TLDR managed to get a job with a local car shop which was in cooperation with a large car manufacturer in order to get some things in order that they couldn't, ended up feeling like I ran the cooperation while not even having contacts or oversight from any form of management that was able to understand the nature of the work.
So pretty much two years ago I started to work at a local car shop, I am pretty sure I was considered only because the owner knew me from past work I did for them and because he knows me though relatives of mine. I started out working at a lage electronics retailer at the age of 15, mostly fixing TV's, Laptops and PCs as well as doing installations of CCTV and network administration at my company and for customers. I never had any higher education and the job wasn't paid well at all for all the money I was bringing in. Five years later I ran the quality assurance department being responsible for legal compliance for the products we sold, as well as investigating faulty products and testing them for various things. As well as running the tech support hotline. I ended up quitting because someone stole all of our customers private and payment information. Now the place is more of a hardware store than an component retailer. We used to have 100k oders a year.
After that my (previously non existent) career took a nosedive, I did some work at an industrial manufacturer and worked for a tourism company for one summer. I tried school multiple times but it got me frustrated pretty quickly. Evening school and overfilled classes and back from retirement/overworked teachers made me loose the fun I usually have learning very quickly, me knowing things and proving them to my teachers didn't exactly get me any sympathy.
So after all I was excited to get back into a real tech related job, so when someone I knew got to me and asked me to work for them I pretty much was on board instantly. The project was time limited to two years, it was planned to build a large battery storage ~700kwH of Lithium batteries out of old (brand new never driven) repurposed EV's from a car manufacturers test batch and a charge of cars destined for export which had a little issue with being not compliant with regulation.
So far so good, I have quite some experience working with all kinds of 18650 battery packs including EV's even to I'm not an mechanic in the classical meaning.
We where expected to strip the batteries out of the cars and assemble them into a new enclosure with new power electronics. So I got to designing that, two months later a 3 ton behemoth of an enclosure shows up, a little bit later some of the equipment I ordered shows up and I get to my buisy work. Charging batteries sorting them by grade making cables etc. I was pretty much the only electrician there working on the project exclusively.
As I was doing evening school at that time I did not work full time, I had a senior electricitan on site who was doing most of the management work regarding the cars mostly just instructing other employees by very roughly stripping them down as I didn't much care about the automotive side.
Although he did not have any experience with batteries and once assembled a pack which had LFP and NCO batteries mixed in, without consulting me first he figured that mistake out pretty quickly as one half of the bank immediately got overcharged and started to heat up pretty bad. So next thing on my schedule was designing the refabricating of a large 30 yard dumpster to be able to flood with water to cool future “mishaps”.
So eventually we get one container done ~150 cars where supposed to be made into about 12-15 grid storage batteries. We where missing some power electronics still and where testing at a measly half percent of the targeted discharge rate, if you don't know what I'm talking about that is not nearly enough to guarantee the thing won't go up in flames in summer after someone looks at it wrong. So to save money and bypass long delivery times on the stuff I requested the company owner decided to bring in a rep of the car company and pretty much decided with him to reuse some of the cars electronics to save money and time. So I was tasked with jailbreaking 20 year old embedded software that was controlling the batteries in the cars. As they of course can't give out company “secrets”.
A few months later I found out the orders for the inverters we needed to finish the project in a reasonable time and adequate savety never even left my bosses office.
After arguing if I really need “all that expensive software” and testing equipment I just quit one afternoon, for your information, I brought in my own 600€ oscilloscope which I occasionally need to repair things for friends and family, I still haven't received that back. We received all those cars for free and even received compensation for my colleagues mistake.
Now after working in a phone repair shop for about two months and being left without access to the internal software tools or even basic training, (they said we really don't need to train you as you've fixed phones before). Customers beg to differ if I break their stuff or do stupid simple mistakes which are absolutely avoidable so I quit there too.
Now I'm considering going into a simple retail job because there aren't any tech related companies even remotely close that aren't exclusively looking for
People with Bachelor's degree. I feel cheated and taken advantage of by people that profit of me while they don't even have enough time to know or care what they are taking about.