Edit: Thanks for the advice. I didn't want to describe the exact situation because I was hoping for more general advice. Listing the age probably would have helped, though. To preface this, I don't have kids
I was left with my 2-year-old niece this afternoon. My sister was working, and my brother-in-law was taking my other niece (5) to a birthday party. Before he left, my brother-in-law put the 2-year-old down for a nap. He told me to wake her up in 2 hours. She woke up in about 20 minutes.
At the time, I was doing some electrical work with the entire house out, because fuck the person who labeled the breaker. So I'm knees deep in exposed wires when I hear someone screaming "daddy!" upstairs. I made things as... less unsafe... as I could and went to her room. After trying to console her for about 10 minutes, I decided to let her just cry it out. She never did.
I finished my work, running up and down the stairs several times (like you do when someone doesn't label the fucking switches), and I went back in her room. She's still screaming for her dad. I eventually got her to calm down by pulling up a nursery rhyme video, and getting her a snack.
So far as I'm concerned, "I did everything right". I didn't get upset, I tried to let her resolve her own issues, and ultimately, I was able to get her to calm down. (I said I didn't get upset. I got very worried she'd walk out with all the wires out of the wall) Still wonder could I have done anything differently? Is this just a no win scenario? What would you have done?
Now the 5 year old I have different problems with. She likes to push buttons. The latest thing being her trying to jump on me when I'm on the couch. My sister has a pretty straightforward time out protocol, which, I've "abused" in the past. They usually give her 5 minutes, I gave her 15 with less warning than they give. (She hit her sister, wtf am I supposed to do...) Holy crap I've never seen a kid that upset! She appealed to my brother-in-law and got the sentence reduced to normal.
So now she does this thing where if I tell her not to do something, she'll try to side step it to see what she actually can get away with. Do I straight shut that down? Do I let it go for a while? She tries to have these kinds of things arbitrated by my sister and brother-in-law. They don't exactly take her side, but they don't take mine either. They kind of let it alone, which empowers her.
My sister and brother-in-law are by no means roll-overs. They take discipline seriously and have fantastic communication with the kids about how both parties feel, why, and why the consequences are what they are. But I tend to be less tolerant of behavior I've already addressed and see as unacceptable. Thoughts?
I'm almost wondering if I wrote this because it sounds a lot like me. I made a pitch for doing light (to us) coding for several other people last week. I also talked about automation. It's something I really want to do because I like working on many small projects (I literally said I have at least 100 repos on gitlab) rather than monolithic ones. We'll see if they bite. They are going to get back to me tomorrow.
Here's my advice. Keep doing what you are doing. Work on small projects. But for employment, most people want specialists. They aren't going to take you on for one small project for you to just move to something else. Or let you hop between other things within their organization unproven. People are afraid of generalists because there is no way to know if you are just ok at one thing or generally helpful at many things. Why should they take your word for it? Specialization is how they can tell if you are excellent.
You need to pick one thing and get VERY good at it. Better than the average specialist. This doesn't need to be programming, in fact it is probably easier if it isn't. I'm a teacher. By becoming a good specialist at something, in my case teaching, you show you are capable of being great at at least one thing, and it gives you a broad understanding of the organization and then you can make a pitch.
A pitch is something you need to figure out for yourself. You need to convince them your value is addressing the needs of other specialists. Very specifically. You need to be conversational in all of their projects and this takes a lot of people skills.
TLDR: Pick a singular career to support yourself first. If you want your job to be to dabble, be excellent at your job, then prove your real talent is horizontal not vertical