Here’re my two cents. I’m in the US with nearly two decades in engineering for experience. And I started programming young, like you; it’s very much a passion for me.
There are great places out there. Look for the roles that are going to expand your skill sets. More money is nice, but long term you’ll benefit more from pushing your boundaries. Ask lots of questions about the team when you’re interviewing—that can give you plenty of insight. And get comfortable with AI programming. That’s a seismic paradigm shift happening right now and embracing it can help you leapfrog others. Right now I like Windsurf AI.
And I get how this sequence of events you laid out is dispiriting—it would be for most imo. Personally, I think it’s worth the pursuit if it’s something you’ve enjoyed since such a young age.
Happy to answer more if it helps.
Nah, you’re safe to run it locally. You’re downloading the specific model, that’s right, and it’s not an exe. As you ask questions of it, the inference step, that is sent directly to the model on your machine by the ollama interface. Nothing goes over the network after you download a model and there is no scanning involved; that’s just not how it works.