[tl; dr] Trying to get my life together with mental illness, looking for guidance without hating myself back into deep depression.
So, I've been t...
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Wow, quite a response. Though I can't profess to having nearly the same degree of academic success. It's quite possible that'll I'll do this for months, and never receive feedback. That's not my entire goal for doing this. I'm also doing this to stay sane, and that alone I think would make such an attempt worth it. I can absolutely fail, I know this, it's the way of things and I'd rather go down fighting.
Your mentioning of "failed to maintain my motivation" resonates with me. I've seen all kinds of these sort of "motivational" videos/images or whatever from the "harsh discipline" and the gentle "you can do it" attitudes. I've been finding that in reality what's needed is far more complex than they make it seem. For me, scheduling, "building" from just maintenance of life to doing actual work, knowing my own psychology, changing environments, trying to build habits, and so much more are far more effective.
Hopefully that makes sense, a problem which is complex and all-encompassing requiring a solution which is at least equally complex and all-encompassing seems to make sense to me. I can make like four major decisions and make myself work for two hours at most a day. As less than adequate as that is, I still believe that is something I can build off of, depression is a nasty pit to be in.
It looks like it'll be a long and winding road for me to find that entry point into professional work for me, but I'm not dead yet!
Thanks for your reply and good luck out there friend!
Okey dokey, you'll have to excuse some self-promotion in my response here.
Identifying your goals is very important step. Too many people go into the career search without much thought and it makes the task of evaluating job postings and offers almost impossible. Goals give a direction, and that is important.
I want to make something super clear about getting a job. It has absolutely NOTHING to do with your ability to do a job.
The whole job process is a mess and I recommend treating it like a separate set of skills and knowledge. An example here might help. In an interview, you might get asked to explain the Big-O of various algorithms, but on the job you'll never talk about Big-O or use an algorithm that isn't provided by a library.
All of this can be extremely depressing and traumatic.
Where I recommend people start is their resume. Not portfolio sites, github, or linkedin. The reason is that you send your resume in everywhere and people won't look at the rest until after the resume. If you're not getting interviews consistently, your resume needs work. Even without experience, you can get a resume together that gets an interview almost 100% of the time.
From there you start applying for jobs to get a lot of practice with interviews. I published an article today about how those interviews are conducted by people who aren't trained and never had to answer their own interview questions. The most common myth here is that your coding ability is what keeps you from getting an offer, and your coding ability might represent 40% or so of what is actually important.
As you get good at the interview components it still isn't a sure thing though because we have no idea what is going on inside a company when they are hiring. They don't tell us, for example, that the job posting doesn't really reflect what they need, or that someone quit recently and they're actually trying to hire for that person, or that they actually want to promote someone from within but have to interview due to policies. So even if you're really good, you might only get an offer 1 in 3 times.
I'm going to wrap up my response here, but here's what I've got for you. I write a lot of articles on here about career stuff, so look through that. I also wrote a book on how to get your first development job in less than six months, and I just (this month) launched my first online class that covers and expands the material in the book. You can find all that stuff on my bio.
Good luck, and if you need anything, contact me.