I was unemployedish (some freelancing) for around 18 months and I'm starting what I think might be my dream job on Monday.
I was very burnt out after being fired / laid off from multiple unethical tech startups and a divorce.
During the ego death I realized that I no longer had any desire to do work that wasn't making the world a better place. I considered changing careers because it's very hard to find software jobs in that space but I kept searching. I remained sane by reminding myself that suffering is temporary and the world is still beautiful in many ways.
I got hired by a local community college to work on some very hard software problems and I couldn't be happier. I get to continue working with the stuff I love while helping people achieve upward mobility.
Working on projects that help society and people can give you so much energy. I experienced it once and want to get back to that. Especially important during these trying times.
Curious to know, what are those hard software problems?
Short term: Work with various departments to pull all student-related data into a data warehouse. Then apply data analysis techniques to try and find the patterns in student failure where the college can offer more support.
Long term: Add in machine learning to automate the most tedious parts of the college's processes. The idea being that we could automate query writing, data linking, etc for reporting, grant proposals, etc. Not without human supervision of course but still saving a ton of time.
The software problems themselves will be hard but I'm sure there will be a lot of hard social problems too.
I was very burnt out after being fired / laid off from multiple unethical tech startups and a divorce.
During the ego death I realized that I no longer had any desire to do work that wasn't making the world a better place. I considered changing careers because it's very hard to find software jobs in that space but I kept searching. I remained sane by reminding myself that suffering is temporary and the world is still beautiful in many ways.
I got hired by a local community college to work on some very hard software problems and I couldn't be happier. I get to continue working with the stuff I love while helping people achieve upward mobility.