lowlander's comments

Came here to say Schwab as well. Caught me very pleasantly by surprise. It's easy to get a human on the phone, they are always very knowledgeable and get me answers fast. I've dealt with them on everything from bounced checks to wire transfers to self directed 401k questions, not one sub par experience.

I don't have a good answer. the money and possible upside of future opportunities in software are probably the biggest things keeping me tied to this work. I keep coming back to these things when I doubt myself:

1. what kind of person do i aspire to be? what kind of life do I want to lead and what example do i want to set for my kids and my family? one who is miserable but makes good money and is just in it for the paycheck. or someone who lives a life of purpose, passion and enthusiasm. 2. people who are passionate, excited and invested in something can usually find a way to make good money. especially these days. 3. being less than enthused about what I do might actually be what's keeping me from finding more financial success

Thanks for your vulnerability and sharing your story. Good for you for moving forward and moving on, glad it's working out for you. I've been in several bad situations, maybe not quite as bad as yours, and every time I get out I have nearly the same realization as you did - it just wasn't worth it. Whatever valid reasons I thought I had for staying were almost never worth the anguish and pain of sticking it out. I resent those people and situations too, and I try to fight it by remembering that resentment is like swallowing poison and hoping the other person dies.

One thing I noticed you didn't talk about was what you tried to build? Did your learning have a purpose and goal of actually creating something - in other words, were you trying to actually build an app or tool or thing that you wanted to exist? Maybe you were missing an specific reason or purpose for your brain to put the pieces together beyond just "learning".

I am self taught and would have given up in short order but for the fact that I really wanted to build something specific (a web app that did something with text messages), I thought would be useful and therefore had reason to keep going even when I understood almost none of what I was doing. I used Michael Hartl's Ruby on Rails Tutorial and literally just copy/pasted his code until it worked without understanding any of it. It took me a very long time (many months if not years) to really understand the pieces and how they all fit together and then be able to apply that knowledge.

I've seen people with no experience do a month or two bootcamp and come away with a way better grasp than I would have, but they lack the real-world experience of applying that knowledge.

I'm working on changing careers. After 10 years of struggling to find the right role/company/environment in software dev or product management, I realized that I just don't like making software. Period. Made some good friends, enjoyed some of the work, learned a lot, got pretty decent at the whole SaaS thing, but I just don't like it.

That realization over the last couple weeks has been a huge relief. I'd like to explore some things I'm naturally curious about such as agricultural waste management.