The EdTech Revolution Has Failed

I dropped out around the same time, and one other key thing I’ve noticed is the tech bootcamps hadn’t completely taken over yet, so there was less of a flood of other entry level people to fight for every single opening. You would even get a call back sometimes applying cold (no internal referral).

I tend to throw “lucky” in there too when telling the tale of how I got my foot in the door— it’s hard not to, considering my jobs before that were call center rep, bus boy and dishwasher at restaurant, camp counselor. Tech changed my entire life.

I got kind of double-lucky in my case too.

When I dropped out, I assumed that my job options were limited to minimum wage work, so I applied to McDonald's, Lowes, Target, Walmart (as a cashier), Aldi, and a few other places in one day (driving around the Orlando area). When I got home, sort of on a whim I applied to junior-level Coldfusion+Flash job I saw on Craigslist, thinking that there's no chance but it also didn't cost me anything to apply.

The only job that called me back was the software job, which I thought was bizarre, but it's what kickstarted the career.

In hindsight, I think the reason none of the others called me back was because they saw some college and they were afraid that I would quit the second that I went back to school.

I learned two important lessons that day: 1) The typical Wayne Gretzky "you miss 100% of the shots you don't take", and 2) the less qualified you are for a job, the more willing a company is to overlook a lack of qualifications.

I'd like to elaborate on point 2 because I don't see it mentioned much.

The conventional wisdom for finding a job (qualified or otherwise) is to see what's in demand and learn that skill (e.g. something popular like Java), but then you hit a problem: everyone is applying to that job. There are lots of people who learned Java from school or work, and you're competing with all of them. 2012-dropout-tombert would be applying for the same job as a 4.0-GPA'd-Harvard-Graduate, and as such the company will almost always choose the latter.

When I applied to the Coldfusion job, I accidentally discovered that because it was (even in 2012) a pretty niche bit of tech, no one applied to it. I didn't really know Coldfusion either, but the fact that I applied at all was an artifact of me not having the option to work in a more popular platform, and I was able to learn it quick enough to where it wasn't really a problem.

Thanks for sharing all of this Tom. It's always cool to learn the various backstories behind mainstay HN contributors. Hope the rest of your career is going as well as that first day!

Ha! Never really thought of myself as a "mainstay" contributor, but I'll take it.

I mean, like most careers its had its ups and downs. 2023 was an exceptionally awful year for me (like many, many people in tech), but this year has been pretty alright.

I think you might be right about why you didn’t get the retail job callbacks. On the other hand I bet today that’s no longer the case, because it’s so hard to find anyone to staff a retail job who is even remotely competent or reliable. Even if you did quit 3 months later, that’s probably above average now.

Happy for you that you found your niche!

I think part of it also goes to my second point; since lots of people are qualified for retail jobs, they get a lot of applications, meaning I was competing with a very large pool of people.

I never got confirmation on this, but I am about 95% sure that I was the only person who applied to the Coldfusion job. Compare that to Target, where there was literally a queue of people applying at the terminal in the store.

I’ve been declined for enough jobs to know that you can be declined for the dumbest reasons, or no reason at all, so trying to reason about it is an exercise in futility, but I am pretty sure that a lack of applicants is the reason I got the coldfusion job