Forward to my university years, I got into computer science because I thought writing code for the rest of my life would be as cool as it was in my teen years. For a moment, during my university years, it was! I aced my classes and was happily writing code for projects and coming up with unique little tools and ideas to build.
After graduation, I hit a brick wall. I found out there are very few jobs for programmers in my country, and almost none in my city. I searched for months, but in the end, I settled for a tutoring role. I worked as a tutor for two years, and then, just with sheer luck, I found a paid internship, applied, and was offered the position. I think I got offered the internship because the pay was low—it was basically slave labor—but it was decent by my country’s standards. I believed that building my reputation, network, and experience working with a US-based startup was worth more than the pay.
I worked as an intern for 6 months, then moved to a Jr. Role, doing full-stack work. I worked as a Jr for 8 more months, then the startup failed to secure funding. So, again, I was unemployed.
I got referred to a different startup by my old employer, started working there as the only frontend developer, the pay was good, and the work was good, but that startup also failed to secure funding, and I was let go.
Now, I am unemployed. I applied to hundreds, if not thousands, of openings on LinkedIn, HackerNews’ monthly “Who is Hiring” threads, but got nothing.
I am now in an existential crisis, local work where I live is almost non-existent, and even if I do come across an opening, the pay is not even decent by my standards; it simply is not worth the effort. So, my goal is to find contract roles and fully remote roles abroad, and honestly, I don’t know how viable that goal is now.
I am even thinking of shifting my focus away from software development due to the market saturation worldwide.
What would you do if you were me? I’m looking for real, honest, and thoughtful feedback.
One lesson I had to learn the hard way, no one is coming to save you. Build your own future. Make your own path. Finding something that people would pay for is easy. Finding something that a lot of people will pay for is hard. Just find a way to earn a living and then find a way to make a living with what you love doing. You don’t need to work for a FANNG to be successful.
Can you clarify how you mean that?
There's an extreme interpretation that I'm guessing you don't mean.
The first thing that comes to mind is, if I wanted to hire you remotely, how would I pay you?
I don't know whether it's a common question you have from prospective employers, but if I'm running a business (FWIW, I'm not), I'd be worried that regularly sending money to Iraq might trigger some alarms (anti-money laundering, sanctions, etc.), and this probably trumps any other consideration unless somehow you're able to show that you're so good at doing the work that it's worth the (perceived) risk.
So I'm speculating that maybe you'd have better chances if you focus on crypto-friendly companies and figure out a way to receive money using crypto, and mention this upfront or at least at the same time you reveal where you are currently.
I can't even imagine how hard it would be from Iraq, even if it's currently "not sanctioned" in theory.
However, as OP directly experienced (as have I) most startups will fail. That's the normal result. Employment is almost always safer, even if ultimately less rewarding. So try to do an honest assessment of your risk tolerance. If you only have yourself to worry about, you can live on beans and rice for a long time. If you have children or other dependents, it can be more complicated.
I was taught by my very first real "boss" (way back when dinosaurs roamed the streets) to never put more into your startup idea than you can afford to lose and still manage to survive afterwards. You can always rebuild (a totally new idea or a variation of the old, after learning from your mistakes) from that point as long as you can manage to survive your mistakes. On the other hand, he also said that if you're really serious about your idea you should absolutely invest in it as much as you're realistically able to (finances, time, and effort) without putting yourself in an un-survivable bind.
So - solve it for them. Figure out all the answers, set up all the stuff that will make it easier for a prospective employer and have it all at the ready.
I also found Erwin McManus' approach to finding what you like do helpful. Take a sheet of paper and make to columns: "I love this!", "I really dislike this". Over the course of a couple weeks, when you're feeling one of those, write what you are doing in the appropriate column. You'll get start seeing some patterns after a while. His theory is that what we excites us is pretty specific, so look for things like "writing tools for others" rather than "programming". (However, while I think he's right, I also think we are much broader than that, so you might look for things that are not even related to programming. You might find something completely unexpected that does have local opportunities.)
Given your propensity for programming you are probably a high functioning individual, able to apply logical reasoning and systems thinking to a wide range of problems.
I have no idea of your living conditions so honest feedback beyond that is quite hard. Different places are different man.
I know talented programmers coming from around the world - so your career choice was not wrong. The career has been an opportunity for talent across the globe. It's possible that your life situation, however, is what stops you to actually follow the career path of your choosing now.
I know people who've struggled to find direction after their initial education did not pan out. They eventually pull through - sometimes they find a job that is aligned with their education, and sometimes they need to pivot and find something new. I have no idea what action you should take in your local economy.
I'm super impressed you take care of you elderly mother. I don't know what relationship you have, but being a caretaker is a dignified position what ever the circumstances. But it can also be a sacrifice towards personal freedoms, goals, and life outcomes.
Now, what I'm going to say may sound like BS but it really is the only solid actionable support I can give: take care of yourself. Try to exercise. Try to sleep. Try to eat. Try to find things in life you enjoy, and notice and pay attention to them. Life can be lived - and sometimes needs to be lived - one breath and one heartbeat at a time.
Do you have a personal website or blog? Do you have thoughts, ideas, problems you’ve solved, or mini hobby projects to talk about? It may not directly lead to an instant job but I think showing the world more about you and what you enjoy doing (and are good at) beyond the normal CV format might be a good start? It’s at least a productive thing to spend your time on while you’re trying to work out your next move.
- find outsource dev shops near you and see if you can find work via them - find outsource dev shops NOT near you (different time zones) and offer to work with them to increase their off hours coverage - list yourself on work platforms like fiver and taskrabbit for lots of useful problem solving that isn't programming but where programming makes you more competent: organizing digital documents, fixing/creating excel models, integrating various business software, setting up CRMs, fixing vibe coded messes, making personal websites, setting up email on custom domains, sending order confirmation emails/texts, lead generation, sending notifications/emails when particular topics appear in news/regulation/official databases, keeping an online menu up to date for a company - offer cheap localization / "check and fix your ai generated localization" service -
It's not like you'll find a job next door. Even in USA you usually don't and need to search well.
Look up my contact info from this site: omardo dot com. It's my blog from the high school.
Are you personally making a living by selling a product or service you created - and if so could you share something of your experience? Making a product is not trivial - it's double hard.
First you need to come up with a product. Then you need to sell it and the latter is possibly much harder than the technology in all except the most complex of products. There are success stories, sure, but so many people in the internet are hustling so success looks like driven by chance rather than a deterministic outcome by following a given process. (If you get to medical school, then becoming a doctor is a deterministic outcome. If you get unemployed, coming up with a product and sales to make a living does not seem deterministic to me in the same sense).
patio11 is famous because what he did was really non-trivial even though he is such a humble person he discusses his work in very homely terms.
2. Assuming that it is still to do with computers. A software business does not have to be about building products and selling them. I imagine in Iraq (or where ever you are) there are many small businesses and non-technical people who need their computers maintained and repaired (example, this guy has posted on HN and has a small business that does this : https://www.scottrlarson.com/services/computer/repair/ .. I am not affiliated in any way with him). You might need to hit the street, ignore the fear / embarrassment / rejection, and cold call or cold visit businesses. If only 1% of the people are going to turn into customers, get the other 99% out of the way, faster the better.
3. Teaching positions may not pay well but may pay the bills while you work to build a career or business.
You country was devastated by an illegal war. Rebuilding will take a lot of time and courage. Wish you all the best.
This might mean that you will have to move to a different city but you do what you need to do to survive.
Unfortunately, I can't find a problem to solve, and believe me, I tried! Everything I come up with has been solved already with a better set of features.
I recommend using the concept of a “talent stack” to find areas you are uniquely suited for and uniquely interested in.
Make an ordered list of things you enjoy, things you are motivated toward, things you are talented at. Then brainstorm ways to combine as many of them as you can.
Your particular combination will be rare, this is where you are most likely to be able to find and solve problems.
Since you’re a programmer you are very well suited for that type of analysis.
Once you’ve identified those areas, dedicate deep focused thought toward identifying problems and solving them. Go for long walks or hikes or bike rides while thinking about it.
There’s a whole host of US-centric products that work well in American-ish places, but fail to serve local users in non-Americanized markets.
(See: Baidu vs. Google in China)
“What we are taught is that if you want to start a business, you need to come up with something new, something that hasn't been done before. But the reality is that the world will very easily accept three of the same thing, or five of the same thing. And usually it is an advantage to look at something that already exists and say, can another one of those exist? Or can I take what's there and tweak it a little bit? If you are a great cloner, you will be 90% ahead of the rest of humanity.”
One way I was told how to find product (your service) and market (labor market) fit is to focus on the problem. Sell yourself as a problem solver rather than a software developer. The software is just a tool, and software engineering is a framework to apply those tools in practice. Although the current state of your locale lacks software dev opportunities, it might also be that most people aren't aware of their needs for digitization yet. Software is also in a lot of things. Don't limit yourself to web development.
this is to say, don't give up.
from my personal experience, tech networking is the only thing that worked for me. not just networking through jobs (that didn't do anything for me) but participating in tech communities. online and offline. HN, various discord groups for programmers, skool.com also has lot's of tech groups, maybe even linkedin. (i use linkedin mainly to connect to people i meet elsewhere, so i can't tell how well it works by itself). others i don't know. i'd also look for expats from your country in other countries. maybe you can make some connections there to help you get remote jobs you would not otherwise find.
Look at existing software with unhappy users and make an alternative, even if a simpler one. Create something that hits a specific need of local businesses. If nothing else comes out of it, you will still have a real-world project and related experience (with designing, planning, shipping, talking to customers) to add to your resume.
But that requires also being able to eat, and sleep under a roof, so taking "hold your nose" jobs may be required.
Also, learning and mastering difficult stuff, can be useful. "Full-Stack" is a very crowded field, with a lot of talented, hungry people.
I sincerely wish you the best.
1) We'll always need tech for bureaucracy. Look for anything that is done on paper that can be digitalized. CRM, POS, LMS, inventory management. These stuff are red ocean and you don't need to convince people that yours is better. Just be better than Excel, simpler than SAP.
2) Anti-corruption is a fertile field in developing nations. That means forms. Payments and payments infra. Malaysia is entering an era where e-invoicing is mandatory for tax cuts. Things like remittance may be difficult too and it could mostly be a paperwork thing.
3) Common advice in HN is jobs good, entrepreneurship bad. But in your situation, the odds of having a business may be 15%, and the odds of getting a job may be 1%. Entrepreneurship is also a lot more difficult if your competitors are people like Walmart or Amazon so the math is entirely different.
when you can't get a job then entrepreneurship is the only other option. uganda leads the statistics with the highest number of entrepreneurs world wide for a reason.
What adversity does is challenge our attachment profile. This helps the timid hoarder, who wants to keep everything, by forcing them to choose. They learn a stronger, purer, sense of self in the process. A lesson we can’t seem to learn as fast, voluntarily. Victor Frankl describes it in great detail as a holocaust survivor in Man’s Search For Meaning.
So embrace your hardship. Consider that you are exactly where you need to be in this moment, to move ahead. And make all attachments second to this - Never Give Up. But for the rest, maybe introduce flexibility, experiment more. You have an opinion on these other opportunities not being worth it, but what have you tried? You see things up close that the ruminating knee hugger simply won’t ever see by thought alone.
The saying I have tried to live by is “only a young person thinks the last downturn was the last”. Also as Game of Thrones puts it, “my sweet summer child”.
Is moving to an area with more jobs a possibility on the table?
Also keep in mind that pay is relative to where you live. While some hit the jackpot making Silicon Valley wages in developing counties with very low costs of living, that’s not the norm and shouldn’t be the expectation. Those wages are high, in part, because the cost of living is high. I work for a large company and pay scales are region dependent to account for cost of living. I think the idea being that two people doing the same job have a relatively similar lifestyle. Are you turning down otherwise good opportunities because you’re looking to make California wages outside of California and the US?
Make solving big problems your life’s purpose, not trying to find a “job”.
if you can move to a country that is hiring lots of dev (like japan) move.
“The Money River, where the wealth of the nation flows. We were born on the banks of it-and so were most of the mediocre people we grew up with, went to private schools with, sailed and played tennis with. We can slurp from that mighty river to our hearts' content. And we can even take slurping lessons, so we can slurp more efficiently.”
Have you already tried positioning yourself as deep into your country's "money river" as possible? It's by far the biggest knob, location location location. You can be the most qualified amazeballs whatever of something in a resource desert devoid of opportunity and you'll starve.
So I would say that christianity has the most logical, comprehensive and historically/experientially validated truth claims. As to why catholicism specifically its the church Jesus, ie God himself, founded. All the other christian denominations were founded by men hundreds or thousands of years later.
Plus (as does the eastern orthodox) for various reasons it has valid versions of all 7 of the sacraments, especially communion which is kind of the summit of the Christian life.
That's nonsense. The Bible is full of contradictions[0]. Also, you write "Jesus is the son of God" and next paragraph you write "Jesus, ie God himself". Is Jesus his own son? (Fwiw, I attended Catholic schools for 13 years, made many good friends, and still think that religion is nonsense.)
> As to why catholicism specifically its the church Jesus, ie God himself, founded. All the other christian denominations were founded by men hundreds or thousands of years later.
Are you saying Catholicism is better because it's older? The Jews would say Judaism is the right one. That Catholicism and all the other Christian denominations were founded much later, and Jesus was just another prophet.
[0]: https://www.skepticsannotatedbible.com/first/contra2_list.ht...
Philosophically we are able to understand that God must exist without even requiring theological revelation. And we are actually able to derive that the Trinity must exist too.
The Father, the first person of God (who is pure actualization) would have a thought of Himself and the thought would be so perfect and complete that it would be actualized into the second person of the Trinity, the Son. Then the Son and the Father love eachother and make such a perfect gift of themselves to eachother that this combined gift of love becomes a third person in the Trinity, the Holy Spirit. So once a God exists as philosophically He must, we also can reason He must exist as a Trinity although the thought might not occur to us without theological revelation.
Catholicism is Judaism! It is the continuation and fulfillment of the covenant God made with Abraham. The Old Testament and the many, many very specific Jewish prophecies of Jesus that are fulfilled in the New Testament are part of the Catholic faith.
Catholicism is correct because Jesus founded a church with the 12 apostles as the first bishops and the succession of bishops from the 12 apostles has never been broken in the catholic church. Normal people like Martin Luther or Calvin or Joseph Smith do not have the authority to start valid religions on their own especially since Jesus (who is God) has already created the religion He wants us to follow and has been very clear that it is the way God wants us to worship Him.
People inevitably will reject the call to be obedient to God because of pride and various other influences. If you read the New Testament Jesus predicts that many people will reject the church as many people rejected Him.
The church is very intellectually rich. If you engage with it in good faith and an open mind you have the smartest people of the past two thousand years who have devoted their lives to thinking about and answering any questions you might have in much greater detail than I can certainly. The saints are the most inspirational role models I can imagine, learning about them is a joy. And I can’t emphasize enough, the fruits of engaging with the church in good faith and asking God to help you are very, very real and literally the antidote to 99% of the problems that modern people are suffering from.
Unfortunately I don’t know if all of this stuff is even on the radar of people in the tech sphere so I hope some people have their curiousity sparked and learn more! It’s a fun hobby even if you are just interested in diving deeper into history.
Perhaps you are, but this is not universal for philosophers. Most modern day philosophers do not believe in any god.
> Catholicism is Judaism! It is the continuation and fulfillment of the covenant God made with Abraham. The Old Testament and the many, many very specific Jewish prophecies of Jesus that are fulfilled in the New Testament are part of the Catholic faith.
Judaism does not accept any of the claimed fulfilments of prophecy that Christianity attributes to Jesus[0].
> Catholicism is correct because Jesus founded a church with the 12 apostles as the first bishops and the succession of bishops from the 12 apostles has never been broken in the catholic church.
I don't see how that follows.
> Normal people like Martin Luther or Calvin or Joseph Smith do not have the authority to start valid religions on their own especially since Jesus (who is God) has already created the religion He wants us to follow and has been very clear that it is the way God wants us to worship Him.
This is just your opinion: I'm sure Jesus was a remarkable character, but I don't see how it's clear that he was god. From my point of view he was just a normal person and didn't have the authority to start a valid religion.
> The church is very intellectually rich. If you engage with it in good faith and an open mind you have the smartest people of the past two thousand years
Respectfully disagree with both. The smartest people I know have figured out it's nonsense.
> And I can’t emphasize enough, the fruits of engaging with the church in good faith and asking God to help you are very, very real and literally the antidote to 99% of the problems that modern people are suffering from.
Here I think I can agree with you that the church is an antidote to 99% of the problems modern people are suffering from. Though I think there are other ways too.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_views_on_Jesus
Faith is a gift, it’s not something we can create for ourselves or claim responsibility for. We can only pray to God to give us faith and I believe He will always grant it!
Liberal autocracy is taking the color out of life. You might watch a few episodes of, "I Love Lucy" to get a fix on what living in black and white is like. Pleasantville comes to mind. Our lives will be the plot of that film backward.
EDIT: I didn't realize that our guy here is in Iraq. With that said I will leave the original post so a bunch of overpaid software developers can tell me how misguided and angsty I am.
1. if there are jobs offering high pay, and there are people who get them- these jobs are not overpaid, clearly some people want to pay high and there are other people who deliver (and of course there are other who fake it, but it's not a norm)
2. not all people are equal, and not all jobs are equal, and just because 'it feels unfair' does not mean it is unfair. Sure, there are different levels of programmers but I personally have seen people who deserve every penny of their pay, because they produce stuff 99.99% people won't be able to produce no matter how hard they want to be in that league
3. Education is investment people make because they see it opens some doors that are otherwise closed- looking at job descriptions in my area, most well paid jobs require some form of paper from applicants- it doesn't matter if it's good or bad, it's state of reality (and sure, there are other jobs where paper is not needed, my point is that with the paper more doors are opened)
4. in case of original poster, the problem might be different- partially because of the target audience and partially because of local reality. In early stage of developed countries nepothism is a huge problem, so I sympathetise with the poster as I know this first hand. I dare to say, having college degree puts him in much better situation than most of the population and the game is to be patient.
I feel like you're just coming in with an ax to grind that has no relevance to the question being asked here.