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>Can you do an online degree and work on the side? I am, that's why I mention being 3~ years out from a degree in my OP. And then I'll be 39~ with a degree and

>Can you do an online degree and work on the side? I am, that's why I mention being 3~ years out from a degree in my OP. And then I'll be 39~ with a degree and then 18 years of experience doing paperwork and it'll be a whole new set of "well, we're looking for someone with actual experience in such and such field" or "we can get a 22 year old for way less money than you" instead of "well, we're looking for someone with a degree".

caffeine 5y ago
You need to find a way to do it much faster..
mch82 5y ago
Call back some recruiters who turned you down because of the degree. Tell them appreciated their advice and are working on the degree. Ask them what experience they recommend you get over the next three years to be eligible for the job once you have the degree. Don’t discount the work experience you’ve had. You have 18 years of working with people & working through problems. Your maturity will count. 39 is still young.
lordnacho 5y ago
But is coding what you will be doing? Will you be continuing in the same industry? You should talk yourself up. You have lots of experience, not just in whatever narrow industry you think, but you're also a proven worker. I've seen young people get canned because they didn't know how to get out of bed in the morning. Plus the fact that you've run a family for a while without that blowing up is also a positive. Plenty of people have had their careers blow up at the same time as a divorce. Finally there's the fact that you have all this experience, just because you didn't have a degree doesn't mean it isn't real. I used to work with a trader who had this terrible thing bothering him about that. He knew plenty about options trading but it always bothered him that he didn't have a shiny degree, even though none of us graduates actually learn anything about options in undergrad. The degree is really only telling people that a person has learned a bunch of topics, and thus might be able to learn some other topics at work. That's not a guarantee that you can learn if you have the certificate, and it's not a guarantee that it won't be possible to learn things if you don't.
strgcmc 5y ago
You are burnt out and stressed, so I completely understand the general despair/malaise that drips through from your posts. However, you are getting in the way of your own success. What's the alternative? Being 39 with no degree? Delaying the degree even further, so that you're 45 with a degree and 24 years of experience, and still competing with 22 year olds? Starting now, is better than not starting. If you're going through hell now, keeping going and don't stop moving forward (otherwise you'll be stuck in hell forever). You can do this. You can make positive changes to your life and your career. It will not be easy (in fact, it will absolutely suck over the next 1-3 years, but even this you can try to mitigate somewhat). It will not be the ideal course you might've wanted for your life. You may not out-compete all the 22 year olds. But that's okay. Life is not a schedule, and whether some 22 year olds are better or worse off than you, doesn't affect the quality or enjoyment of YOUR life (or at least, it shouldn't, unless you allow it to mentally and emotionally affect you). Being burnt out or depressed or whatnot, tends to give anyone a very negative outlook on the world, which is insidious in 2 ways: (1) it robs you of the ability to feel joy from even small wins (and even robs you of the ability to recognize what is a win, like signing up for college, passing a tough exam, or cleaning out your attic, or whatever); (2) it makes you think that there is no hope, no possibility of improvement (which is simply not true, if only you could interrupt your own thought patterns enough to see it). Being on HN is kind of a double-edged sword for lots of folks like you who may be struggling in their careers (and when I say "struggle", I don't mean underperforming or being bad at their work, though that is also an issue for others but not in your case I think), where on the positive side, you can try to draw inspiration from the "can-do" attitude that naturally goes hand-in-hand with "hacker" mentality, with startups disrupting industries, with believing that it is possible to move mountains and upend institutions through innovation and hard work. On the negative side though, you are also inevitably going to see yourself as being compared to 22 year old founders and millionaires, or new college grads getting entry-level FAANG jobs for ~$200k+, and of course it can steal away joy or contentment from your own life or your own trials and tribulations (and successes!). You need to try and draw out the positives while staying away from the negative comparisions, to feel inspired by the "can-do" energy of all the different types of "hackers" launching anything from personal projects to unicorn startups, and then translate that into your own life, so that you start to see how you can creatively problem-solve for your own situation. Start with problem #1, working 60hrs/week with no end in sight... Can you simply refuse? Is your overtime mandatory? You shouldn't care about performance reviews or making a good impressions, because you don't want this job at this company in the long-run anyways. You just need to do barely enough work to not get fired, so that you have income while earning your degree and preparing your exit strategy. Or OTOH: could you actually quit? Another poster mentioned actually taking that job at McDonald's, which I think could make perfect sense, IF it actually affords you the chance to focus on and accelerate your degree, and IF it actually reduces your hours and your stress. The point is, all of these are just random suggestions, but you're paralyzed by your burnout/depression, and not able to problem-solve effectively. If you can fix that, and start to think about it as creating a flywheel of positive changes in your life, then each individual change may be small, but they can accumulate and it will get easier and easier over time, for you to move your life in the direction that you want. --- EDIT to add: I just poked around your personal blog a bit, and I saw this entry from you, back in July 2021. I think this is a really amazing and very healthy perspective you shared there, and I would encourage you to think about your life in relation to this sort of cohort that you are learning together with, which is much more realistic, much more grounded, vs comparing yourself to some hypothetical 22 year olds. Think about your classmates in their 60s, the recovering addicts, the former prison inmate who's trying to improve their life. If they can do this, then so can you... keep pushing! You wrote these words yourself. You have the seeds for your own success. > The group you gather with, if it is anything like mine, is likely to contain quite a variety of people. My gathering contains 2 immigrants, a Canadian couple, people ranging in age from 20s to 60s, 2 individuals that are converts to the Church within the past year and a half, blue and white-collar workers, 2 recovered addicts, and even someone improving their life via education after having served time in prison, and we have 3 native languages represented with no communication difficulties in our group. It’s a truly diverse group and I’ve definitely been inspired by, and learned from, the unique experiences of my gathering-mates and I would suspect my unique experiences have also helped some of them. I definitely feel like I have a much more diverse group of people here than I would in a traditional brick-and-mortar college program where I live. https://www.ryanmercer.com/ryansthoughts/2021/7/23/reflections-on-my-first-semester-of-byu-pathway-worldwide https://www.ryanmercer.com/ryansthoughts/2021/7/23/reflectio...
Terry_Roll 5y ago
Potential employers will always find a way to get out of hiring people, usual excuses being too qualified, experienced, old, expensive. However Goldman Sachs has noticed some trends namely Reddit becoming more topical with the younger generation what with WallStreetBets & GameStop and now Antiwork. https://finance.yahoo.com/news/antiwork-movement-may-be-long-run-risk-to-labor-force-participation-goldman-sachs-165417840.html https://finance.yahoo.com/news/antiwork-movement-may-be-long... Its worth reading the comments in r/AntiWork its quite an eye opener! A lot of people are fed up with the goal posts being moved, its not really being covered by the mainstream media other than labour shortages in certain areas but when ever there is a labour shortage, it usually means wages are not high enough. Besides no one can predict the future either. Probably best advice I would give, is be your own boss and run your own business, in other words start your own pyramid and have people working for you and take a cut off all your employees to keep your pyramid going and a source of income for you. You will have to put in the hours your family if you have one wont thank you for not being around, but that's the sacrifice we all have to make. There are absolutes, namely the global population is still growing so that means cheaper new entrants to the global workforce putting downward pressure on wages in developed countries where offshoring in one guise or another is possible. Govts are excellent at make work schemes so keep an eye on them. Be wary of the news, or as Trump put it Fake News, so look at Foxconn and how the US tech companies offshored manufacturing to China as they could afford a high failure rate because Foxconn gave them bigger margins which made a higher failure rate still profitable because China pegged itself to the dollar, or look at how the US is not happy with Germany's trade surplus so the world saw Dieselgate to hit the German motor manufacturers when US motor manufacturers were also doing rigging emissions or Huawei 5G "spying" when in fact Huawei leapfrogged the US tech giants and have the most 5G patents rendering Huawei products legally superior to US 5G tech. Leap frogging is a perfectly valid form of increasing market share, so try to spot developing trends and niches which will come from knowing a market/sector very well. This is the right website for some of the latest developments in a wide range of sectors. Look at demographics, the "boomer" generation are considered to have the greatest amount of disposable income, highest level of assets and older people tend to become more right wing as they age, so servicing their needs beit funerals, property maintenance, healthcare, travel would seem a logical area to investigate further, if that's something you might be interested in. If you talk to people who have degrees, ask them what type of degree they have, I'm surprised at how many graduates are in employment that's not in their field of study. Don't get your hopes up that having a degree will magically give you a pay rise, Zuckerberg didn't graduate along with these people. https://www.businessinsider.com/the-15-richest-people-without-college-degrees-2010-11 https://www.businessinsider.com/the-15-richest-people-withou... So like I said don't get your hopes up when you do graduate, its not a panacea, all it shows is you stuck it out trying to better yourself and become more knowledgeable in some area, but most employers don't even know what you studied so they don't know if you are useful to them. That's the sad state of reality if everyone is to be honest with themselves!

caffeine 5y ago

You need to find a way to do it much faster..

mch82 5y ago

Call back some recruiters who turned you down because of the degree. Tell them appreciated their advice and are working on the degree. Ask them what experience they recommend you get over the next three years to be eligible for the job once you have the degree. Don’t discount the work experience you’ve had. You have 18 years of working with people & working through problems. Your maturity will count. 39 is still young.

lordnacho 5y ago

But is coding what you will be doing? Will you be continuing in the same industry? You should talk yourself up. You have lots of experience, not just in whatever narrow industry you think, but you're also a proven worker. I've seen young people get canned because they didn't know how to get out of bed in the morning. Plus the fact that you've run a family for a while without that blowing up is also a positive. Plenty of people have had their careers blow up at the same time as a divorce. Finally there's the fact that you have all this experience, just because you didn't have a degree doesn't mean it isn't real. I used to work with a trader who had this terrible thing bothering him about that. He knew plenty about options trading but it always bothered him that he didn't have a shiny degree, even though none of us graduates actually learn anything about options in undergrad. The degree is really only telling people that a person has learned a bunch of topics, and thus might be able to learn some other topics at work. That's not a guarantee that you can learn if you have the certificate, and it's not a guarantee that it won't be possible to learn things if you don't.

strgcmc 5y ago

You are burnt out and stressed, so I completely understand the general despair/malaise that drips through from your posts. However, you are getting in the way of your own success. What's the alternative? Being 39 with no degree? Delaying the degree even further, so that you're 45 with a degree and 24 years of experience, and still competing with 22 year olds? Starting now, is better than not starting. If you're going through hell now, keeping going and don't stop moving forward (otherwise you'll be stuck in hell forever). You can do this. You can make positive changes to your life and your career. It will not be easy (in fact, it will absolutely suck over the next 1-3 years, but even this you can try to mitigate somewhat). It will not be the ideal course you might've wanted for your life. You may not out-compete all the 22 year olds. But that's okay. Life is not a schedule, and whether some 22 year olds are better or worse off than you, doesn't affect the quality or enjoyment of YOUR life (or at least, it shouldn't, unless you allow it to mentally and emotionally affect you). Being burnt out or depressed or whatnot, tends to give anyone a very negative outlook on the world, which is insidious in 2 ways: (1) it robs you of the ability to feel joy from even small wins (and even robs you of the ability to recognize what is a win, like signing up for college, passing a tough exam, or cleaning out your attic, or whatever); (2) it makes you think that there is no hope, no possibility of improvement (which is simply not true, if only you could interrupt your own thought patterns enough to see it). Being on HN is kind of a double-edged sword for lots of folks like you who may be struggling in their careers (and when I say "struggle", I don't mean underperforming or being bad at their work, though that is also an issue for others but not in your case I think), where on the positive side, you can try to draw inspiration from the "can-do" attitude that naturally goes hand-in-hand with "hacker" mentality, with startups disrupting industries, with believing that it is possible to move mountains and upend institutions through innovation and hard work. On the negative side though, you are also inevitably going to see yourself as being compared to 22 year old founders and millionaires, or new college grads getting entry-level FAANG jobs for ~$200k+, and of course it can steal away joy or contentment from your own life or your own trials and tribulations (and successes!). You need to try and draw out the positives while staying away from the negative comparisions, to feel inspired by the "can-do" energy of all the different types of "hackers" launching anything from personal projects to unicorn startups, and then translate that into your own life, so that you start to see how you can creatively problem-solve for your own situation. Start with problem #1, working 60hrs/week with no end in sight... Can you simply refuse? Is your overtime mandatory? You shouldn't care about performance reviews or making a good impressions, because you don't want this job at this company in the long-run anyways. You just need to do barely enough work to not get fired, so that you have income while earning your degree and preparing your exit strategy. Or OTOH: could you actually quit? Another poster mentioned actually taking that job at McDonald's, which I think could make perfect sense, IF it actually affords you the chance to focus on and accelerate your degree, and IF it actually reduces your hours and your stress. The point is, all of these are just random suggestions, but you're paralyzed by your burnout/depression, and not able to problem-solve effectively. If you can fix that, and start to think about it as creating a flywheel of positive changes in your life, then each individual change may be small, but they can accumulate and it will get easier and easier over time, for you to move your life in the direction that you want. --- EDIT to add: I just poked around your personal blog a bit, and I saw this entry from you, back in July 2021. I think this is a really amazing and very healthy perspective you shared there, and I would encourage you to think about your life in relation to this sort of cohort that you are learning together with, which is much more realistic, much more grounded, vs comparing yourself to some hypothetical 22 year olds. Think about your classmates in their 60s, the recovering addicts, the former prison inmate who's trying to improve their life. If they can do this, then so can you... keep pushing! You wrote these words yourself. You have the seeds for your own success. > The group you gather with, if it is anything like mine, is likely to contain quite a variety of people. My gathering contains 2 immigrants, a Canadian couple, people ranging in age from 20s to 60s, 2 individuals that are converts to the Church within the past year and a half, blue and white-collar workers, 2 recovered addicts, and even someone improving their life via education after having served time in prison, and we have 3 native languages represented with no communication difficulties in our group. It’s a truly diverse group and I’ve definitely been inspired by, and learned from, the unique experiences of my gathering-mates and I would suspect my unique experiences have also helped some of them. I definitely feel like I have a much more diverse group of people here than I would in a traditional brick-and-mortar college program where I live. https://www.ryanmercer.com/ryansthoughts/2021/7/23/reflections-on-my-first-semester-of-byu-pathway-worldwide https://www.ryanmercer.com/ryansthoughts/2021/7/23/reflectio...

Terry_Roll 5y ago

Potential employers will always find a way to get out of hiring people, usual excuses being too qualified, experienced, old, expensive. However Goldman Sachs has noticed some trends namely Reddit becoming more topical with the younger generation what with WallStreetBets & GameStop and now Antiwork. https://finance.yahoo.com/news/antiwork-movement-may-be-long-run-risk-to-labor-force-participation-goldman-sachs-165417840.html https://finance.yahoo.com/news/antiwork-movement-may-be-long... Its worth reading the comments in r/AntiWork its quite an eye opener! A lot of people are fed up with the goal posts being moved, its not really being covered by the mainstream media other than labour shortages in certain areas but when ever there is a labour shortage, it usually means wages are not high enough. Besides no one can predict the future either. Probably best advice I would give, is be your own boss and run your own business, in other words start your own pyramid and have people working for you and take a cut off all your employees to keep your pyramid going and a source of income for you. You will have to put in the hours your family if you have one wont thank you for not being around, but that's the sacrifice we all have to make. There are absolutes, namely the global population is still growing so that means cheaper new entrants to the global workforce putting downward pressure on wages in developed countries where offshoring in one guise or another is possible. Govts are excellent at make work schemes so keep an eye on them. Be wary of the news, or as Trump put it Fake News, so look at Foxconn and how the US tech companies offshored manufacturing to China as they could afford a high failure rate because Foxconn gave them bigger margins which made a higher failure rate still profitable because China pegged itself to the dollar, or look at how the US is not happy with Germany's trade surplus so the world saw Dieselgate to hit the German motor manufacturers when US motor manufacturers were also doing rigging emissions or Huawei 5G "spying" when in fact Huawei leapfrogged the US tech giants and have the most 5G patents rendering Huawei products legally superior to US 5G tech. Leap frogging is a perfectly valid form of increasing market share, so try to spot developing trends and niches which will come from knowing a market/sector very well. This is the right website for some of the latest developments in a wide range of sectors. Look at demographics, the "boomer" generation are considered to have the greatest amount of disposable income, highest level of assets and older people tend to become more right wing as they age, so servicing their needs beit funerals, property maintenance, healthcare, travel would seem a logical area to investigate further, if that's something you might be interested in. If you talk to people who have degrees, ask them what type of degree they have, I'm surprised at how many graduates are in employment that's not in their field of study. Don't get your hopes up that having a degree will magically give you a pay rise, Zuckerberg didn't graduate along with these people. https://www.businessinsider.com/the-15-richest-people-without-college-degrees-2010-11 https://www.businessinsider.com/the-15-richest-people-withou... So like I said don't get your hopes up when you do graduate, its not a panacea, all it shows is you stuck it out trying to better yourself and become more knowledgeable in some area, but most employers don't even know what you studied so they don't know if you are useful to them. That's the sad state of reality if everyone is to be honest with themselves!