A few... Some about jobs in general. Some through the particular lens of happening into technology work, out of a tinkering habit, from a loosely-related arts field. Not all of them are about actually landing work; some of them are just useful and/or important.

*Build what you want to use.*

You'll have significantly more reason to keep going with the project you can show off later if it personally matters to you, relative to focusing on just a tutorial or a curriculum. Whatever that is will give you demonstrable project management experience, total freedom on what the scope of that looks like for as long as its primary user is you, and excuses to dig into a bunch of new subject matter and tools that aren't beyond just what you're currently being instructed to do.

The overall development of your skillset when you do have a job will actually depend a lot on your ability to find other excuses to tinker on new tools, languages, etc that you don't get to do so with at work.

If you extend this to fixing things that you personally find annoying, you can also end up with valuable open source contributions.

*Know your rights.*

You don't have to tolerate everything you encounter in the workplace, just to have a job. Whether that's bigotry, or wage theft, or workplace cultures that tell you that you shouldn't talk about those things. Businesses frown on you doing it, obviously, but the reason that culture is able to persist is in part because we all collectively allow it.

It's trendy for bosses to trash on Gen Z for what they view as a lack of professionalism, much like how there are written examples of "kids these days" going back to the times of ancient philosophers... but it's important to recognize that "nobody wants to work anymore" also has written examples dating back centuries, and that the onslaught of articles about how Gen Z is unemployable are contemporary with tech company leaders encouraging young people to work for free.[1] You're not uniquely terrible, this kind of talk isn't new, and there will always be someone telling you that you're being unreasonable by having basic standards -- whether it's about 996ing, or adherence to pay transparency laws, or relocating to a place that can lay you off in 3 months, or one-way video submissions, or... Anyway. It really isn't just your "attitude," and you are in fact being gaslit. Not every hoop you're being asked to jump through is about "bar-raising," and while Canonical for example is famous for making jokes about how you can go somewhere with lower standards, and linking to the US government, it's also genuinely insane to ask "what would your high school classmates say about you?" as a question on a job application.

On that note, whatever your opinion of cops, regulatory bodies exist to help you. Their jobs are to address abusive and harmful behavior by businesses. Your experiences with them may vary, but employers aren't exempt from rules just because they might regularly act like it.

And even if you don't choose to take the step of going to them, knowing what you should and shouldn't have to put up with is also a filter for the kinds of places where you do and don't want to spend your career, the kinds of people you do and don't want to spend it working with, and the kind of colleague you ought to be to those around you.

It also means nagging your public officials to pass measures that would improve your conditions. (Ideally together, alongside the kinds of colleagues that you do want to spend your career working with.)

Their job is to represent your interests and help you with your problems. You don't have to listen to those officials call that the "complainer class"; those are people you can, and should, replace.

Low-hanging example impacting your generation: the fact that businesses hold you all up as examples for why we shouldn't do anything about the minimum wage -- and that they're allowed to say, out loud, that they should be able to pay you less because you're younger, and pay everyone else less for the entry-level jobs you all would have right now -- is only possible because our age discrimination laws don't cover anyone under 40. (I'm assuming US here.) That makes it worse for everyone else in a lot of other ways too -- for instance, the hustle culture we push on people in their 20s disproportionately harms anyone with additional healthcare or caregiving needs (whether you're older, or you have a disability, or you have kids, or you're caretaking for any of the above...)

A functioning minimum wage is actually a hedge against abusive bosses everywhere, regardless of whether you have a "good" job. So are accessible healthcare and housing. So are unions.

*Find good colleagues*

See above.

More broadly, find people that you can trust with your professional issues -- whether the problems are about your workplace, or whether they're about the tools you're working with.

Internet research is useful, but you should also have some actual personal connection. Your coworkers aren't your friends, but some of them could be, and at a bare minimum you should care about functioning work environments for each other so that you're not the only one caring about them for yourself.

This does not explicitly mean "spend time in an office." Onsites are valuable, but "culture" is how you treat your staff, and you don't have to be around each other all the time to do that.

It does mean you should hang out (physically and otherwise) in spaces that are related to your work but not actually your workplace. At least occasionally, you should meet people that do what you do (or something adjacent to it), including but not limited to the people you directly work with, in spaces your employer doesn't run.

Community isn't something your workplace should own, and will also regularly surface tools that you haven't encountered before.

Several of my favorite colleagues are Internet friends, and several of my favorite tools are finds from HN and places like it.

*Talk to startups*

If you can get in at a small enough company, you can get your hands in a lot of subject matter outside of what you're formally trained in. If you find something genuinely mission-aligned, or a place that values work-life balance more so than a corporate job, or something else that makes it better for you than just a job, it can also be a great way of finding good colleagues.

*Freelance*

You don't actually have to wait to start doing useful work that makes you money. Your probably already have enough of a skillset to fix things for the people around you. This is the same as with side projects -- a useful way to get experience with stuff that's outside the scope of your primary work.

For a personal example, my first open source contribution actually happened in the course of solving a data recovery problem for one of my friends.

*Technology work != technology company*

You can solve tech problems for people in other settings. Lots of small businesses don't have internal staff who thoroughly understand how their systems work, and rely entirely on their vendors for support. Or they're overloaded with manual tasks that you can automate. Or they don't know how to get actionable data that gives the business or its leadership a sense of direction.

You don't have to work for a big tech company in order to have a tech career. You don't even strictly have to use them for everything.

*Do not depend on cloud services*

Using them is fine, and they can be immensely helpful when you need backups, but your whole workflow should not depend on a tool that can rug pull you at any time. It's important to store as much of your work as possible in an open format that isn't dependent on any one client. I particularly encourage you to use Markdown wherever you can.

You especially should not depend entirely on cloud services for your password manager -- use something open source, that you have the option to self-host if things ever go sideways. Go read some of the stories of what happens if your whole Google account gets banned; they're mundane nightmares.

[1] https://fortune.com/2024/07/20/squarespaces-cmo-cold-called-...