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Ask HN: A plea to help me help my father

Article news.ycombinator.com

Ask HN: A plea to help me help my father

My mother died in a car accident yesterday. To my great regret, I had constantly been putting off seeing her for years, and it leaves me deeply stricken that not only did she die with nobody at her side, but that she had spent years alone, with nobody keeping her company as she became isolated in older age.

While delivering the news, my father told me his doctor had given him two years to live, ten months ago. I don't want to repeat the same mistake. I want to spend the next year with him, fulfilling his dream of a cross-country road trip, something which he gave up on to raise me as a single father.

However, I cannot afford to do this. I did odd jobs here and there, but the kind of small-time contract work I dabbled in has dried up with the advent of LLMs, and my own savings are insufficient.

I would be incredibly grateful to be given a job opportunity with remote, flexible hours that would allow me to work while fulfilling my father's dream. I am not a conventional hire. I didn't finish high school, I don't have a formal employment history. I can offer a portfolio of personal projects but my resume is the kind that gets auto-rejected.

I can be incredibly useful, if you'll give someone the system overlooks a chance. I've spent 12+ hours a day for years programming all kinds of random things, most with no market value but which have developed my skills tremendously. I have experience with just about anything you can name, from embedded assembly and bare metal devops to Android apps and web dev and everything in between. On the off chance I don't, I'll learn anything you can throw at me. I simply love programming for programming's sake. I can wrangle a chatbot if that's what the job demands, but I prefer to use them for research and brainstorming and hand roll the best code I can myself, delivering something of far higher quality than you can get with prompting.

I have confidence in my own skills and that I can eventually break into the market on my own merits. But I don't have 'eventually'. My mother is dead and my father is dying. It's my own fault things ended up this way, not being the child I should have been for them earlier, and these regrets are mine to bear, but all I can do is ask for help to prevent another regret being added to the pile. I promise I will make it worth your while if you can give me a chance.

(A contact e-mail address is in the profile. Please forgive the anonymous account, it shames me to be begging like this... )

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