well as just hosting the general infrastructure like forums, dkp systems and voice chat servers you need for a large guild. Even later external online tools for EvE Online (D-scan parsing, wormhole mapping).
Then I just got lucky and while telling someone all of these “qualifications” they basically just hired me. Even funnier, over a decade later an old WoW guildmate approached me with a programming issue … and after solving it he offered me a much better job. That’s were I work now.
This but it started with pirating video games.
I certainly remember the age of “key-gens” when you still had keys on the back of the CDs that you bought. But the internet wasn’t quite up for actually downloading entire games, yet (it would take weeks or months. Heck, mp3s took days back then).
Yeah, I’m kind of old.
I downloaded a ton of games from warez sites over 28.8 and 56 using a download agent
In 2008, I was fed up with a combination of wage slavery and freelancing, so I started looking around for a proper career. I found a job posting on monster.com for something called “seismic survey technician”. I was severely underqualified and I had no idea what it was, but it involved computery stuff with and emphasis on Linux and other unix systems, in addition to international travel which sounded interesting, so I sent in my application out of curiosity.
I ended up getting the job, turns out dicking around with Slackware and FreeBSD for 10 years was actually useful. Over the years since then I’ve carved out a pretty comfy niche in the industry.
I chose from a list of vocational schools that the GI bill would pay for.
Imagine my dismay after I graduated the schools, Veterans Affairs told me I have to pay all that money back. So I’ve spent the last 15 years working those jobs to repay the government all that college money they said I earned for serving in the army. Thanks for all these years of empty promises & torture, GI bill.
Why did you have to pay it back?
Wait, how did they approve and pay it in the first place?
Sorry to hear that man
*WOman
Thank you for feelings.
Apologies madam.
My previous boss showed me the job listing and said that it was better than anything he could offer, and told me to apply for it out else he’d lose respect for me.
Sounds like a great boss
Sinceriously the best
I fell into it, and let me tell you the excel skills of my coworkers is abhorrent. One of them maintains a shared workbook with 30 worksheets all held together by manually-pasted data and she acts like Vlookups are the greatest thing since sliced ass
We used to build forts for fun. Then later, skate ramps. I realized I was pretty good at building shit so I got a job as a laborer. Then I got a job as a roofer on pretty nice houses. That turned into sort of helper/ apprentice thing. My dad and uncle had a construction/contracting company but I refused to work for them because I didn’t want to get a job because I was the owners kid. Later, my uncle blew out a knee or something and they asked me to come lend a hand for a bit. Turns out, they were really, really good and I stayed for about 20 years learning almost everything. Now I work as a project manager and finish carpenter on some pretty big, fancy houses.
Good on you for making your own start. There are many nepos in construction who know fuck all about anything but think they’re qualified to run crews.
Truly, I think it shows real character to achieve what you have.
Thanks. Really, I got lucky with mentor types early on.
There was a dude in highschool in the theater group that did the tech stuff. Lights and sound, sets were another group. He was super rad. He taught us that figuring out how to do stuff was at least as fun as doing stuff. He also taught us a weird kind of loyalty. If we skipped class or whatever, we could come and work in the theater as long as we kept quiet about it and just worked. He wouldn’t lie or cover for us but if we were there to learn or do, mum was the word.
My roofing boss took me aside one day and asked why I was trying to work so fast. I told him everyone else was cruising. He said “I dont pay you to do it fast. I pay you to do it right. Speed will come later”. He also taught me it was crucial to know where the good lunch places were and to make the most of that break.
And between my dad and my uncle, I’ve learned that just because you’re good at something doesn’t mean you’re a better person than someone, work ends at the end of the day, that if you’re being paid to do something it means you’re a professional and you should act like one, and to take pride in my work even if its for an asshole client.
I’ve worked for some shitty people too. They taught me that if I ever think I know it all, I should quit because thinking there’s no more to learn just means I’ve given up trying. They also taught me that hazing is stupid and the only thing that achieves is getting the new guy to piss in your thermos (thats right Dave, you fuck. that was me that fucked up your coffee. Think about that next time you tell someone to move a pile of lumber back and forth 3 times).
I failed upward to the level of my own incompetence.
How’s it going, Peter?
No, this is Patrick!
I was working at a hotel job part time while doing a bachelor’s business degree when I finished the exam prep up to a point where I didn’t see a benefit and tried out codecademy.
I had an incredibly pure joy of just creating shitty webpages and doing assignments, learned some javascript and then it hit me.
I started a compsci degree, stopped working and got some student loans and overkilled every programming assignment. I basically thought “If programming is the most valuable part, I’m just gonna max it at the cost of everything else” and it was a fantastic choice.
I applied to all the jobs in Iceland, nobody took me in so I started applying to bunch of jobs in all of Europe. Ended up landing my first job in Germany and that’s where it my career started.
Are you remote or did you move to Germany?
I moved but then covid hit and I moved back to Iceland and got myself a remote job in the US as a full-time contractor.
Process is pretty easy for EU/EEA citizens.
Emergency/Crit care doctor.
I initially studied physics/maths with a goal to go into aerospace engineering. I was binge watching scrubs and I thought medicine might be cool so I did that, then I thought emergency medicine sounded cool so I did that, then I thought critical care sounded cool so I did that.
Basically I’m a child that makes poor life choices because things sound cool.
How are you feeling about it now ?
I have some regrets but ultimately it’s an interesting job
From a news paper ad. Yes I’m that old. It was only almost 26 years ago…
Been climbing communication towers since 2000 March. I’ll be 50 on the 16th.
Was recommended to me by my previous employer. Was the resident computer geek on my nursing unit. Not looking for a new job or anything. Out of the blue, my boss says IT is looking for computer geeks with clinical experience. Fast forward a few months, I am now an Application Analyst.
IT professional for 20 years. C/C++ developer for 10 years prior to that.
My first job out of college was mostly luck. I took a job doing tech support but after a couple of years was able to transition into development work.
Virtually every job since that first one has been thanks to connections I made among coworkers. I got my current job because I knew two employees here. One of them was a co-founder of the company, and somebody I’ve known since the 1990’s and worked with at 3 other companies prior to this.
