I worked as a software developer for years. It was traumatizing as hell and made me extremely averse to white collar jobs. I started suffering from anxiety and despair from interacting with coworkers and became a lot healthier after switching to being a delivery driver. As a driver, I could be alone almost all the time. I remember being screamed at by a manager because I started panicking when a coworker noticed I was wearing headphones and started continuously coming up to me for bullshit reasons to aggravate me. This same coworker was editing my code to introduce bugs and reporting it to the manager. The manager said I couldn't wear headphones anymore so the other coworkers harassed me by playing music loudly, rapping out loud, whispering loudly about me, tapping on my desk when they walked by, and screaming when they were near me. As a driver, nobody ever fucked with me for listening to music. The pay was poorer as a driver but not by much and I ended up making more because I could hold the job long term instead of getting fired every few months.
Becoming a truck driver requires a 1 month course. It's the easiest job in the world, just don't fall asleep. There's probably 20 trucking jobs for every software developer job. You make about as much as an entry level programmer with a bachelor's degree starting and you can make $100k+ after 2 years if you do long hauls. It helps to be over 25 for insurance. You're alone most of the time, especially if you do no touch freight. It lets you see the continent instead of being in a fucking office.
Here's a few pieces of advice for people working in programming/IT/sysadmin type jobs
- Don't.
- Have a high leveled degree. No matter what your portfolio is, people will use any excuse they can to question your competence. People that have never written a hello world will say you don't know anything just because you don't have a degree. These are often the types that can be replaced by a software update and are afraid of you.
- If you believe in producerism and like programming because you like producing things, working as a programmer will likely ruin it for you. You're a gorillion times more likely to work on malware or DRM than a programming language or operating system. This is a white collar administrator type job. You'll be in an office or call center interacting with bureaucrats. That means you'll be with business managers, accountants, human resources, brokers, lawyers, marketers, salespeople, and other pencil pushers. The type that don't generate wealth, only move it. If you want to be successful in this type of job, don't just learn tech, learn how businesses operate. Thank about if you really fit in with that clique. Most "programmers" don't program, they just pretend. You won't be able to talk with them about programming, just sportsball.
- If you actually do your job, you're going to get replaced quickly. The work ethic of this kind of job is "pretend to be busy". You will be pressured into making code hard to understand and bloated so that you're more difficult to replace, having feature creep in order to "stay busy", having technological debt to keep yourself occupied, and so on. It's the digital equivalent of digging holes and then filling them again over and over. Your coworkers will harass you for fixing bugs they depend on. I've experienced a coworker having a meltdown because I replayed code he wrote that had(in PHP) "for(...) {$a[] = $b;}" with "array_fill(...)". Apparently the program slowing down made it look more professional and official, like it was doing more. You see, only little kids write code that executes instantly. That means it's not doing anything, right?
- These types of jobs attract liberal ideologues. No matter how much you appease them, it'll never be enough. To them, trannies and illegals are sacred. They'll be suspicious if you don't use Redditspeak. At best they'll think of you as being an old fashioned weirdo and at worst a right wing terrorist. If you're ethnic, exaggerate it as much as possible. Talk with a heavy accent even if your family has been present for generations. It'll make it easier to excuse your oddness to them. Be careful using ideal grammar. To them, that screams "white nationalist". They like talking in rap slang. Be prepared to practice doublethink in any topic related related to race or immigration.
- You do not need a 9-5 schedule. It's just there to make it more difficult for you to work and to exhaust you. Sleep deprivation causes severe and irreparable brain damage. Remember that there are jobs out there where you don't get screamed at for being 5 minutes late, you just get paid for 5 minutes less.
- Beware of white collar crime. If you're getting paid a lot of money without doing much work or working remotely and your coworkers take you out to expensive restaurants and give you expensive gifts, when you get positive reviews despite not doing much, when you get raises in response to asking for more work, it's a sign that they're trying to frame you or manipulate you or make you take a fall for a crime.
- No gun signs aren't for guns, they're for you. The sign doesn't apply to the manager.
- Smoke weed and get your coworkers high. It's a way to unfuck your coworkers. There's no way anyone can work this kind of job and not go crazy without drugs.