Ask HN: 200k student debt, degrees not very useful. What to do?
Situation:

About to graduate top 10 law school.

Top 10 undergrad, BA in random dumb social sciences junk I regret studying (high GPA).

roughly 200k student loans by the time I graduate.

Performed mediocrely in law school (put in serious effort, but, it's tough, at least for me. Lots of other excellent students here. Did well in some classes, but not most.)

As a result, didn't get one of the big law firm jobs I was expecting to justify the investment

Best current law job prospects pay 50k and stay pretty flat (public interest). I've applied to just about every legal position, clerkship, fellowship etc. out there. I've got a gig right for right after I graduate but that's pretty short-term, and I want to think about the future here.

Not that into law. Its not as interesting as i thought. Also the opportunities suck -- its status/prestige-obsessed if you want to make good money doing something besides personal injury and hoping to get lucky, and I failed in that competition, top 10 JD aside. Oh well.

I am around 30.

Wishing i'd studied a serious subject. i was scared about getting a low GPA, but having useful knowledge would have been way better.

I think i have the aptitude to learn stuff and do well in some career, but not sure what to do.

More school seems pointless and financially infeasible besides, plus i am burned out on academia. plus i'll be working full time to support myself -- can't take out any more student loans, especially for a second bachelor's.

Interested possibly in programming, comp sci, electrical engineering, but don't know enough about those fields to know whether i like them or just the idea of knowing a "hard subject". Also while I know you can self-teach programming and have friends who've done so, not sure how you'd go about self-teaching say engineering.

I don't really want to find something "safe" and ride it out till I retire. I want to figure out a way I can make a real contribution and do something interesting while making good money. Maybe that sounds weird for someone who went to law school, but I had something of a perspective shift mid-law school. So advice along the lines of "most work sucks, just learn to deal with it" isn't really helping me solve my problem.

What should I do HN?

Also as far as legal career options, before anyone asks:

1) Yes I've applied to government law jobs. Those are really hard to get, some even way harder than private sector firm jobs, which i failed to swing.

2) i have nothing against public interest law. i may even do it for a while to pay the bills. but having some experience in it already through law school stuff, it just wasn't something I could see myself doing indefinitely and enjoying very much. Plus the pay is really quite terrible.

3) working in-house at big companies is a route that's pretty much closed unless you're lateraling over from BIGLAW (a route now closed to me due to the way legal hiring works) or have some kinda nepotistic connection (which I don't have).

4) I'm not too much of an outlier in my situation. Lots of people in my class that I talk to privately are looking for work. The school tries to put a smiley face on the situation, but privately they'll tell you in your second year that if you miss the boat getting a job at on campus interview with a big firm, your short term private sector prospects are in the $20/hr range, which wouldn't be bad if you were coming straight out of college, but, with law school debt, it's pretty awful. It's bad out there, even near the top of the law school pyramid.