Pick something small and write it. A firefox extension? An iphone app? A website that randomly picks toppings for nachos? Some task with an Arduino, since you are interested in hardware?

Just work on it until you're satisfied with it, or come up with a better idea to hack on.

This is a good advice but I would have said:

Just work on it until it's finish.

"I can assure you I have more capabilities than I currently present to anyone, including my employer"

"please advise me on how I can begin to impress my employer and prove to them that I am a capable employee".....

You have the answer right within your text.... present more to your employer (more of the stuff you have that he/she cant see now..) Go the extra mile in all tasks.

What's your MBTI (Myers-Briggs) type? It can be of help in finding the kind of work that's suitable for you.

Something else, don't rely on a job for experience. Most programming jobs (specially if they're boring) sap away your experience instead of enriching it; they make you a worse programmer than what you already are or what you could've been.

I wish you the best. Since you already have a degree in CS and you like computing you could be a little bit more specific on the topics and courses that you relatively enjoyed. This could possibly help the HNers to give you solid and useful advice.

I hope it was sex, drugs and rock-n-roll that had you so detached from your classes. I'm finding it difficult to reconcile your claim of being rather sharp and then having such a foggy notion of what your classes were about.

Couple of questions: How do you learn best? Reading, tinkering and learning, being shown how to? What are you passionate about? - I mean outside of programming, perhaps connected to the opening comment. Have you become self-motivated? or still need a mentor to guide you?

I think if answer the above questions you might discover a path forwards. If you share the answers with us on HN, then people might be able to chip in with suggestions.

it was mostly trying to manage paying for as much as i could on my own. My parents made enough for me not to be eligible for FA, but not enough to pay my tuition.

I pick up the fastest when I'm shown, but that doesn't really teach me much, it only shows me how to do that one specific thing, so I usually learn by practicing over and over, until I'm comfortable it.

I'd like to be successful, not sure if I'm passionate about it, or just afraid of ending up a middle-aged guy with no future. I have become motivated to do something, but unfortunately I still don't what direction to point this energy towards. I hope that made sense. Please feel free to ask as much as you'd like, after all, you guys are the ones offering to guide me.

Most people will tell you that you can't be passionate about being successful (whatever that means) nor about being happy. Passions are like: real-estate (Donald Trump), sports and media (Ted Turner), human rights (Nelson Mandela), the ecology (David Suzuki). I'm passionate about finding ways of using IT more effectively and in ways to reduce our impact on our environment. Some people are into flying, teaching, healing, etc, etc.

Now, it's our turn: What are you passionate - or at least very interested in?

The most important thing is to put yourself in a context that stimulates your growth. Some examples: [1] start hanging out at a hacker space, [2] find a friendly university research lab (this is what I do), [3] find a company that is willing to train you, [4] dive into Ruby/Python/Lisp/... and start hanging out with the club in your area.

Just being in the presence of other people who are working in your field will inspire you, show you how to act and what to do, and lead to opportunities that you can't imagine in advance.

You need to learn how to learn how to be a programmer (or whatever else you want to be).

Most open source projects are always short on contributors. Pick a project thats of interest to you and start contributing documentation, patches, tests etc. Be open to review feedback for existing project devs. You will lean a lot and have fun in the process.

What to read would be related to what project interests you. If the project needs C, read up on that. If it needs Python/Perl/Ruby read up on that. Something like 'The Art of Unix Programming' (http://www.faqs.org/docs/artu/) is always useful.

Good luck :-)

I would say: before forcing yourself into a profession or into activities that you think are good for you, try to find out what you actually like doing.

Nothing is as devastating as having a job that you're not enthusiastic about and, vice versa, it seems that people are usually more motivated to achieve success when they're doing something they like.

You've graduated in CS, but perhaps you should look beyond the computer related stuff?

Have you tried applying to tech consultancies ? - they often hire non-CS graduates and teach them programming from the ground up.

Can you name some companies that I can look into for more info in NYC area?

Tell us about a couple of projects you did that meant something to you.

I enjoyed my OS class working with semaphores, shared memory, and some process scheduling was fun.

I wish I had a chance to take a class that took me deep into computer hardware, but unfortunately my curriculum didn't have any hardware focus at all...