As some with ADHD, my interest fluantuats wildly. How does an average person choose a job thats suppose to be for life and not worry about loss of interest, let alone some with ADHD.
I studied physics in undergrad, and was planning to continue to graduate studies. Took me until my senior year to realize that I actually found most of the work in physics to be extremely boring, and I was actually just following the degree path out of an egoistic desire to prove how smart I was.
But now that I’d lost my path in life so close to graduating, I realized I needed to find another, fast. Luckily I’d been taking classes for a CS minor, so switched that to a major and graduated with both degrees with an additional 6 months of classes.
However, since I’d been banking on physics, I only had one summer to do a CS internship, got it at a no-name local company, and ended up in .Net development after graduation. Despite what Lemmy might say, .Net is actually not that bad - at least as a developer. The documentation is good, the tooling mostly makes sense, and corporate support is pretty responsive. But it doesn’t lend itself to working on sexy, pro-social, world-changing tech. So I generally found my coworkers and company to be pretty boring and closed minded, and the work we did to be quite meaningless.
Due to the lack of social connection at the job and meaninglessness I felt about the work - in combination with the fact that I kind of felt I’d been forced into the occupation by circumstance - I suffered from a pretty consistent depression for about 5 years while working in software.
Luckily, my actual passion was the outdoors. During college, I’d taken 6 months off to hike the appalachian trail, spent my weekends going to the mountains with friends, and spent weekdays riding bicycles around town and dumpster diving - I was happy doing these things, and realized I didn’t need much in the way of money or material posessions to make me happy.
So when I got my software job, I immediately started saving as much money as possible and putting it in investments. So after working for about 8 years, I was able to retire.
These days I work part time rigging concerts, do little diy projects around the house, and go rock climbing. So on the whole, I feel like it worked out well. Though now I have the itch to get back into software and prove that I could do the thing where I do something meaningful and enjoy it and make tons of money.
ahdh, I work at a bank because it pays well for not having a degree
Most people don’t love their job.
That was not the question, though.
Looked up which were the highest paying jobs for people not inheriting wealth or social connections. Realized the field was oil & gas and the highest job was Petroleum Engineer, took Chemical Engineering because of its wide applicability, accepted I’d be working in the boonies for at least a decade of my life, made it work.
5/10. Wouldn’t recommend for the loneliness.
I was very lucky. I got my diagnosis at age 44, right when I started figuring out I was good at identifying and resolving process gaps. With meds, I found out I was really good at it, as well as rapidly understanding very complex processes, and being able to explain them to different parties. Suddenly I oversee a bunch of data architects and software engineers who do file ingestion and data analysis. And without me, they function like a squabbling kindergarten, if they function at all.
Money and its ability to support my (future) family was the biggest deciding factor for choosing IT. The other factor was not wanting my passion (playing music) becoming a necessary burden to make ends meet, with the resulting stress killing my passion.
It’s just a job. Some days it’s good, some days it really fuckin’ blows, but overall, it’s tolerable.
Land Survey. I stumbled into it by accident and it is perfect for ADHD folks. It’s a combination of cartography, history, law, geometry, geography. You can be in an office, you can work outside. Best part is, you can get licensed with out a degree in a lot of states. And, even if you don’t get a license, you can make a decent living at it.
I had several careers doing vastly different jobs - both white and blue collars - in seven countries. I can tell you what I did to land my jobs, but bear in mind that I’m close to retirement, so what I did back then may not work anymore, as the job market was probably more more open when I started out.
I basically applied for jobs being brutally honest about what I could and couldn’t do, about my flaws and my strenghs. For instance, one of the things I always said during job interviews was that I’m terminally lazy, and that’s why they should hire me because I will work long hours to put something in place that will allow me to not do something repetitive more than once. Turns out, this line was both true and the thing that sold my application for most of my employers.
Also, when I changed jobs completely - for example when I went from computer programmer to CAD designer - I applied for a job at small companies that didn’t necessarily have the money to pay seasoned engineers and told them I was a fast learner, and proposed a big pay cut for 6 months until I proved that I could do the new job I had no experience in. A few key employers took a chance on me, allowing me to change career. And of course, once I had experience doing whatever new thing I set out to do, I could apply for another job in that field and claim experience.
Finally, I did not hesitate to find employers abroad. If I saw a company I liked that offered a job in another country, I applied, flew over to the interview, and if my application was selected, I relocated. I did that 6 times. It’s not for everybody, but if you’re mobile - or extremely mobile in my case - it increases your chances to find your dream job.
Of course, as the years passed, I accumulated quite a resume with an eclectic variety of jobs I held, and places I lived, and my resume spoke more and more for myself as a proof that I could do all those things, so I had less and less trouble finding jobs with employers that knew just by reading my resume that I can adapt to anything.
Would this work today? Maybe. I know the job market is a lot rougher than when I graduated. So don’t necessarily take what I did as something to follow verbatim today. But maybe some of the things I did would work for you too…
If you are going to be a disposable slave, you want to be the highest paid disposable slave.
Just pick something that pays well and stay focused. It takes decade or more to get it done.
Flop flopping is not a viable strategy. This is a long game and you have 1 shot to get it done.
Alternative is crushing poverty
stay focused
😅
Yeah, you know. They’re very intelligent, they just need to apply themselves.
👿
I’m looking for a second non-career (slave) job to do to fill in gaps when I can’t find a job in my career. Can you think of any slave jobs where you can progress in the skill to be paid better?
That all depends on your local market, ie job access
Practically hard to advise. But white collar is played for now.
It seems blue collar where is some demand but anything with prospects there would essentially require a switch and getting some sort of apprenticeship type set up which is also aint that easy but more viable than office
Hmm true. I was thinking of something artisian like being a cook/chef where even though you just use it as a plan B, you gain tangible skill the longer you do it to fill said gaps
Brutal work though and very hard to break out
True. Idk any other ideas?
I took the first job I could get, and then when I was tired of that I took the next first job I could get.
This was me. New job every year, eventually stretching to every two years. Bonus is getting a pay rise each time.
Took apart a computer that I didn’t own… said “oh shit, I gotta put this back together and make sure it works!”. Put it back together, it worked. 30+ years later… I work in the computer industry.
Separate what makes you money and your ability to support yourself from what makes your life worth living. Two massively different concepts!
Good luck!!
Money, job security, affinity. So now I’m in Business Intelligence.
I guess I kind of got lucky.
I always liked computers, and I like solving problems. Got hired as a database administrator for a small research center in a large university.
I’ve changed jobs a couple times over the years (decades, actually). As it turns out, computer nerds who like to solve problems are valuable, and I’ve been generally left alone to solve problems ever since.
Current leadership team doesn’t want to solve problems or work more efficiently now because if you depend on one person to make the team more efficient, and that one person leaves, you’ll have to hire someone to replace him.
So instead, you just hire 10 people for the same pay to do the extra work they have to do when you don’t have someone making everything easier.
Oh well.
I needed a stable job so. And it was the easiest way to get it.
After I chose to follow my passion and started working on that, which is my current job. Just to find out that not because you work in your passion your job is going to be fun.
Then I realized than a job is a job. And most jobs are shitty. So I focused on working as little hours as possible and just enjoy my hobbies.
My adhd was mostly untreated til about a couple years ago, and I was tryna get into film or TV production, but indecision paralysis hindered me 6 ways til Sunday, and being diabetic was also a major hurdle cause I needed good insurance. Thankfully my dad was a union electrician so I got into that easily. But I couldn’t handle construction and quit after 3 months. Then I went into something more residential, but injured my wrist. Luckily they let me do dispatch and other desk job stuff there and I just kinda stayed, cause going to one location and staying there really worked out for me.
