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I was on CL looking for an N64 controller and this drunk guy posted an ad for an English teacher in Beijing in the for sale part of craigslist.
I thought that misplaced ad was funny, applied, got the job and flapped over to Beijing to teach.
Rocked. made more than in the states working less than half as much ($2500 USD/month for 9-20 teaching hours a week), cost of living was insignificant, great food, learned mandarin, started traveling and never stopped, and a lot more!
I wish I had known about overseas teaching when I was younger. My kids about to be a teenager and am trying to get him to get the hell out of this country and go visit Switzerland or go teach English in Beijing something like that too. Just to get some experience outside the US. Once he's old enough of course, just planting seeds now.
That's great, let the notion simmer. I heard about teaching overseas multiple times before the right opportunity struck at the right time.
Teaching English is such a quick, comfortable route out of the US rat race, and travel is a wonderful way to build curiosity, respect and tolerance.
I worked with a 67 year old English teacher in Beijing, so with a teenage son, you're probably well within the comfortable age range for English teachers. With 2 billion English students, they aren't saying no to many native speakers.
You can always start with an hour or two a week on an online platform too, if traveling isn't in the cards right now.
Thanks for reaching out, someone else from the US I've been talking to just let me know twenty minutes ago they're moving to Portugal with their wife! I hope these posts stay useful, and I'll be here to offer advice and encouragement as long as I'm able.
If you or your teenager have any questions about travel now or later, let me know!
My previous boss showed me the job listing and said that it was better than anything he could offer, and told me to apply for it out else he'd lose respect for me.
Sounds like a great boss
Sinceriously the best
In 2008, I was fed up with a combination of wage slavery and freelancing, so I started looking around for a proper career. I found a job posting on monster.com for something called "seismic survey technician". I was severely underqualified and I had no idea what it was, but it involved computery stuff with and emphasis on Linux and other unix systems, in addition to international travel which sounded interesting, so I sent in my application out of curiosity.
I ended up getting the job, turns out dicking around with Slackware and FreeBSD for 10 years was actually useful. Over the years since then I've carved out a pretty comfy niche in the industry.
I chose from a list of vocational schools that the GI bill would pay for.
Imagine my dismay after I graduated the schools, Veterans Affairs told me I have to pay all that money back. So I've spent the last 15 years working those jobs to repay the government all that college money they said I earned for serving in the army. Thanks for all these years of empty promises & torture, GI bill.
Why did you have to pay it back?
Wait, how did they approve and pay it in the first place?
I've always been unable to ignore bullshit from management at work. It's cost me jobs and promotions in the past, but now I work for a trade union, where the ability and desire to argue with bosses is a benefit rather than a liability.
Unions are a good thing, unfortunately I've only had bad experiences in my professional life.
Unions are made up of human beings, and unfortunately most human beings suck. Unions are the only way we know to fix bad workplaces though.
I know, I like/support them conceptually and hate them in anecdotal experience.
Basically because of video games.
It first started with doing some admin work for a very early online StarCraft tournament. Keeping the roster/grid up-to-date and posting results ... by literally editing the html file. Started out helping out more and eventually got into PHP code of this early tournament software and helped with that.
Then later it turned into writing scripts and addons for World of Warcraft, as well as just hosting the general infrastructure like forums, dkp systems and voice chat servers you need for a large guild. Even later external online tools for EvE Online (D-scan parsing, wormhole mapping).
Then I just got lucky and while telling someone all of these "qualifications" they basically just hired me. Even funnier, over a decade later an old WoW guildmate approached me with a programming issue ... and after solving it he offered me a much better job. That's were I work now.
This but it started with pirating video games.
I certainly remember the age of "key-gens" when you still had keys on the back of the CDs that you bought. But the internet wasn't quite up for actually downloading entire games, yet (it would take weeks or months. Heck, mp3s took days back then).
Yeah, I'm kind of old.
I failed upward to the level of my own incompetence.
How's it going, Peter?
No, this is Patrick!
IT.
Injured out of infantry and poored out of college but landed a shitty little ISP job. Started one to beat that one, because they were sleazy like used-car salesmen. Left embezzling biz-partner to do coding-adjacent job in NJ and stop being startup-poor. Kept working. Fast forward.
I only regret I was unable to use my skills to relo for new jobs farther away like some of my peers.
From a news paper ad. Yes I'm that old. It was only almost 26 years ago...
Been climbing communication towers since 2000 March. I'll be 50 on the 16th.
I was working at a hotel job part time while doing a bachelor's business degree when I finished the exam prep up to a point where I didn't see a benefit and tried out codecademy.
I had an incredibly pure joy of just creating shitty webpages and doing assignments, learned some javascript and then it hit me.
I started a compsci degree, stopped working and got some student loans and overkilled every programming assignment. I basically thought "If programming is the most valuable part, I'm just gonna max it at the cost of everything else" and it was a fantastic choice.
I applied to all the jobs in Iceland, nobody took me in so I started applying to bunch of jobs in all of Europe. Ended up landing my first job in Germany and that's where it my career started.
Are you remote or did you move to Germany?
I moved but then covid hit and I moved back to Iceland and got myself a remote job in the US as a full-time contractor.
Process is pretty easy for EU/EEA citizens.
IT professional for 20 years. C/C++ developer for 10 years prior to that.
My first job out of college was mostly luck. I took a job doing tech support but after a couple of years was able to transition into development work.
Virtually every job since that first one has been thanks to connections I made among coworkers. I got my current job because I knew two employees here. One of them was a co-founder of the company, and somebody I’ve known since the 1990’s and worked with at 3 other companies prior to this.
Mine was all over the place to be honest.
Couldn't afford college, so I joined the military as a weather forecaster - which is what I'd wanted to go to college for anyway.
After my contract, I tried to get into a college for meteorology, but because of the way some "classes" are graded for the military associates you can get, my GPA was technically too low for that program to accept me. I didn't really have another choice for a college at the time, so I did a ton of research on bls.gov and decided to get a degree in geology.
Gosh I loved that program. But unfortunately I got really sick midway through and spent a lot of time in the hospital. What I was diagnosed with basically meant that I would never be able to be a geologist, so I had to swap gears again.
Instead I found GIS and got my degree in technical geography. Took a ton of internships that landed me with a good resume.
Now I work for a utilities company, making maps that are used internally. Since it's utility work, we're union and we have great benefits and flexibility. It's really worked out for me
Maps rock yeah!
Emergency/Crit care doctor.
I initially studied physics/maths with a goal to go into aerospace engineering. I was binge watching scrubs and I thought medicine might be cool so I did that, then I thought emergency medicine sounded cool so I did that, then I thought critical care sounded cool so I did that.
Basically I'm a child that makes poor life choices because things sound cool.
I didn't - I created it.
I'm a self-employed home improvement contractor. I got laid off from my previous job as a plumber and I didn't want to just find a different company to do the same thing for, so I instead took this decade-long vision of a better alternative and turned it into a business.
Sounds like a plumbers answer.
I was stuck working in restaurants in my late 20s recovering from alcoholism. Managed to get set up at trade school with a friend who gave me rides till I got my license back. Studied industrial electricity and got a job as a helper shortly after, I've been a licensed electrician for a few years now and work for myself.
I love my trade. It kicks my ass some days but most of the time its not bad, I make good money, and I can feel good about the work. I do a lot of residential service calls these days, I love fixing homes.
Luck. Nobody dreams about being an auditor( unless you are an accountant) but I had just graduated and was looking for a job like crazy and saw and add for a trainee program in a big4 company. Manage to go in and that's it. trainee programs in big comlanies can teach you a lot. 10/10 would recomend
I fell into it, and let me tell you the excel skills of my coworkers is abhorrent. One of them maintains a shared workbook with 30 worksheets all held together by manually-pasted data and she acts like Vlookups are the greatest thing since sliced ass
C# Software dev....
Well i liked doing it during test runs. Wanted to be a cook but that doesnt pay. Neither does if you get a degree in history and i wouldnt have made it threw more standardised tests.
And that one company was the only offer i got to train me sooooo here i am. :)
Not that i dislike it. Its really fun. (Exept the user story writing. I really dislike that!)
Rust Software engineer.
At a very young age, maybe 12yo, a friend of my mom's knew I liked computers, maths, and english, so he sent a youtube course to me on python. And I just couldn't stop watching it. Since then I've learnt a few more languages, but Rust stuck in my mind and I simply loved every part of it. Recently I received an offer to work with Rust on a financial company and I've never been so excited about a job :3
You just described my nephew. He saved up to buy the dolphin hacking tool, I gave him an old laptop to do his more dangerous stuff on so he didn't break his current one, stuff like that. Built his own keyboard, 3d prints me fun shit like a pocket knife wall rack. He's barely in 6th grade. Loves making his own board game rules and messing around with programming and make space stuff.
He is a little autistic and has trouble controlling emotions, explodes easily, but can occupy himself with awesome tech stuff.
I'm autistic too :D
If you show him the game Kerbal Space Program I'm sure he'll love it! And always incentive breaking shit, it's how humans learn ❤️
Thats awesome bud!
I got hurt on the job and was given compensation. While I was free someone suggested I get a book called "Discover What You Are Best At," by Linda Gail.
It's a series of tests and then a list of the jobs that use those skills.
I've read a few 'self help' books over the years, but this is the one that actually worked.
And no, I won't mention my career. What made me happy will probably make everyone else miserable.
Why won't you mention your career?
It's a pretty specialized job, with less than a million* people doing it in the whole country. I don't want to give anything away.
*Actually, somewhere between 27,060 and 989,515 full time employees.
That low number is a little less than the number of operators in my field.
My last job was going out of business and one of my old coworkers recommended I go work at a slaughterhouse her son works at. Been there 4 months now and like it a lot more than my last job. Still a job though so only so much I can like it.
Neigsendoig (my producer) and I used numerology to determine what we're doing now. We're both designed to be content creators, though it's mostly Neigsendoig who's been doing it more than I have.
