Good one to vent a bit. I'm 30 now, living in the Netherlands, and dropped out of a PhD in epidemiology/bioinformatics to work remotely for a company in the US. This has been great. Pay is wonderful, approx 130k/year. My official title is something like Senior Data Scientist. I work mostly on the application of machine learning and natural language processing to clinical study data. Between the day to day ops and management, I sometimes put together neat little ML prototypes. And, in the past 3 years I managed a team that I personally put together through hiring and firing. The company I work for gives me a lot of autonomy, and I think we've delivered truly amazing things in that time span. We've literally build a state-of-the-art medical search engine from scratch, from the design, to the Clojure programming, down to the nuts and bolts of putting the machines in the racks. Since things were seemingly going well, I thought "good moment to buy a house". So I bought a house, approx 400k (coming down to 2000/month roughly). But ... I've recently become aware of some changes to the company structure that may or may not play out well. I think they will, but they might not. So there's a reasonable risk that I might be unemployed soon-ish. This scares me. Being in the far North of the Netherlands, there aren't a lot of job opportunities for a drop-out like me. And, finding a company that is willing to take the risk of hiring me remotely ... yeah I'd even be hesitant in hiring myself at that pay-rate. The thing is, I might have to sell the house and all that shitty adult stuff if that happens, just to cut monthly costs. That scares me.
On top of that ... I'm not even sure I /want/ to work anymore. I would love to work on things like climate change, but that being underfunded (and not having a degree) I don't see happening. The only openings I see for a Senior Data Scientist position usually require a PhD (which I dropped out of sigh), or are in the ad space. And, for as long as I have a say in the matter I will never work in the ad space.
I've been thinking of doing my own thing, bootstrap something. But I literally don't know what. Cynicism maybe. You hear all these stories of bozos pitching some idea but can't get the people to build it; I guess I'm the opposite: I think, given time and resources, I can build a lot of things ... but seriously, I wouldn't have a clue what to work on. Except maybe multi-stage flash desalination using concentrated (heliostat) solar power to green deserts as a carbon sink ... but yeah, not a civil engineer.
The thing is ... through life choices I think I've made myself unemployable. I need the autonomy to do stuff, or I'll go mad (also, don't make me get out of bed before 10AM ... just not going to happen). But on the other hand, man it's been a productive 3 years ... and I learned /so/ much. I wish I just knew what to work on next. But my dysthymia prevents me from seeing that stuff clearly. If someone with a cool idea comes around, I'd love to sink my teeth into stuff; on my own, all I think of is the impending climate change disaster. Fun fun fun.
