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Ask HN: Have you successfully done a career do-over, and how did you do it?

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Re: Ask HN: Have you successfully done a career do-over, and how did you do it?

#81

Post by crimsonalucard »

keyle wrote: post #8

This industry is the very definition of career do-over. Every 5 years or so we change our activities. No one writes code or design like 20 years ago. With a career of 50 years, we are all doomed to have to change. Adapt over time. Don't just jump. Take on new responsibilities. You will find experience crosses many fields. It's a lot about domain knowledge (e.g. financial industry) and we carry a lot of stuff over wit…

The industry only changes superficially. The fundamentals stay constant. Don't master languages; master the fundamentals.

Re: Ask HN: Have you successfully done a career do-over, and how did you do it?

#82

Post by ctdonath »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #15

I'm not sure what this means: What did you do to redeem yourself in the eyes of your respective industry? Are you talking about someone who screwed up enough times that the mean free distance to a negative referral is essentially 1.0 ? I don't see industries as having 'eyes' but I have known industries that are relatively small communities. I have known, and hired, a number of people who have 'redone' their career wh…

I don't take it as necessarily an implication of accumulated failure.

Career paths just tend to end, somewhere somehow. Might flame out. Might get a bad rep. Might be doing just fine but that tech & corp might just be leading to "going nowhere", coasting or the path vanishing. Be on a road long enough, you eventually discover it ends, be it accumulated choices or "just does".

At some point you need a change of direction. Might even be the same direction, you just have to get on a different road that actually continues that way. I'm still doing what I always liked doing, I just swapped out the technology & clients for something more modern.

Re: Ask HN: Have you successfully done a career do-over, and how did you do it?

#83

Post by mod »

crimsonalucard wrote: post #65
matte_black wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was in your position, been working with iOS since the beginning until I decided to just get the fuck out of iOS and start doing some useful things. Went all in with building single page applications in JavaScript and Node, front end, back end, and database administration, and haven’t looked back. Fuck iOS now, native mobile development benefited from a craze where everyone thought mobile apps were the new web apps,…

Node and javascript? Those technologies change and move faster than anything else in the industry. What you're doing now will likely be obsolete within a couple years.

Sort of. The difference I guess is that you can still put javascript on your resume and it'll do something for you.

Re: Ask HN: Have you successfully done a career do-over, and how did you do it?

#84

Post by _sdegutis »

crimsonalucard wrote: post #65
matte_black wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was in your position, been working with iOS since the beginning until I decided to just get the fuck out of iOS and start doing some useful things. Went all in with building single page applications in JavaScript and Node, front end, back end, and database administration, and haven’t looked back. Fuck iOS now, native mobile development benefited from a craze where everyone thought mobile apps were the new web apps,…

Node and javascript? Those technologies change and move faster than anything else in the industry. What you're doing now will likely be obsolete within a couple years.

I'm willing to bet that Node/JS devs actually have an easier time staying current, since their workplace actually has a need to change technologies, so they're getting paid to keep rewriting their web app in $the_latest_framework, which they can then put on their resume.

Re: Ask HN: Have you successfully done a career do-over, and how did you do it?

#85

Post by marnett »

nerfhammer wrote: post #64
_diyu wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm only 32 but that's kind of where I'm at right now too. Mastered Objective-C and Mac & iOS development 10 years ago, now it's all Swift and nobody's really hiring for iOS devs in my area (Chicago suburbs), and nobody's hiring for native Mac developers anywhere, period. And all the best practices in iOS have changed drastically since then, too, in terms of both coding and UX. Learned Ruby on Rails 8 years ago, but…

don't worry, all the people making apps and new javascript/css frameworks have moved on to cryptocurrencies now

I think you mean zk-SNARK

Re: Ask HN: Have you successfully done a career do-over, and how did you do it?

#86

Post by burkemw3 »

atsaloli wrote: post #80
rb808 wrote: post #34

I suspect its not as easy as many people make out. I was a great C++/OO dev for 10 years before I got bored, starting doing management, business focussed roles and more high level devops style work. After 10 years of that I wanted to move back into pure coding. With great experience should be easy right? Wrong. I got a mid-level java/python dev job and it was difficult, I was out of touch and everything was different…

What's DI?

For me, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dependency_injection

Re: Ask HN: Have you successfully done a career do-over, and how did you do it?

#87

Post by _sdegutis »

atsaloli wrote: post #80
rb808 wrote: post #34

I suspect its not as easy as many people make out. I was a great C++/OO dev for 10 years before I got bored, starting doing management, business focussed roles and more high level devops style work. After 10 years of that I wanted to move back into pure coding. With great experience should be easy right? Wrong. I got a mid-level java/python dev job and it was difficult, I was out of touch and everything was different…

What's DI?

I'm guessing Dependency Injection? In context meaning writing code that's easily testable, and writing lots of tests, which goes hand in hand with the other TDD/BDD buzzwords that job descriptions often throw out there.

Re: Ask HN: Have you successfully done a career do-over, and how did you do it?

#88

Post by iBelieve »

atsaloli wrote: post #80
rb808 wrote: post #34

I suspect its not as easy as many people make out. I was a great C++/OO dev for 10 years before I got bored, starting doing management, business focussed roles and more high level devops style work. After 10 years of that I wanted to move back into pure coding. With great experience should be easy right? Wrong. I got a mid-level java/python dev job and it was difficult, I was out of touch and everything was different…

What's DI?

Dependency injection: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/130794/what-is-dependenc...

Re: Ask HN: Have you successfully done a career do-over, and how did you do it?

#89

Post by [deleted] »

_diyu wrote: post #79
Liuser wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you get into technology, you should go under the assumption that you will be a student for the rest of your life. Otherwise you will get left behind. My Dad is in tech (I followed his footsteps). For as long as I can remember growing up he always had a book with him in his free time. He started with punchcards.

I don't mind learning, definitely. I got into this field because I'm passionate about software and I enjoy programming a lot. But while I have a full time job and a large-ish family to support, it's hard to fit "3 years of professional React.js experience" into my spare time to put on my resume, so that when nobody's hiring iOS developers anymore, I can still get a job. That's what I'm talking about. A lot of the ski…

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: Have you successfully done a career do-over, and how did you do it?

#90

Post by edgarvaldes »

dsnuh wrote: post #73
PascLeRasc wrote: post #41

Does anyone have any stories of career do-overs that aren't just a renaming of "software engineer" on both sides?

Exactly. Most of these read as "I went into a different specialization of the same field". Where is the engineer that just chucked it all and opened a donut shop? That's the level I want to know about. Most of these are just stories of people making lateral moves in the same industry.

That's because the opening line: "I'm not talking about switching professions at some point in your life"
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