It's important to note just how great the Arch wiki is. It's one of the most complete and thoroughly documented sources I have ever used. Arch is a very atypical distribution, but with the wiki you never feel like you are lost without any guidance.

I also will second the amazing package management with yay or pacman. It's one of the main reasons I use Arch as my primary os!

@Tounai I hear a lot that university "makes you an interesting person".
Respectfully I strongly disagree. To me someone with natural curiosity will have interesting things to say. Conversely, if someone only retells has stuff they heard in University, I find them very uninteresting.

I think it's very important to separate the concept of structured education and practical learning. I think the complains many have against education is that it often does not reflect the skills you need in the real world.
That said, you still need a degree to have a chance at a reasonable job. I bet the CEOs that say you don't need a degree, are not willing to take a chance and hire someone without one.

I understand the point you are making but I would expand how you define what a smart person is.

To me a smart person is willing to be open minded and engage in good faith debate if they disagree. A stupid person will just yell over you.

Recently I've been torn between working hard/saving for the future, and spend money/enjoy my time now.

I was the former for years but now at 35 I'm leaning towards the latter

I agree, even though computer skills are in demand finding a job still take time. I been down this road a few times and my advice would be quantity, apply to a lot of openings even if you don't fit exactly the requirements. Try to apply to 5-10 jobs per day and write specific cover letters for each.

You sort of have to do it this way. Over time I've realized that many job postings out there are no longer relevant. Maybe the company decides not to hire a new dev after all, or they already hired someone but never took down the position. Sometimes the main contact person gets busy and your application gets lost.

Most importantly don't despair. You only need one company to hire you, if you persist long enough you'll find a decent job.

That drives me crazy, so many managers seem to think they can solve all problems by simply adding more people. As if all development skills are completely interchangeable and the existing codebase is instantly understood by a new dev.
In reality they don't need more people but rather the right people. Someone with specific experience is going to be better than someone with simply more years of experience.
Simply adding more people without explicit reason just slows things down from the added burden of training and more meetings. My old boss used to intentionally keep his dev team small. Every year they would offer him more people to hire but he would turn it down saying, I can do more with 3 devs than with 30.

Clients and non tech people are very good at finding one thing that confuses them and asking you change the entire system for it.

I totally understand where you are coming from. I made b2b accounting software with a standard login screen. It was literally a text input for username/password and a "login" button.

One of the clients was an old lady and called me because she was having troubling logging in. After nearly an hour on the phone and checking logs, I finally realized she was entering her username and password but instead of clicking "login", she would click the link "forgot password". And then fill in the info needed to reset her password and get emailed a new one. Then go back to the main login page where this repeated 34 times.

I was dumbfounded. I couldn't believe a trained accountant whos job requires her interact and use computers, couldn't figure out a standard login page.

In my experience there really is no such thing as idiot proofing. The end user might be competent, or they might also be an old batty lady who even after 20 years of using computers daily can't figure out a standard login screen

Unfortunately there is absolutely no good way to deal with a person like that. The bottom line is that you cannot make someone care. If they do not want to do work they are going to find a way out of it, or do the shittiest job possible.

I wish could say it gets better in the work world but it doesnt. My old boss always used to that 10% of the people do all the work and 90% do nothing. In my 15 years of working this is generally pretty true.

It might be temping to tell your boss about someone's lack of contribution but this rarely results in any action. Most people dont care about doing quality work meaning that the majority of the work burden falls on the few people that do care. Honestly the best thing you can do is to just accept that this is the case and dont expect others for help. If it means that you end up doing all the work just find a way to be at peace with that. I know its easier said than done, I still get frustrated working with others that do not pull their weight.