My odds are probably not great to reach out about this specifically but I figure it’s worth a shot since I’m in a major depressive episode and I need to channel it into something. If you read all of this, thank you.
I’m a thirty-something disabled trans woman in the US who works in tech. I’ve been doing programming for almost 15 years and I have been unemployed since January of last year. I am at my wit’s end trying to navigate this AI-infested, ATS fueled hell that is interviewing at any god damn tech company in 2024.
I used to work fully remotely for an airline company, and that was lovely. All through my career, even pre-Covid, I’ve had coworkers who worked completely online with us from all around the world, and it was never an issue. 2020-2022 were honestly something of a relief to me as I was finally able to make time and space needed to keep my health condition in check. I need to use temperature-regulated medication at all hours of the day, and that is of course much easier to do from my home than on the bus, or the train, or an office building. Now tech is apparently allergic to the concept and is forcing all of us back into offices around the country and as an immunocompromised person due to said condition I really can’t risk any more than is necessary, or else get even more serious complications, or die. If I absolutely must I’ll go back…but I can’t even do that. I have exhausted all of the local options I am aware of to radio silence, and we can’t afford to move or drive anywhere (no car). I have genuinely never seen a job market this bad, and I was a late teen working in 2008. I am very desperate and need help finding anything, anything that I can actually do.
I am not capable of prolonged manual labor anymore, but my wife works a minimum wage job at this local chuck e cheese knockoff to support us in the mean time, which means she is surrounded by an apathetic, anti-mask population and hundreds of teenagers and kids daily. She is the only one who wears an N95 to work; everyone else, including coworkers, refuses when offered. It was the only thing we could find to keep us from homelessness. To say we are stressed out is putting it lightly.
We aren’t hurting for money (yet) but my savings ran dry long ago and we are on the razor’s edge. I just want to work safely again, man. I’m sorry if this is not the right place for something like this, but I don’t know what else to do.
Do you have more info about this? I have been doing a lot of hobbyist lisp stuff (Racket & Scheme) with a little bit of python on the side, too. That sounds almost too good to be true, lol
My specific experience is with AutoLisp and the Arcpy library for ArcGIS Pro. We do fiber optic network design and permitting, so having someone that can auto draft a spliced network using code is invaluable. Otherwise you have someone going page by page on a print tracing millions of fibers from the service point to the terminal to make sure it was designed correctly.
My job is to write code that takes a physical network of underground bore paths or aerial span runs and connects each service point along that route to that network and allocates fiber cables according to design guidelines from the client.
Here's an example of one of our maps:
That's just a single street, we usually do whole cities. Currently about halfway through building a new network in Houston.
From my experience so far in this field, the way I'm doing things is the way of the future and it's going to require tons more people that can do that sort of work. Especially because of the massive amount of money that was basically handed to telecoms recently for FTTH build out across the country.
If you don't want to work directly for an engineering firm, you can also contact them as a contractor that will help them build automation or auto-quality control scripting to help validate designs.