My first job out of high school was tech support for a major printer company, it was fucking terrible and after a year I went to work in construction as I had experience from summer jobs in high school. After a year doing that I realized there was no way in hell I could spend my whole life working with those types of people and that the odds of ruining my body while young were high.
Off I went to university.
Went into an IT degree as I had been coding and building home Linux servers since age 12 and figured it would be easy. It was. It was way too easy and I pretty quickly lost the passion.
I had developed an interest in physics, so I finished up a 2 year diploma and changed majors. Started working as a research assistant in a computational physics lab after second year, got my name on a couple publications, even got to present some work at an international conference.
Off I went to grad school.
Went with theoretical solid-state physics, carefully interviewed potential supervisors, went with one that was young, already had over 100 publications, and, most importantly, actually seemed like a decent guy. He also agreed to my condition that my work would be treated like a job and I'd be spending a maximum of 50 hours working per week, including my graduated coursework.
That quickly surpassed 80 hours per week as he continued to dump work on me. I saw him once per week for about 30 minutes and that was primarily to discuss my results for his projects and give me more work. We never talked about my thesis.
I started emailing him my concerns, he turned really fucking nasty and basically told me to suck it up and work more if I needed to. I forwarded the email chain to the prof I worked for for 2.5 years in undergrad, he told me to gtfo of that program and away from that supervisor.
So off to the workforce I went.
This job market in a tech city in canada, nobody gives a fuck about an undergrad in physics or outdated coding and IT skills. Every interview I had I was told I either needed an up to date portfolio for coding jobs, needed more experience for most IT jobs, or, my favourite, that they felt I was overqualified for junior jobs and they were worried I'd get bored and leave after a few months. After four months of unemployment I went back to tech support for a major internet and cable provider.
Eight fucking years of technical education and I was working a job I was qualified for when I graduated high school.
After three months of working evening and weekend shifts (so I rarely saw my roommates let alone my other friends) and spending my free time working on an app and studying up for current IT certs I was convinced I had irreparably ruined my career options. I was once again considering suicide as a viable option (have been dealing with depression and anxiety for over a decade) when I got The Call.
There was a power outage due to a windstorm in an oilpatch town and I got a call from a drunk rig pig demanding to know when the internet would be back. I explained that I couldn't give an eta as that was a hydro issue and he had this to say,
"You're a useless fucking loser too stupid to get a real job."
I agreed with him.