Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: If you were to switch career, what would you do?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

421–430 of 881 posts

Re: Ask HN: If you were to switch career, what would you do?

#421

Post by FiatLuxDave »

randlet wrote: post #227
FiatLuxDave wrote: post #216

I'm not a developer (I'm a physicist), but someday I'd like to go into medical research. I like the idea of coming up with things that directly help suffering people. I hope that the problem solving skills I've acquired would prove useful. Of course, I'd need to go back to school for a few years to get up to speed first. Unfortunately, I have too much to do still in the applied physics world. It takes too damn long t…

Have you looked into Medical Physics (mostly concerned with radiation therapy and imaging). Best of both worlds in my opinion! If you tire of research you can likely pursue a clinical career and clinical physicists get paid pretty well ($120k-$200k in Canada at least, not sure about US).

I appreciate the kind advice, since you are correct that Med Phys is a rewarding field for many. However, I'm already more than familiar with Med Phys, since that's most of the "boring day job" I use to pay the bills. I was on the design team for some of the most widely used devices in the field. Unfortunately, as a field of applied physics, it is the epitome of slow steady progress with almost no real breakthroughs. There's nothing wrong with that, especially when it helps people, but I'd prefer to work on things with the potential for big breakthroughs. So I work on the boring stuff during the day, and do mad science at night.

Re: Ask HN: If you were to switch career, what would you do?

#422

Post by scarecrowbob »

soundwave106 wrote: post #257

Craft beer brewer would probably be the first choice. I already homebrew, and I actually think it's possible to envision a profit-making craft brewery (even as crowded as the marketplace is these days). I'm also a musician (synthesizers / piano) with enough skills to play in cover bands in the past. But that's a very difficult market to break into, and the types of jobs that actually make good money either aren't usu…

IMO, "breaking into the market" as a musician isn't tough... the problem is that the market pays so little.

I know (and gig with) a lot of folks who play music as their primary or only source of income, and it's doable if you are never going to retire and don't mind living out of your car. Or possibly have a spouse that makes better money.

Re: Ask HN: If you were to switch career, what would you do?

#424

Post by cafard »

Teach, I suppose: high school history or English, or maybe with some brush-up, math.

(Over the years, I have earned money as busboy, stock clerk, landscape worker, driver, proofreader, copy editor, tech support worker, and developer. At this point, I don't know that my back is up to some of the manual labor, and I think that I'm too much of a wool-gatherer to be a good commercial driver. I wasn't a bad editor, but it doesn't pay well: people know when their computer systems don't work, but don't know or don't care when their texts are unreadable...)

Re: Ask HN: If you were to switch career, what would you do?

#430

Post by cableshaft »

TeffenEllis wrote: post #339
cableshaft wrote: post #229

I did stop being a developer for a year and a half in order to work for a video game publisher as a producer. I really enjoyed it, worked on five games (four of which were released on Nintendo, Microsoft, or Sony consoles), got to go on fun business trips to game conferences, and got to meet some important people in the industry, but I got nervous not programming for that long because I thought my skills were atrophy…

Could you tell us about how you got into video game publishing? I'd love to make the transition myself.

My route is probably hard to duplicate, and was more by chance than anything. I made a game for Microsoft's Dream-Build-Play game dev competition (Proximity HD, now called Proximity 2), on their new upcoming Xbox 360 Indie Games Service. It was a finalist in the competition (you can see me on the list here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dream_Build_Play#2007_Challeng...), and was on display at their XNA Gamefest conference in Seattle along with my name and my city.

A guy who worked for the (small) publisher attended the Gamefest, saw that I was local to their office, and called me up to stop by and discuss a possible deal to publish it on Xbox Live.

Halfway through the discussion I mentioned I was looking to break into the game industry, and the discussion morphed into a job interview.

I was brought in for a second interview with their parent company in Japan via teleconference, and was asked questions in Japanese and had my answers translated back, and apparently my answer to "What's my favorite game right now?" being "Tetris Attack" was a great one, since I found out later I was being interviewed by ex-Bulletproof Software guys who developed Tetris for Game Boy.

I got the job, and immediately had to become a competent producer, video editor (for ESRB ratings and game trailers), localization and certification checker, evaluating games for possible publishing, advertising asset designer, the local expert on managing the console dev machines for evaluating builds, and overseer of entire QA teams, had to come up with new game features and prioritize which bugs got fixed, despite having pretty much zero experience in any of that before I got the job. It was intense, but rewarding. I learned a ton while I worked there, and wore many hats.

If you have any questions about it, I'd be happy to answer them.

Post reply on HN