I like programming, and I program for a living, but there is nobody on earth who gets out of bed every day and is like "Aw yiss I'm gonna go code a bunch of salesforce integrations!"
I've been working long enough that at this point my work goal is like, I want a job that 95% of the time I do not actively dread. I don't need to be excited about it, I just need it to be fine.
People get so hand-wringy about what dogs can and can't eat. Like I've had people tell me not to let my dog eat apple because there's a chemical in apple seeds that's converted to cyanide in the gut.
Like, first of all, I'm not feeding the seeds to my dog, and second of all there's not enough of that stuff in one apple's worth of seeds to hurt you, and third of all you'd have to basically chew the seeds into powder, a thing that dogs famously do not do, to get even that tiny harmless amount.
It's not safe for dogs to eat chocolate, grapes, or alliums. Everything else is kinda fine. (And tbh growing up my family dogs ate all of those things a few times and were fine -- how dangerous it is depends on the concentration of the toxic thing, the size of the dog, etc.)
tho to be fair "change your pillowcase" is probably a decent bit of advice for a lot of teen boys in particular. I knew a lot of guys in college who only washed their sheets once a semester. 🤢 It's the "Have you tried turning it off and on again?" of acne advice.
Honestly, this is even more boring than that. This is some rich dude who has made obsessing over his health and his diet his entire life. He's not actually DOING anything other than pretending orthorexia is 1. something he invented and 2. a substitute for a personality.
Something you're at least vaguely interested in and don't mind doing.
Something you're at least vaguely interested in and don't mind doing.
Blockchain, because it's a scam that is rapidly disintegrating.
No one else can tell you what you should pursue. I didn't know what I did or didn't like until I tried a few things and figured out what aspects of them I like and what aspects were not for me. For instance, I don't like frontend programming and I absolutely hate dealing with external clients. I do something more like data engineering, which a lot of people find deadly boring but I find perfectly satisfactory.
The other thing that's been really important to me is decoupling my career from my self-worth. My job is not the most important thing about me. My job is something I do so I can get paid enough to do the things I actually want to do. I don't need to LOVE my job. I need to like it enough to mostly not dislike having to do it 40 hours a week. For me this means I don't find the work boring, I work with nice people, I mostly don't have to do things I HATE (e.g. client presentations), and I'm not doing anything that conflicts with my values (e.g. I wouldn't work on blockchain, or law enforcement projects).
When I was in grad school we got a lot of potato quality third generation photocopy PDFs. I used an iPad but this was also back when the iPad was basically the only viable tablet option.
I'm pretty sure they put them together because that's how you keep everyone from becoming suicidally depressed after watching Grave of the Fireflies D:
This makes me sound like a total wanker but I reread my favorite Charles Dickens and Jane Austen. I find them both very comforting because generally nice people end up happy in the end.
A few of the chatbots I worked on, back when I did that, were actually good. Those companies had actually looked at their support traffic and figured out that like 95% of it was people asking the same 20 or so questions that had specific answers. Or at least that you could get to a specific answer with 1-2 followup questions. Like, a huge number of people just want to know how to pay their bill, and the answer is "go to this webpage or call this number".
It's kind of a waste of human time and effort to have a human answering all those questions, so the chatbot dealt with those (and tbh it was 50-50 whether those people even knew they were talking to a robot) and the actual hard shit got a warm transfer to a human agent who got the chat transcript.
Honestly the companies it worked best for, either their online documentation was a total shitshow so the chatbot was your best hope of actually finding anything, or a huge proportion of their customer base were total luddites who just didn't want to use a website and wanted to talk to someone. (We had to make our chatbots support Internet Explorer 11. In 2021. Because for some of our clients IE11 was like 30% of their traffic. I don't even fucking know.)
I used to design and maintain chatbots for a living, for a company that among other things sold bespoke chatbots to corporate clients, and I can tell you that the companies KNOW that customers don't want chatbots for customer service. They don't care. THEY want chatbots for customer service because chatbots are orders of magnitude cheaper than hiring customer service representatives.
A chatbot is gonna cost what it costs them to employ 1-2 customer service reps, but it can handle basically infinite traffic for that price. The GOOD ones handle the simple questions (your "how do I pay my bill"s and your "what are your hours"s) and then forward the difficult ones ("why is my bill fucked up?") to a human agent. But I absolutely worked with some clients (who I will not name because I do not want to get sued) that explicitly wanted to avoid letting customers get access to a human agent by whatever means possible.
Also a side note but basically no one lets people cancel accounts via chatbot. They inevitably want THOSE requests to go to a human rep so they can try to talk them out of it.
I just know that one day I got on the bus and as soon as it pulled away from the stop THE STENCH hit me. Like poop, but worse. Poop and also rotting. I don't know. I never saw the source of the stench. I grabbed the stop-request cord as I leapt to my feet and hauled ass to the exit door and tried to hold my breath until we got to the next stop.
I walked home and it took basically the whole walk to get the residual stink out of my sinuses. I will never know what made that smell and I think I'm glad.
I like programming, and I program for a living, but there is nobody on earth who gets out of bed every day and is like "Aw yiss I'm gonna go code a bunch of salesforce integrations!"
I've been working long enough that at this point my work goal is like, I want a job that 95% of the time I do not actively dread. I don't need to be excited about it, I just need it to be fine.