I don’t want to spend hours making shitty bloated proprietary software but 99% of jobs seem to be like that.

It sure is. :(

I really don’t care about applying for jobs

Unfortunately that’s not going away in any other profession. Unless you’re a unicorn and best friends with the hiring manager.

I hate just about every one of my classmates.

Sadly, that’s the biggest boon about going to school is networking with people that can provide you an easy in at their workplace and hopefully life long friendships.

Your certifications aren’t going to be all that helpful beyond meeting the checklist HR is following.

Is it possible to actually make a career in free software

People do make money off free software just look at Patreon. But they are the exception. Kernel development might be a in as well.

I just ditch out of tech and pick something else

You’re in it too deep now in my opinion.

Fortunately database developer roles are in high demand if you can stomach SQL and whatever unique cloud solutions they are invested in.

Also, if you want to tame a beast COBOL developers are in high demand too.

If you think robots are cool check out embedded systems.

You could end up working for a company that develops free software so that’s one way. My company develops an open source science tool and it’s free for anyone to hack on, run their own copy, and use for commercial purposes, but we sell support which usually seems to involve being paid to develop certain features and fix certain bugs, as well as advise on how to keep their system running smoothly.

I think you should try a few different things out before you judge all software engineering jobs. There’s a big variety.

As for “making shitty bloated proprietary software” that only really applies to the really big tech companies and banks etc… Most dev jobs are about using code to solve a problem. I’ve worked in lots of small companies and we use open source software almost exclusively. If there’s anything you write that you think could be useful as an open source project, they’ll generally let you spin it out into a standalone library and you can spend some of your working time on that. The company benefits from increased visibility and can be a “thought leader” at conferences etc if it takes off. Definitely worth asking about that in the interview though, since different companies will have different philosophies around it.

It’s extraordinarily difficult to make a living in it unless you luck out and start a project that is extraordinary popular from the get go and even then you have to be more skilled than all the copycats. I’m running the only Foss ai api and I’m barely covering costs even though we have thousands of users 🤷

Possible, but it’s really hard to make a living. Just look at lemmy devs, they’re work totally on this project and rely on donations.