I’ve been inside LCCC, at the library. I’ve never been to a class. I applied for financial aid after I graduated high school and wouldn’t have got enough to go to school full time. I would have had to work and pay.
I wanted to go. I knew there were things I could breeze through. I was going to go for a degree in computer science, and I had a significant head start compared to most of my peers. I also wanted to attend JVS while in high school, but I skipped it so I could make my cousin feel comfortable starting at my high school.
I never stopped learning the way I had in middle and high school. My interests were in programming mostly in native languages (C++, C, D) and reverse engineering x64 executables. I also have interests in DevOps and sysadmin, both Windows and Linux. I’m very adept at finding and absorbing documentation. My knowledgebase is large enough to make me feel comfortable getting started with just about anything. If I wanted to try making a game on a whim one day, I would have no problem researching and downloading a game engine and getting it working and starting a development loop.
I also enjoy toying around with self-hosted services and even had my own e-mail server setup at one point, able to send and receive emails without getting blocked by big providers. I’ve applied for many IT jobs in the past, but it seems in the area I live they are rather hard to come by. That is why I had set my sights on leaving Ohio before starting a family. I wasn’t dead set on it, because my job at the time was giving me regular increases and recognition. Now I’ve heard that they’ve made it so I can’t work anywhere in Ohio ever again. I had the qualifications to apply to Brilliant to work as a programmer, but because of the things I was hearing at the time and the way my previous employer treated me I decided to hold off until this is resolved by the police.
My partner is currently going to college part-time, and it is a lot of driving back and forth. Thankfully, the school isn’t too far from where we live, but it does limit my options right now when it comes to finding employment again for myself. She would have to start using Uber again and it would consume a significant portion of our finances. We do have 3 cars at the house we live in; one person could drive each car. But apparently, the 3rd is a death trap, and the owner is unwilling to do anything to fix it right now, we have to wait.
I’m afraid I’ve spent more time doing research and small projects than most people spend in school to get their degree for computer science. I have proven projects that are still running in production, some of them the first projects in their respective specific languages.
The opportunity to go back to college while working full-time came from my last employer. They did offer to pay, but at that point they weren’t even willing to pay for what I already knew and what I was already doing. I would have been willing to sacrifice the time if they had compensated properly. My partner was stretched so thin that she went through a depression herself. I declined and continued to put in the above and beyond effort that got me the recognition I had gotten.
Once I reached a point where I needed to pull back a little and level things off for a little bit, I mentioned this to multiple people. It was at this point where I wasn’t given time to do my job. Part of my duties that I set myself was to write documentation and get all of the projects under source control. I worked on setting up Azure DevOps with some Teams integrations and once I had something worth showing, it just stopped working altogether. Microsoft never responded to me via the support ticket.
I was never just a programmer. Because I started working from the manufacturing floor, I was visited often by people I had worked with before. I helped others fix problems that were blocking them, taking a load off somebody else’s plate. The fact that employees from multiple areas had my personal cell phone and were told they could contact me as late as midnight if they needed support was never recognized or acknowledged.
EDIT: Something I feel I have to add. When I was moved from Ridgeville to Strongsville, I was told by my supervisor that upon completion of the LabVIEW projects he had, I was to expect an increase in pay. This did not happen. In fact, I was finishing the only long-term project he had ever given me, the Sequence Tester when I got fired. My supervisor wasn’t privy to the conversation I had with HR about my ongoing medical issues. When I talked to the previous HR about getting time off to help take care of my father, I was met with harsh resistance. As if I was making up that my father was sick. Years later, my father got extremely ill.