Unemployed programmer here. If you compromise and give up on your dreams of art (music) then life will at least give you a little while of employment before it becomes as useful as your dreams

Is alcoholism hiring?

I changed majors to anthropology because I hoped that it would help me understand humans and therefore myself. Now I know a lot more about how much I don't know, and every job in the field has hyper specific requirements that make it seem like they were written to guarantee the PI's grad student gets the position.

Streaming

The version I stick by is "Find a job you enjoy doing, and you'll start hating it".

Forget majors, get a PhD. You'll be even less hireable because companies won't want to pay you more.

also true of majors your hate tho

Oh it's hiring alright. If your dad knows people.

Anthropology made me the school bus driver I am today.

Or you’ll need at least 15 years of experience for the unpaid, entry level, 6-month-contract position.

I'm reminded of this girl I met in college, who was a print journalism major. She knew it was a dying field, but she loved it and was dead-set on riding it into the ground.

Damn, thinning about it, her determination and humor as contributor to the student newspaper was hot!

I love programming because it feels like magic.

Couldn't choose it as a major because everyone wanted it while I was going to college. It was too competitive.

I still learned it, have fun making things. Helping others by making tools. Thought I could get a job in programming because "degree doesn't matter".

Now the degree matters a lot because they have plenty with the degree, I think it didn't matter in the beginning because there weren't enough people. Now with AI, the people with degree aren't finding jobs. So no way anyone hiring me.

But because I love programming I still use it on my job. Making tools for clients and internal productivity. Basically working like a software engineer without a software engineer salary because I love it.

So profit??? To the company?

Biochemistry drove me into the Navy.

I choose major wealth redistribution by taxing the ultrarich out of existence.

PS I had a liquid-shooting-out-of-nose-chuckle moment. Thanks.

pretty much bio-research, if you arnt lucky with 1-2 years before graduation you are out of luck.(seats in labs are very limited in universities), many PI got burned by volunteers flaking on the duties, so they resist even mentioning lab work to potential students. also labs predominately prefer 1 demographic over another. and entry levels wont entertain you for a job, because its became a catch 22.

or some people love 1 major but cant seem to grasp the pre-req classes, as in passing them. i knew one that kept trying, but thier advisor told her to just give up because you arnt doing so well.

The overwhelming majority of bachelor degree holders don't work in a field related to their major. Something like 30% of university graduates are working in a field related to their major.

That's fine, and it's always been normal. A university education isn't purely a vocational school, and generalized education is still very useful for navigating the world, including careers.

Most job fields just don't have a corresponding major. So much of the economic world is just administrative work, and the skill sets to be able to manage that are both universal across all job fields (using email and calendar software, word processing, the entire spectrum of skillsets for spreadsheets, maybe even basic scripting or programming, generally navigating through UIs of unfamiliar software or websites) or highly specific to one field and not necessarily learned in school (how to use a proprietary software product, or a particular piece of equipment invented long after you graduated from school, etc.).

Most jobs involve the intersection of two or more fields, and very few people will have majored in coursework related to both, and tend to have learned one or more of the intersecting fields well after they graduated, on the job or otherwise. Software sales. Aircraft leasing broker. Solar panel financing. Data journalism. One interesting area is that there are a surprisingly number of people who make the jump from oil and gas distillation/refining to becoming the master distiller for a major spirits producer.

There are really only a few dozen majors, but probably a few thousand career paths from there.

Heard the same things about passion, and because someone else is always willing to do it for free...

not true, ask any barista

But i wanted to be an engineer since a little kid, does it still apply?

Maybe I'm one of the lucky few it worked out alright for I guess.

The great part about entering a miserable field where everyone is quitting is that you can at least get hired. The bad part speaks for itself

Me in IT after being out of work for the past year and a half.

I remember one role where they listed a maths degree as essential; turns out their idea of "degree level mathematics" was calculating standard deviation and variance.

Generally, even if a job suggests it's in your field, you're not going to spread your wings much. I do think this is part of why people hate their jobs so much - they trained hard, learned so many things, and then got dumped into microsoft office and "doing things as they've always been done" because some arse in HR was unicorn hunting.

I'm a computer science major. If I graduate after the bubble pops, I don't know what I'm gonna do.