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.
Most people don’t love their job.
That was not the question, though.
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, job security, affinity. So now I’m in Business Intelligence.
Wanted to be an officer in Navy. Ended up enlisted, in the engineering department as a mechanic. Got out and use those skills to fix ships as a civilian. Have had a couple other jobs outside of marine repair, but currently working in a ship repair facility.
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 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.
I tried a bunch of different things, mostly in the trades / trade adjacent work (welding, wood working, etc) and really liked it, but I have incredibly unsteady hands so just didn’t do well in the job I did land.
Planned to go the engineering route in college, but then discovered I had a knack with computers. Don’t particularly enjoy it (I do HATE the office work aspect) but it just makes sense to me while not making any sense to most. So found I could make money with my skills and just stuck in that lane.
I’d say it comes down to finding something you can tolerate and have reasonable promise at skill wise and that pays the bills.
How I chose:
Look up something I love deeply on the US Bureau of Labor Statistics website, and then go to that most applicable job, then look at jobs that are related in some way and rabbit holed until something made a comfortable amount of money but also seemed interesting enough.
Then I don’t burn out on my passions and have a good paying job that’s cool enough
I picked it because I was good at it, and there were multiple facets to expand to. I fell into a niche for a few years and then promoted to a generalist position where I am basically half department head and half principal engineer. I basically quit jobs every 2 years, and had a high track record of being hired back to the same teams I quit when I ran out of money.
I just always followed my passion: IT. But I really don’t work well in groups or with someone above me so I rarely did that. So basically I retired somewhere in my 20s, which already was over 20yrs ago. Since then I live ny passion at home, tinkering with my servers, smart home and just general coding. Rest of the time I enjoy with wifey and travel. Guess I’m one of the luckier ones.
Job hopped until I settled into something I finally enjoy.
I highly recommend making a good impression and being a team player. About half of my jobs came from recommendations from people I had worked with at other jobs.
ahdh, I work at a bank because it pays well for not having a degree
Needed a job in high school. Went to university and decided I didn’t want to be in the field I had chosen when I graduated. Focused on first job field and got very good at it. Moved up the ranks. Got an offer at a company in a different industry from a former peer and leap frogged to the next pay band while getting out of my 20 year industry.
My hobby is technology. I decided against going that route when in school as I didn’t want to kill my love for it. But that meant sticking with an industry I didn’t love for a long time. Found I love developing people through it all and management was my thing. Great news about that is people are people and managing them doesn’t change from industry to industry so I can go pretty much anywhere.
Well, i knew how to build a computer relatively early in life. I was advised to go for a specific cert (security+), got it, got hired into a service desk role just about immediately (DoD), and I just kinda went from there i guess?
IT has a pretty simple pipeline that can be a lot more granular than a degree program. Early certs are not too difficult and their courses are much shorter than college or other programs. The tricky part is that getting past the “Hello, this is IT. Im here because you broke something” phase, without burning out. You really need to specialize or market yourself as a subject matter expert, the path becomes much more (and less) defined by certs.
Yup, its pretty straightforward. Biggest thing holding me back IMO is lack of foundational knowledge of both scripting logic and networking. I can do CLI interaction just fine but trying to write out a cohesive script I just fall flat on my face. In my last job everyone could (and did) script circles around me.
The advice I have on the scripting practice is to just do home lab stuff. A bucket of pis or a few VMs to get something working where your not afraid to break things. (Im not good at it either, but practice is the key takeaway).
As for the networking, they got certs for that, and said home lab will make applying your new skills easier until you find them relavent for an employer.
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.
