Ask HN: Recent grad, need advice. Please help

[pppppqqqqq]

I graduated a month ago with a Bachelor's of Engineering in IT. I live in India. The degree is basically equivalent to CS.

So, my problem is that although I've graduated, I'm still kind of a newbie to programming. I know the absolute basics of things like DS/Algo, HTML/CSS/JS, and C language.

How I happened to fall into this situation is depression and suicidal thoughts. I'm still pretty suicidal so as a last resort I'm selling help from here.

My college years coincided pretty well with the pandemic. My life wasn't going all that well, which lead to me entering a cycle of procrastination where I avoided doing basically everything. I passed the exams as they were almost completely theoretical and required rote memorization.

I also kept myself from actually programming because I kept getting RSI pains in my arms from time-to-time which scared me a bit. Procrastinated incessantly here.

The college also was a pretty low quality one where the teachers didn't actually know anything, taught from PPTs downloaded from the internet, and couldn't actually explain why concepts.

I've graduated now and am now in a pretty strong need of a job due to poverty. Horrible situation to be in, I know. I also know that I'm pretty much incompetent so it's basically nigh impossible for me to get any practical job. I'm kind of caught in a clutch and my mind isn't working, so I'll be grateful for any advice I can get on my situation.

I'm not sure what to do from where I am and am feeling pretty devastated over where I've ended up.

My city is bad in terms of jobs. I see at most 6-8 jobs at any time and many of that are for Senior posts. Metro cities with good jobs are like 1,000 kms away.

I also get strong RSI pains in my arms. I can't get diagnosed for it because I don't have the money. I'm afraid I won't be able to work well due to this limiting my career. This is the part I'm most worried about.

I'm being hammered by the constant issues caused by the severe lack of money and RSI in my arms that keeps me from upskilling. I want to make something out of my life but every moment feels as if I can't.

Please help.

[anjoz]

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[ilaksh]

Sounds incredibly hard.

What are you doing repetitively? Maybe you can leverage that for a job.

Look for medical charity clinics in your area and don't assume you have the right diagnosis.

Upwork and Fiverr can be abusive but they are practically a monopoly. Sign up and try to find an easy sounding task that you can complete in a few days. Then do it and give the task description and your code to GPT-4.

Work your way up more involved tasks and don't apply to any jobs that you aren't sure you can do. You can even try to code the hard part before you apply.

You don't have to do complex software engineering to start. Just try to find easy things to play around with so you can stay motivated while learning hands on.

Also there are lots of jobs where some understanding of IT or core IT skills can help but aren't necessarily really technically challenging. It's okay to do those.

I think that if you really can't pay then you should try to find some charitable medical organization. Also you may be able to find some type of pain killer without having a cure. First step is finding out for sure what causes the pain in your arms.

Also look into coding via voice. Or giving instructions to GPT-4 via voice..using Whisper or the web speech inout related API.

[tomthumb]

Drill down on your DSA and start doing problems on leetcode. Be regular with your prep. Side by side, review your web dev course and start building projects. Freecodecamp would be useful here.

[pppppqqqqq → tomthumb]

But I'm being troubled by RSI

[tomthumb → pppppqqqqq]

Kokoro Zashi Aru Tokoro Ni Michi Ari.