Looked up which were the highest paying jobs for people not inheriting wealth or social connections. Realized the field was oil & gas and the highest job was Petroleum Engineer, took Chemical Engineering because of its wide applicability, accepted I’d be working in the boonies for at least a decade of my life, made it work.

5/10. Wouldn’t recommend for the loneliness.

ahdh, I work at a bank because it pays well for not having a degree

I was very lucky. I got my diagnosis at age 44, right when I started figuring out I was good at identifying and resolving process gaps. With meds, I found out I was really good at it, as well as rapidly understanding very complex processes, and being able to explain them to different parties. Suddenly I oversee a bunch of data architects and software engineers who do file ingestion and data analysis. And without me, they function like a squabbling kindergarten, if they function at all.

Took apart a computer that I didn’t own… said “oh shit, I gotta put this back together and make sure it works!”. Put it back together, it worked. 30+ years later… I work in the computer industry.

Separate what makes you money and your ability to support yourself from what makes your life worth living. Two massively different concepts!

Good luck!!

I studied physics in undergrad, and was planning to continue to graduate studies. Took me until my senior year to realize that I actually found most of the work in physics to be extremely boring, and I was actually just following the degree path out of an egoistic desire to prove how smart I was.

But now that I’d lost my path in life so close to graduating, I realized I needed to find another, fast. Luckily I’d been taking classes for a CS minor, so switched that to a major and graduated with both degrees with an additional 6 months of classes.

However, since I’d been banking on physics, I only had one summer to do a CS internship, got it at a no-name local company, and ended up in .Net development after graduation. Despite what Lemmy might say, .Net is actually not that bad - at least as a developer. The documentation is good, the tooling mostly makes sense, and corporate support is pretty responsive. But it doesn’t lend itself to working on sexy, pro-social, world-changing tech. So I generally found my coworkers and company to be pretty boring and closed minded, and the work we did to be quite meaningless.

Due to the lack of social connection at the job and meaninglessness I felt about the work - in combination with the fact that I kind of felt I’d been forced into the occupation by circumstance - I suffered from a pretty consistent depression for about 5 years while working in software.

Luckily, my actual passion was the outdoors. During college, I’d taken 6 months off to hike the appalachian trail, spent my weekends going to the mountains with friends, and spent weekdays riding bicycles around town and dumpster diving - I was happy doing these things, and realized I didn’t need much in the way of money or material posessions to make me happy.

So when I got my software job, I immediately started saving as much money as possible and putting it in investments. So after working for about 8 years, I was able to retire.

These days I work part time rigging concerts, do little diy projects around the house, and go rock climbing. So on the whole, I feel like it worked out well. Though now I have the itch to get back into software and prove that I could do the thing where I do something meaningful and enjoy it and make tons of money.

Money and its ability to support my (future) family was the biggest deciding factor for choosing IT. The other factor was not wanting my passion (playing music) becoming a necessary burden to make ends meet, with the resulting stress killing my passion.

It’s just a job. Some days it’s good, some days it really fuckin’ blows, but overall, it’s tolerable.

Land Survey. I stumbled into it by accident and it is perfect for ADHD folks. It’s a combination of cartography, history, law, geometry, geography. You can be in an office, you can work outside. Best part is, you can get licensed with out a degree in a lot of states. And, even if you don’t get a license, you can make a decent living at it.

I needed a stable job so. And it was the easiest way to get it.

After I chose to follow my passion and started working on that, which is my current job. Just to find out that not because you work in your passion your job is going to be fun.

Then I realized than a job is a job. And most jobs are shitty. So I focused on working as little hours as possible and just enjoy my hobbies.

My adhd was mostly untreated til about a couple years ago, and I was tryna get into film or TV production, but indecision paralysis hindered me 6 ways til Sunday, and being diabetic was also a major hurdle cause I needed good insurance. Thankfully my dad was a union electrician so I got into that easily. But I couldn’t handle construction and quit after 3 months. Then I went into something more residential, but injured my wrist. Luckily they let me do dispatch and other desk job stuff there and I just kinda stayed, cause going to one location and staying there really worked out for me.

Not every job is a great fit for someone with ADHD, but some of that is a learning curve as well. If you’re worried about it I’d recommend looking into the kinds of work that are more hands on, active, and varied.

Beyond that, you don’t choose a job for life. You don’t even necessarily choose an industry for life. Most people will change jobs, industries, even entire careers once or twice. I’d expect people with ADHD probably more so.

You look for something that aligns pretty well with what you want, while doing that you figure out what parts of it you’re good at or you like, then down the line you steer your career in a direction that aligns more with those things. You do that two or three times and you end up with a fulfilling career you may not have known existed at the outset.

I just always followed my passion: IT. But I really don’t work well in groups or with someone above me so I rarely did that. So basically I retired somewhere in my 20s, which already was over 20yrs ago. Since then I live ny passion at home, tinkering with my servers, smart home and just general coding. Rest of the time I enjoy with wifey and travel. Guess I’m one of the luckier ones.

Tried to become a philosophy professor but couldn’t get funding for my PhD - needed another 5% on my grades to get a distinction at MSc level to achieve that.

While studying philosophy I’d got interested in FOSS and Linux so I was vaguely aware that I found computers interesting. It turned out there was Scottish government funding for doing a MSc in Computing without needing to have done a relevant undergrad (Computer Science would have required a related UG degree).

Became a dev after doing the MSc Computing. Was a junior for 1 year then left that company and moved to another one at mid-level, where I realised I enjoyed the data related tasks. Promoted to senior after 3 years there. Also became aware Data Engineers got paid more than regular engineers.

Moved to my current company as a mid-level Data Engineer and recently became a Senior Data Engineer. Not 100% sure how it all happened given I’ve never been particularly good at maths however philosophy has a lot of problem solving/discrete mathematics type puzzles involved so that probably helped.

I’ve always enjoyed computers. Said I didn’t want to do it for work, because it would make it less fun.

I was actively looking at becoming a paramedic when I got a job working with IT because it came easy and natural to me. I’ve been doing it for years now. I don’t find it nearly as entertaining as I used to, but I’ll admit that’s not because of work. I’d rather just work on cars all day as a hobby instead. Or sewing or embroidery.

Most people don’t love their job.

I had several careers doing vastly different jobs - both white and blue collars - in seven countries. I can tell you what I did to land my jobs, but bear in mind that I’m close to retirement, so what I did back then may not work anymore, as the job market was probably more more open when I started out.

I basically applied for jobs being brutally honest about what I could and couldn’t do, about my flaws and my strenghs. For instance, one of the things I always said during job interviews was that I’m terminally lazy, and that’s why they should hire me because I will work long hours to put something in place that will allow me to not do something repetitive more than once. Turns out, this line was both true and the thing that sold my application for most of my employers.

Also, when I changed jobs completely - for example when I went from computer programmer to CAD designer - I applied for a job at small companies that didn’t necessarily have the money to pay seasoned engineers and told them I was a fast learner, and proposed a big pay cut for 6 months until I proved that I could do the new job I had no experience in. A few key employers took a chance on me, allowing me to change career. And of course, once I had experience doing whatever new thing I set out to do, I could apply for another job in that field and claim experience.

Finally, I did not hesitate to find employers abroad. If I saw a company I liked that offered a job in another country, I applied, flew over to the interview, and if my application was selected, I relocated. I did that 6 times. It’s not for everybody, but if you’re mobile - or extremely mobile in my case - it increases your chances to find your dream job.

Of course, as the years passed, I accumulated quite a resume with an eclectic variety of jobs I held, and places I lived, and my resume spoke more and more for myself as a proof that I could do all those things, so I had less and less trouble finding jobs with employers that knew just by reading my resume that I can adapt to anything.

Would this work today? Maybe. I know the job market is a lot rougher than when I graduated. So don’t necessarily take what I did as something to follow verbatim today. But maybe some of the things I did would work for you too…