Ask HN: Web developer and looking for a career change, what are my options?

Math is taught pretty badly in most American public schools from K-12. Many people have terrible math experiences in elementary school, in part because the U.S. actively encourages women to go into early childhood education if they can't cut it in other fields (a thing not done to men). So, there are a lot of women who are basically math-phobic who are teaching it to our K-6 kids and the primary thing they teach a lot of kids is that math is scary stuff and you should hate it. It's really terrible.

I pulled my two sons out of public school at the same time. At the time, my oldest was in sixth grade, and he hated math and had terrible, terrible baggage about it. My ONLY goal for him for math while homeschooling him was to teach him "math is your friend" and that was it. I didn't care if he actually learned any math. I just wanted him to stop having fear and loathing of math. He now sometimes does stuff like reads illustrated calculus books (which are over my head -- I dropped out of calculus in college, due to having had a year long math gap... it's a long story) when he runs out of other things to read at the library and is bored.

If you want some pointers on how to get over your fear of math and how to learn math comfortably, I and no doubt lots of other people here can give you some pointers. Because there are people here who think math is cool and fun and managed to get through the school system without becoming math-phobic, in spite of how hard the school system actively tries to make most of us math-phobic.

I am sure you could find an audience. You sound like a rich source of much-needed wisdom on the subject of small business of a sort that would be highly relevant to lots of people on HN.

Edit: It is also fine to interpret my first remark to mean "No apologies needed re the length. Lots of people here would be happy to read more." I mean, you aren't obligated to start a blog because a random internet stranger flippantly suggested it, but I have the bad habit of taking objections literally when people really mean "I don't actually want to do that" but they don't actually say that, they say "I would, but (reason)" and then I'm all "That's totally solvable!" because I am compulsively helpful.

I shall stop digging my grave deeper now. kaythxbai

I haven't done a lot of comparison or asking my coworkers how much they make, but the information I do have suggests that while developers are commonly paid more on average, if you're at a company that actually values product support (often because it's recognized as an important contributor to customer retention) this difference can easily be dominated by other differences such as willingness to negotiate. Support teams are also usually smaller so it can be easier to demonstrate how much value you, personally, are adding.

But again, this assumes the company actually cares about support. There are definitely places that treat it as a revolving door position and won't pay much.

It's also worth noting that from what I've seen, companies are much more willing to have distributed support teams than dev teams, due to the value of having support availability in multiple timezones. I actually telecommute four days a week in my current role.

First save money and change lifestyle to handle the pay change. Coding pays more than many careers, and you might want or need to move to an industry that you have little experience.

Next, be open to moving. There are other places outside of the big cities that can often be open to people from different backgrounds as they don't have all the big city fun.

What do you like or have experience in. Making a slight shift is a lot easier than a large one. Perhaps you coded something for a newspaper, that will make it easier to get a job doing something else for a newspaper. This might mean doing a double jump. Get a job coding for the industry you want to be in, then move toward your desired career in that industry.

Best of luck!