I’ve been in and out of so many different jobs. Usually I get to a point where I burn out and just can’t go in anymore. Best job I ever had was as a tour guide in a distillery telling people facts all day and working with what I now realise was a whole bunch of other neurodivergent people. Only left that because I wasn’t paid enough to live. Honestly could have stayed there forever otherwise. Such is life!
Currently in the middle of a career change after realising the whole 9-5 office job life isnt sustainable for me. I’m hoping to be able to work for myself soon and not be beholden to other people’s schedules!
What jobs have you tried out over the years? What has worked well for ye?
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I am a software engineer. It gives me a good variety of work to keep myself interested, especially since I can work on different features and projects regularly. I have a lot of slow days, which can end up being painfully underestimating. Thankfully since I’m work from home most of the week, it gives me the opportunity to step away and clear my head/find something small to work on around the house.
I really love programming because i feel that I can understand it very well with my chaotic mind, even if corporate work is mind numbing at times
Variety is key!
For sure! I’m realizing that i’m in a bit of a rut currently because I haven’t had enough variety in my work, so I’m deciding to try and learn something new. That way I can also give myself a new project to work on
Be an engineer they said, its all about problem solving they said, they lied. No one mentioned the documentation and reports, just let me tinker/build/fix/test things. Turns out should be a technician 😂but i do love it really.
@EmrysOfTheValley @neamhsplach
Do computer programming (software development) so you only need to talk to computers.
Haha, just kidding. 90% of it is communicating with humans. Either directly (tickets, reviews, meetings, …) or indirectly (comments in code, commit messages, …). 😕
IT Swiss Army Knife. My current position is in Infrastructure but I dabble in SQL, Azure, AWS, Kubernetes, team management, MDM, etc. The infrastructure here is solid and requires little maintenance so I’m sometimes glad to have other areas to work in. I’m looking for a move soon to something less all over the place and focus on more on Azure as a whole. Something remote would be nice vs. coming to an office on the daily to work in nothing but cloud services.
Something remote would be nice vs. coming to an office on the daily to work in nothing but cloud services.
Hard agree! So many admin roles have no place in an office.
90 percent of my day currently is working in Azure portal and PowerShell. I commute 20 miles to the office to do this. Upper management says we need to be on site because we are team oriented. And teams need to be present to work well together. The other 10 percent of my day is complaining with my team.
I have an undergraduate degree in computer science but currently work in marketing. I hate it most days, because it doesn’t align with my values. I hate that my job consists of increasing profits for bullshit companies, and I have no say in which clients we take on.
My day to day consists of getting tasks, feeling overwhelmed and do anything but work. I browse reddit(rip), get coffee, use the toilet, pretend I’m busy most of the day. Then I get a rush of productivity and do what I actually have to do reasonably quickly. It’s either random or I get pressured by deadlines.
Every day is a countdown until I can get home, and then realise I have to do it again tomorrow.
When I was coming to the end of school, I wanted to go into journalism. Dunno why, it just appealed to me.
Then I applied for an apprenticeship at a local ship repair yard and got accepted as a welder/fabricator. Had no idea what that entailed, but they’d be paying me and I’d learn a skill. No idea how I went from definitely wanting to go into journalism to becoming a welder, but learning some twenty years later that I have ADHD probably goes a long way towards explaining it.
Anyhoo, hated almost every minute of my apprenticeship, got sacked a few months before the end, but managed to find a job doing similar work where I could finish my college exams. Then spent the next seven years working for that firm, where I hated the work, the managers and all my time there. But looking for work is hard, and I hated what I did anyway, so what was the point of working somewhere else?
Then, at 27 my wife left me, so I fucked off the welding and went to uni to study radio production. Graduated with a 2:1 (still undiagnosed at this point, so I’m still really proud of that) and used the degree to score a job on a cruise ship. Spent the next year traveling the world, spinning tunes in the nightclub every night, drinking too much rum and making the most of the all night buffet. It was great.
Did a year on there, but missed seeing my kid, so jacked it in, where I got a series of shitty, barely-paying jobs to try and pretend I was in any way a useful member of society, while I desperately tried to find work in the radio industry.
I never did manage that.
Worked at a company who made those birthday cards with the year of your birth CDs in for a couple of years. Loved that job. I got to fuck about on Photoshop with a bunch of good people, but the economy sucked and the company had to let me go.
So I gave up on my dreams and reluctantly went back on my tools.
Tried to be self-employed. Lasted a year before I had to admit defeat. Then had a couple of jobs in welding before landing at the company where I’ve been for the past five years.
I got my diagnosis a few years ago, which massively helped me to figure out who I am. Between that and turning 40, my brain settled down a bit and I was able to accept that I was doing a job that I didn’t particularly love, but that I had a skill for and that paid the bills.
18 months ago I was offered a promotion to the role of quality manager, which has subsequently morphed into mostly providing training to our employees who need it. To be honest, I don’t really care for the training side of things, but management leaves me alone, and I’m independently working on getting a health and safety management qualification which will enable me to move to a better paying job at a (hopefully) better company than this one.
Sorry, this is very long. Got into a groove, I think.
Not far off my CV in terms of length and variety!! Seeing stuff like this makes me feel better about my chequered employment history. Glad to hear things sound settled for you now! Hoping that’ll be me soon too. I actually quite like training people so I’m hoping that’s where I end up. Especially if it means management leave me alone haha.
Management leaving me alone is a double-edged sword.
On the one hand, I have a level of autonomy that I appreciate. I can have days where my stupid brane won’t play ball, so I can get away with doing fuck all and no one will care. No one can see my screens, so I could spend the whole day playing Stardew Valley if I wanted.
But with that comes not enough accountability to actually get shit done. I don’t have to meet specific targets, so I have no real way to focus my attention where it needs to be, unless I’m really into whatever task it is I’ve set myself. To be honest, I need to chat to my line manager about it when he’s back from his holiday, because I’m not really enjoying myself at the moment.
Trouble is, that’s a conversation I have to instigate, and doing it will almost certainly mean that I bring oversight to what I do, and I won’t react well to that. So I probably won’t…
I’ve held 3 jobs in my 42 years where I worked for someone else. I’ve been independent and on my own for 15 years and tho the money could be better. I wouldn’t change it for the world. I have ADHD, so it works for me.
I’m a lawyer with a background in business! There are a lot of lawyers with interesting wetware since the initial filters on the profession are almost entirely test-based and the tests don’t target things like emotional maturity, empathy, or interpersonal interactions.
I have a lot of lawyers in my social circle and this is definitely the case! I wonder if the “strong sense of justice” trait also attracts a lot of neurodivergent people to the industry initially.
I’m sure it differs from person to person, but a significant portion (possibly a majority) of the people at my law school seemed to be there because they didn’t have any other ideas about what to do with their undergraduate degree. Easy access to ruinous student loan debt can seriously warp a person’s decisionmaking process.
Generally: Programmer - Currently making video games but have also worked with a vast array of platforms and things. Corporate apps, mobile, AR, Weird art things with Raspberry Pi’s…
For me being able to fall into a hole to solve a problem is the best feeling ever, problem is then everything goes by the wayside and I forget to stop and eat or sleep 😅.
Of course the downsides is attempting to do anything I can’t latch my brain onto. I know now that I am not built for a corporate environment…
Just saw this post. Weird art things with a raspberry pi sounds very interesting. What kind of stuff did you make?
Switched about 10 jobs working for someone else. Now just doing UberEATS and Doordash deliveries. Money is not great but the balance of work/money/free time is good enough.
Having lots of free time is key. For me, that free time affords me all the time I need for all those self care activities that suffer when I’m working full time, like showering and sleeping and keeping my living space somewhat tidy. I don’t know how people manage that when they’re working full time!!
Yes! Maybe neurotypicals just have more control of their attention, less intrusive thoughts distracting them, kinda more “stable” internal weather.
Oh to have stable internal weather!
I’ve done a handful of different fields, but they all end the same with me burning out and quitting as well. Web design, organic farming, dishwashing/prep cook, hostel front desk and housekeeping, etc.
Now I’ve been out of work for a while and I have no idea what to even do anymore. Farming was great until my body told me it was done, especially after having covid. I’ve been a bit lost for what to do ever since, sadly.
I got a job in R&D and it’s great. I also work for a great company so there’s that. I lead the Neurodivergent Support Group for my company! I really got lucky as I realize so many of us have issues with employment.
Been in healthcare for well over a decade now, in a variety of roles. I’m currently a data scientist working in pop health for a large and world-renown academic medical center. I think my kind of neurodivergence (honestly not even sure how to label it) works really well for both the work that I do, and the work-adjacent stuff I learned to get really good at (my brain loves connecting things, so I’m very good at mapping out an org and figuring out who to talk with, how to navigate politics, etc.) which was helpful for my career. I sometimes wonder how much of my work time is spent on things I’m actually told to do, and how much comes from things I’ve found myself in charge of or involved in because I found them interesting or they were important to me (like diversity stuff).
