I’m hitting 6 months of unemployment and funds are running dry. My journey into becoming a Stock Marxist is going… ok I guess? I’m learning a lot and know so much more than I did in December, but the money isn’t there to prove it.

So I’m looking for something to do that will not make me go insane. I had a temp job that ended in November, and before that I was working in a Software Dev role that caused my autistic self a lot of grief. My mind was in a dark place. It still is kind of there TBH.

I don’t want to get back into software. The tech changes too much, the frameworks methodolies and endless meetings are frustrating, AND because everyone was told to “learn to code” I have close to 0% shot my resume gets picked out of a pile of 1000s of other applicants. I’ve been branching out into more data analysis/database type work and there’s an AI tool I’m paying for to automate applying. I know it’s not what I’m supposed to do, but I also know spending all day filling out job apps is not where I want to be either.

What other options are out there? Things I’m considering:

Rover (pet sitting)

Data Annotation (AI training)

Flipping things I can find for free or at thrift stores?

Fiverr? Help people with their WordPress sites or something…

IDK, any other ideas?

  • invalidusernamelol [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
    24·
    11 days ago

    You looked into GIS jobs? Basically all Geospatial automation is done through JS and Python. ArcGIS Pro has some C# SDK for building tools as well. Basically every county is constantly hiring for these positions.

    It’s also nice because no framework rot. You’re stuck with the API that Qgis and Esri push out and they barely ever change anything because so many counties and government rely on legacy code that they’ve never updated.

    I’ve done some work with Esri in getting type hints into their Python library to make the dev experience better too.

    Qgis is open source and used by most European (totally funded by the German government) municipalities, and ArcGIS/ESRI is the standard in the US. You can get a personal license to learn it for ~$100/yr and the forums are very friendly. Getting a bit of knowledge then applying to your counties GIS department would be a great way to get one of those cushy government jobs that doesn’t pay the greatest, but it easy and has a fantastic pension.

    • MayoPete [he/him, comrade/them]@hexbear.netOPEnglish
      10·
      11 days ago

      I’m down for something like this. I even have a little bit of experience with the JS ESRI libraries.

      I just don’t want to get stuck in the situation I’ve been in several times where I get hired for one tech stack, then get assigned work on completely different stacks and suddenly I can’t get stuff done on time.

      • invalidusernamelol [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
        9·
        11 days ago

        Learn Arcpy, it’s actually pretty simple and literally no one knows how to use it lol.

        I was on their forums trying to get answers and ended up writing my own wrapper libraries for building tools using it and am the person everyone goes to for answers now. ESRI has even just straight up taken my code that I’ve shared and rolled it into releases… I don’t even consider myself a great developer, but there’s so few competent people actually using it that it’s just rotting.

        I’ve actually applied with them to help fix the mess that is arcpy, the library that runs like 90% of web map backends…

        This post also 100% doxxes me, hi feds skeleton-wave

      • invalidusernamelol [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
        8·
        11 days ago

        Spend the $100 to get a personal license and learn how to use the model builder. There are entire jobs that are just “hey, can you use this node system to run all our tooling with one button”. They give you the catalog for free when you get a personal license too and that has tons of examples and contact info in it.

        But again, just having a literal basic knowledge of how to navigate the program and interact with geospatial data can land you a pretty decent job maintaining county parcel/plat data for census and tax tracking.

      • invalidusernamelol [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
        5·
        11 days ago

        There’s tons of applications for it. I do OSP fiber optic network design currently, and it’s terrible how little most people know about best practices for geospatial data in that industry.