1. Something you’re at least vaguely interested in and don’t mind doing.
2. Something you’re at least vaguely interested in and don’t mind doing.
3. Blockchain, because it’s a scam that is rapidly disintegrating.

No one else can tell you what you should pursue. I didn’t know what I did or didn’t like until I tried a few things and figured out what aspects of them I like and what aspects were not for me. For instance, I don’t like frontend programming and I absolutely hate dealing with external clients. I do something more like data engineering, which a lot of people find deadly boring but I find perfectly satisfactory.

The other thing that’s been really important to me is decoupling my career from my self-worth. My job is not the most important thing about me. My job is something I do so I can get paid enough to do the things I actually want to do. I don’t need to LOVE my job. I need to like it enough to mostly not dislike having to do it 40 hours a week. For me this means I don’t find the work boring, I work with nice people, I mostly don’t have to do things I HATE (e.g. client presentations), and I’m not doing anything that conflicts with my values (e.g. I wouldn’t work on blockchain, or law enforcement projects).

A few of the chatbots I worked on, back when I did that, were actually good. Those companies had actually looked at their support traffic and figured out that like 95% of it was people asking the same 20 or so questions that had specific answers. Or at least that you could get to a specific answer with 1-2 followup questions. Like, a huge number of people just want to know how to pay their bill, and the answer is “go to this webpage or call this number”.

It’s kind of a waste of human time and effort to have a human answering all those questions, so the chatbot dealt with those (and tbh it was 50-50 whether those people even knew they were talking to a robot) and the actual hard shit got a warm transfer to a human agent who got the chat transcript.

Honestly the companies it worked best for, either their online documentation was a total shitshow so the chatbot was your best hope of actually finding anything, or a huge proportion of their customer base were total luddites who just didn’t want to use a website and wanted to talk to someone. (We had to make our chatbots support Internet Explorer 11. In 2021. Because for some of our clients IE11 was like 30% of their traffic. I don’t even fucking know.)

I used to design and maintain chatbots for a living, for a company that among other things sold bespoke chatbots to corporate clients, and I can tell you that the companies KNOW that customers don’t want chatbots for customer service. They don’t care. THEY want chatbots for customer service because chatbots are orders of magnitude cheaper than hiring customer service representatives.

A chatbot is gonna cost what it costs them to employ 1-2 customer service reps, but it can handle basically infinite traffic for that price. The GOOD ones handle the simple questions (your "how do I pay my bill"s and your "what are your hours"s) and then forward the difficult ones (“why is my bill fucked up?”) to a human agent. But I absolutely worked with some clients (who I will not name because I do not want to get sued) that explicitly wanted to avoid letting customers get access to a human agent by whatever means possible.

Also a side note but basically no one lets people cancel accounts via chatbot. They inevitably want THOSE requests to go to a human rep so they can try to talk them out of it.

I quit a PhD program in a social science and this is absolutely true of basically any field about which you cannot say “You need a degree in X to get that job”.

Additionally, colleges and universities are increasingly not hiring tenure-track professors and instead relying on adjuncts to teach their classes. Adjuncts make almost no money, get no benefits, have no job security from one term to another, and often have to adjunct at multiple institutions simultaneously to make ends meet. It’s basically the gig-ification of post-secondary education and it’s awful.

I quit my PhD because I loved the field but it was very clear I wouldn’t be able to live comfortably working in that field. Now I’m a programmer and I made more money at my first non-academic job than my PhD supervisor did with tenure and a decade of seniority.

TIL Beeper exists. Now I am on the wait list, and kind of sad I can’t prepay for a year to skip the line.

You still run into the problem that generally experienced, skilled engineers are not likely to put up with a 30-hour coding challenge. I won’t entertain anything over about 4 hours full stop, and it has to be a very compelling job to get me to spend more than 2. Among the people I know, the more skilled they are the less likely they are to be willing to do more than an hour or two of “homework”, and some of the best people I know won’t do that kind of thing at all because they don’t have to. They can still get good jobs if they exclude every company that does a take-home challenge.

You’re also biasing yourself against people who don’t have 30 hours of free time – anyone with caretaking responsibilities, anyone with health issues that means they need a lot of downtime after work, people whose current job requires a lot of overtime, etc. A lot of those people end up being the people tech already tends to have issues hiring, so it’s just reinforcing the existing biases. Not great!

I’d look at timed problems on hackerrank/leetcode for inspiration, and aim for a 1-2 hour challenge. If there’s a particular skill that you think is particularly important on the team, try to target that.

Dropshipped AliExpress crap and hundreds of people with a cricut and the same free clipart making tote bags/tshirts/dog tags.