Come to a difficult realisation (work related)

[Cromulent]

Over the last couple of months, I've been slowly inching towards a problematic realisation and the last couple of days it has fully formed, and I believe it wholeheartedly.

I've been programming for ten years now, and while I never thought I was excellent, I thought I was average. The fact of the matter is that although I can make websites, I've never managed to turn it into a career. I do have schizophrenia which makes career stuff difficult, but if I were good enough at programming to turn it into a career, I would have done it by now.

The realisation leaves me in an awkward position. Since I have decided that my chief pleasure and passion is not going to result in the career that I want I am at a complete loss as to what to do with myself. I'm starting a maths degree at the Open University in October, but I want to use the time between now and then to do something useful or at least fulfilling. One of the things I have done is joined a political party to see if I could get involved in that. I've also considered starting to make YouTube videos, but those are more hobbies and not something to do full time.

Pretty much my only skills are computer related, so I'm having a real problem thinking of new activities. One thing I will say is because of the mental health issues leaving the house isn't an option, unfortunately (I have agoraphobia), so it needs to be something I can do at home.

I'd be grateful for any advice.

 

[Cromulent]

What is your career now?

I know plenty of people far below average and still manage to keep a job in their field. You may just be putting yourself down.

I'm on disability benefits at the moment due to mental health issues which also makes turning it into a career difficult.

 

[Cromulent]

Well not necessarily, especially if your programming has been a casual side interest, knocking up websites as a hobby etc...

Have you taken any courses etc.. whether online MOOCs or auditing freely available university modules or more formally?

The maths degree is useful, especially if you take some statistics courses too. Combine that with some MOOCs from the usual places or indeed other university modules you can audit (Stanford, MIT and CMU have lecture slides, notes, exercises and video lectures freely available for various relevant modules) and you could get yourself a mix of formal and self taught education in programming, maths, statistics and machine learning and practical experience of various relevant libraries/applications etc... That sort of skill set is very much in demand these days.

Since you don't leave the house you've presumably got a load of free time, so I guess the OU degree can be done in 3 years and you'll probably have time to attempt kaggle competitions and MOOCs on top of that.

You could also perhaps add a masters degree on top too - there are data science/ML/Stats options out there, I think Sheffield offers an MSc in Statistics via distance learning (though you might need to leave the house for a week or so at the start of the course - then again you've got a legit registered disability, maybe they can be flexible), Imperial has launched an online MSc in Machine Learning. The OU doesn't seem to offer any post grad education in Stats/ML though they do have comprehensive 3rd year undergrad stats modules.

I don't know what "average" is as far as programming (in general) is concerned or what you think it is or even what the context is for your experience. I'm not a programmer but I can program and I've worked with programmers for years. Do keep in mind that it is trivial to knock up some hobby project, writing a bunch of lines of code after reading a book etc.. but that day to day a typical programmer working on some enterprise level application might only write a few lines, might well spend a lot of time actually trying to figure out what was going wrong with the code previously and also spend time making sure that the stuff he or she is going to change or add isn't going to **** with other stuff in ways that it shouldn't. If you've got zero experience of doing that then you're probably not very useful (yet) for a lot of programming jobs. People certainly do work from home in this line of work, it is the sort of thing that often can easily be done from home, they do tend to have proven themselves first though.

Ideally it would be better if you were able to get out of the house and actually work somewhere first, not to trivialise mental health or to be too harsh but if your house was on fire you'd leave and presumably you do have to leave for things like doctors/hospital appointments etc... likewise your condition(s) aren't new, prior to the internet people also had to cope with them and couldn't sit in the house all day! There are plenty of social misfits, autistic people etc.. in the tech industry who are good at what they do and have found a place for themselves. Might be better to not give up on that and keep trying to work on being able to leave the house as perhaps then you could be better placed to land a job, plenty of workplaces are flexible these days though flexibility is generally more available to people who've either proven themselves within the company or who have some significant experience already. Even people who officially work from home full time do tend to pop into the office every so often etc...

Ultimately it is down to you, the effort you want to put in and how much you want to succeed, it is very unlikely that someone is going to remotely hand you a good tech/data science career where you can work form home and never have to come into the office... it is possible but I think you'd need to have demonstrated some serious skills for an employer to entertain the idea (not to mention perhaps selling yourself rather cheaply too). The more realistic path involves getting some experience first too and that involves you having to leave the house, that can indeed lead to a career mostly working from home but not exclusively.

I guess you could try the self employed route, as a programmer perhaps crate some apps or do some freelance work via one of the websites where you'll be competing with people in India or Eastern Europe. I guess likewise you could do similar with some ML/Stats/Data science skillset albeit hopefully with less competition as, if you study this stuff properly, then you'll find there are way fewer people who know what they're doing though there are quite a lot of programmers trying to rebrand themselves but without sufficient mathematics or stats background.

Thank you for your detailed reply, and I appreciate your honesty. I am working on leaving the house more, and I'm currently doing CBT with the hope that it will slowly allow me to progress in terms of getting out and about.

I'll look into doing some of those courses while I study maths at the OU. You are right that I do have a lot of free time at the moment. Maybe I should sit down for a day and write up a study plan that I can follow. One of the problems with not having any structured learning is that you either miss important things out by accident, or you slack off when you should be working hard because you get distracted. This is the main reason I went with the OU as that way I'll have a schedule that I need to stick to and also have other students I can ask for help if I need along with my tutor.

I think one of the problems I have when it comes to programming is that I haven't been particular in my learning. I have broad knowledge on a lot of subjects but no expert level knowledge of a single subject. I need to pick an area of programming and just concentrate on that for 6 months to a year until I am knowledgable enough in that one area to start doing some interesting stuff. I am already interested in machine learning so your suggestion of working towards that is a good one. Plus one of the programming languages I use is Python which I am lead to believe is a popular choice for that sort of thing.