Discussion Stuck at a job. Don't see a way out.

[ibex333]

Long story short, I was very ill for many years, so when other people were getting their education, making friends, advancing careers, etc. I was home. In bed. I got my first "real" job around 30, and I got my Master's degree in Web Programming (from a crappy unknown college) around 34. Since no one would hire me for Web Programming with no experience, I ended up working as a tech support monkey, and after switching 3 different jobs, I FINALLY got from 43k to 62k which is still literally nothing in New York City. I need to be at 130-150k if I ever want to have a family and raise kids.

Question is, how do I do it? Go back to college again? At 40 and with a full-time job? Not going to happen. I think my only option is to study something on my own time, and then leverage my Master's Degree to find a better job.

Two issues with that:

1)Can't just study anything and waste my time. What can I "realistically" learn that would really help me advance? For example, I'm not just going to go learn C++ or Python. I'm terrible at programming and forgot everything I learned in the past. Learn servers or networks? I tried. No one will hire a tech support guy for a Network Engineer or a Server Administrator position. They keep saying "you have no experience". I actually have plenty, but not specifically in a work setting. Plus, many server/network guys only get up to around 75-85k.

2)For some unknown reason, I am only able to get jobs working for the city. Private sector won't even give me a chance. I been sending out resumes for many years and never, not even once have I gotten an interview for private sector. You would think it's my resume. It's not. I had it checked many times by professionals and been told it looks great given my experience and my past. See above.

What would you do if you were me? Imagine I wasn't sick for 11 years of my life, but instead was a lazy bum who only played video games up till now. Now I suddenly woke up and decided I want to do better in life. What do I do?

 

[mindless1]

First of all, what the heck is "web programming"? Do you mean website developer? Maybe that is part of the problem, a degree (title, which might be changed?) not oriented enough to specific company's needs?

Yes you could try leveraging your degree, putting max resumes out there. More lines catch more fish.

Maybe get a pro to look over your resume and tweak it? I know you already stated you did, but a lot of up and comers embellish their resumes, especially in tech, and then do it by the seat of their pants. Maybe you are being too humble, or maybe you are not trying to align your learning with the market needs?

The first thing I would do is move out of the high rent area. Your skills do not fluctuate in value as much as some jobs, moving to a more affordable area of the country. 62K is enough to raise a family in some areas, and those areas might even be more family-raising friendly. A lot of people are finding this, that they are happier in a little less dense and far lower cost of living, area.

It's a choice. How important is it to live in NYC? I mean if you had a not-too-much-lower paying job elsewhere? Lots of people raise a family on less than 62K a year, but most males do find that their standard of living goes down when they have to support a wife and child instead of only their own desires. Of course it would.

This is my advice, at 40 y/o and wanting to start a family at this age, your best bet is to cast a far wider net trying to find employment in a lower cost area of living and move there. Plus this will move you up the socio economic ladder for that region. In some areas, women fling themselves at men making 50K+.

There is also the thought in this modern era, that you don't have to earn all the bread, that you should seek a woman who has her own income to suppliment the household unless you want a stay at home mate. Suppose you both earned 50K each, in a median cost of living area in the US. You wouldn't feel rich at 100K household but could make ends meet raising a family.

However, something is amiss. It seems almost like you are waiting to earn a certain income level to start a family or is it to even pursue a female to do so? Usually, well this is talking about foolish kids who throw caution into the wind, they throw the cart before the horse and make the plan to do that, then work on how to finance it.

You aren't mentioning *something*. Is this about the idea that you need a certain level of prosperity to attract the right mate? There has to be a lot of women in NYC or elsewhere that earn less. Is it about the idea that you only need money, not xyz attraction instead?

I will grant you that at 40, it becomes more about money, but it seems like you are too fixated on that rather than finding the right person then planning a future together as a team.

I still think you need to move to a lower rent area. For more reasons than just cost of living.

 

[igor_kavinski]

Regarding the job, you are thinking the wrong way. It's not what pays best that matters. It's what you do best. When you reach a certain level of expertise in some field, you earn the respect of your peers. Word gets around and you get tasked with more and more challenging stuff and this makes you prominent against the backdrop of the regular workforce. Take initiatives. Fix what you think is wrong. Especially, an organization's pain points. Sooner or later, someone will notice.

There's an old saying that goes something like, remove the rocks from the path of travelers and enjoy fewer hurdles in your life. Help anyone in need. Make their job easier. Life has a funny way of returning the favor.

 

[Lost_in_the_HTTP]

First step is to get out of NYC. $40K is more than enough in smaller towns and a lot of what you're looking to do can be done remotely, or as self-employed.

 

[cytg111]

Long story short, I was very ill for many years, so when other people were getting their education, making friends, advancing careers, etc. I was home. In bed. I got my first "real" job around 30, and I got my Master's degree in Web Programming (from a crappy unknown college) around 34. Since no one would hire me for Web Programming with no experience, I ended up working as a tech support monkey, and after switching 3 different jobs, I FINALLY got from 43k to 62k which is still literally nothing in New York City. I need to be at 130-150k if I ever want to have a family and raise kids.

Question is, how do I do it? Go back to college again? At 40 and with a full-time job? Not going to happen. I think my only option is to study something on my own time, and then leverage my Master's Degree to find a better job.

Two issues with that:

1)Can't just study anything and waste my time. What can I "realistically" learn that would really help me advance? For example, I'm not just going to go learn C++ or Python. I'm terrible at programming and forgot everything I learned in the past. Learn servers or networks? I tried. No one will hire a tech support guy for a Network Engineer or a Server Administrator position. They keep saying "you have no experience". I actually have plenty, but not specifically in a work setting. Plus, many server/network guys only get up to around 75-85k.

2)For some unknown reason, I am only able to get jobs working for the city. Private sector won't even give me a chance. I been sending out resumes for many years and never, not even once have I gotten an interview for private sector. You would think it's my resume. It's not. I had it checked many times by professionals and been told it looks great given my experience and my past. See above.

What would you do if you were me? Imagine I wasn't sick for 11 years of my life, but instead was a lazy bum who only played video games up till now. Now I suddenly woke up and decided I want to do better in life. What do I do?

You never get to the interview part?

 

[igor_kavinski]

Can't just study anything and waste my time. What can I "realistically" learn that would really help me advance?

First of all, anything you "study", that is take time to understand, is never wasted. It will come in handy one way or the other. At the very least, it will activate a whole lot of neurons that would otherwise have stayed de-activated. The brain gets rusty and it needs stimulation to keep working at peak capacity. Second, what do you enjoy learning about? Start with whatever it is, no matter how useless it is in practical terms. Sometimes, knowledge about the most esoteric stuff can open new pathways you wouldn't otherwise get access to. Don't think too hard about everything. Just do. Get busy doing SOMETHING productive. The fruit of labor comes later and often when you least expect it.

My personal experience with such a thing: Back when I first got my computer as a kid, I was like 12 years old. I was given a book on MSDOS 5 by my dad. There were set times when I could use the PC. Other times, it had to stay off. So in those times, I would study that book to see what it had. When I could use the PC, I would try the different commands in it. It was fun. Qbasic came with MSDOS 5. One day, I was looking at some program written in QBasic and I saw a menu name in the code and then something like the action to be taken when the menu item is clicked. So I changed the menu name and on screen, the menu name actually changed! I spent a good deal customizing the menu items to my liking. It was cool to see something running on my PC that I had tinkered with and customized. This later enabled me to understand how to customize C source code to do stuff I wanted. If I hadn't tried out those MSDOS 5 commands and hadn't tinkered with Qbasic, I probably would never have experienced the joy of compiling C programs for automating a lot of menial tasks in my current job.

 

[Garion]

This is a really old thread, but I can certainly empathize and think I can give you some ideas.

Tech support jobs can be a slog, but it's all in how approach it. Do the best job you can, but use it to learn what is interesting to you and where you want to focus. In support, it's all about being a generalist. Learn a bit about everything, work out ways to fix common problems that run the gamut of networking, servers, desktop, etc. Use your current job to decide what you like to do and where you want to focus. In your original thread you sounded kind of.. Vague.. about what you wanted to do next, other than move up the food chain and make more money. Decide on a subject area that's interesting to you and do everything you can to learn about it. I liked networking, for example, so I dug in as deeply as I could. When tough network problems came in, I asked to be assigned and dug in as much as possible, learning from the network engineers when I needed to escalate. Eventually, that let me move to a role in that engineering team which got me started down the path in my career. From there, I kept doing the same thing. Networking is cool, but what I really liked was Internet connectivity, so I focused on that, which lead to a job in cybersecurity, and so on.

Another thing to pick up on is something that Mindless said earlier. You mentioned "web programming" as your degree and he reacted negatively to it. Terminology makes a big difference. Stating that you got a degree in "Web Development", even if that's not what your degree officially says would be something more in line with what a hiring manager would expect from someone with a modern skillset that they would want to hire. Make sure that your resume is reviewed by someone who understands technical jobs, not just a generic resume writer - The right terms are important!

Understand the hiring process. Almost every big company runs resumes through automated scanning to score them. The scanners take the job description, look for key terms, and then match your skills to those terms. If you don't have a good skill match to their requirements from the scan a recruiter won't ever see your resume. I'm not saying to inflate your skills or anything, but understand what they are looking for in their job requisitions and emphasize how you fit. You can even go so far as to custom-tailor a resume for a job you really, really want. As strange as it sounds, you can use ChatGPT to help you customize your resume for a specific job role. Ask it to help you customize your resume for a role, paste in the job description, then give it your resume. It will give you suggestions on what to include.

Look for ways to modernize your skillset for things employers want in your spare time. Everyone wants cloud expertise, for example. Amazon offers many, many free classes on their AWS product. Spend a few hours each night and go through their Cloud Practitioner Essentials training and eventually take the Cloud Practiitioner test to become certified. Amazon offers free AWS environments - Go build a web server and a web page. Figure out, security groups. Make 2 web servers and load balance them. Add a SSL certificate for HTTPS, etc. It's all free - Just remember to stop everything that you started to make sure you don't have to pay $$ for it. I believe Azure and Google cloud offer similar services. Consider some more formal classes that move you where you want to go - i.e. a CompTI A+ or Network+. Check out local community colleges for interesting things you can take a night. Most city governments will pay for tuition.

Lastly, there are recruiting firms out there earn money when they place you in a job. Get the career goals firmly in mind, get the resume tuned up for those goals and reach out to some recruiters in your area. Be clear with them what you want (i.e. a FTE job, not a contract) and let them try to match you to a role.

Good luck!

- G

 

[BonzaiDuck]

All the advice here is good, but I especially like the recommendation to get away from a high-cost area.

Consider, for instance, cities in Alaska, or maybe look at cities in Idaho, Montana, etc. This is where "life is an adventure". When I took early retirement determined to live on "less", I read two articles or blogs by people who had something to say about it. One couple -- both high-tech/info-tech employees earning about $100,000 each per year, wanted to "get-get-get -get -a-way-uh-ay-yay!" So the moved from Toronto to one of the smaller cities in Colorado, where they discovered they could buy a house and then live on $25,000 per year. With two kids, they boosted this income by establishing a business with "business use of home". This story I saw around 2004 was in context of the nominal dollar value of that year, or current dollars discounted back to the prevailing price-level then.

The other thing you should consider is starting a business. I sympathize with you here, because you have to form a solid idea of what you are making, selling or providing as a service. There would be an incubation period. You want to take the least time to get from any loss year to a point where you actually make a profit exceeding the "management salary" you give yourself.

I've discovered that many people learn trades, business specialties or small manufacturing from parents, uncles, or other relatives. It is otherwise harder for people whose extended family doesn't have a handle on some type of small business. I could, for instance, imagine starting a bakery, because I know the basics of baking bread, making pizza, rolls and other foodstuffs. You need to build a clientele, and try not to panic when you find that the money in your pocket seems insufficient just for the effort you are making.

The truth of the matter, though, is that you can probably make more money per annum starting your own business than you might earn as a wage-earner. True, our tech fields have traditionally paid well. Then consider what prospects you might have, say, in Anchorage or Juneau.

Consider trading an urban existence for the health and beauty of a home more remote. Can you imagine driving to work every day where you get to drive your car under or past a waterfall? There are places like that.

I wish I had taken opportunities in less urbanized environs as opposed to starting my career in Washington, DC. It would be the same if I had started in any big city, I think. Frankly, I often conclude at age 75 that I should've just stayed in So-Cal, but living afar from LA or San Diego. Or, once I'd spent a summer in 1972 as seasonal park ranger in a national park, I might have stayed in Montana, even for finding employment outside the NPS. And then that, too, would've been an option. You're just not going to get rich at it.