I’m a computer engineering undergrad in my finals and I really don’t care about applying for jobs, there’s so much competition and I hate just about every one of my classmates. I don’t want to spend hours making shitty bloated proprietary software but 99% of jobs seem to be like that. Is it possible to actually make a career in free software, should I just ditch out of tech and pick something else
Theoretically.
You’re going to subsist off donations and side hustling. Which you don’t need a degree for so you’re shooting yourself in the foot by collecting debt.
There are other smaller tech jobs that may or may not be better for you. I’m thinking dirt pay working at a not-for-profit. You’d be way over qualified and the smartest person in the room, so you’d have a different reason to hate your peers.
What I’d look in to if I were you are smaller neiche software solutions that you could make yourself and sell as a subscription. They are out there. I wrote a customized solution to a warehouse once. It was stupid easy and I didn’t charge them much for the sub, so it wasn’t really profitable for me. But networking outside the tech industry could prove beneficial if this is your intended route. Maybe make friends with “the life of the party” and go into business together selling custom software solutions.