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

Ask HN: I feel my career is at a dead end. Any advice on what could I do?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 149 posts

Re: Ask HN: I feel my career is at a dead end. Any advice on what could I do?

#81

Post by wayoutthere »

tafox wrote: post #40
wayoutthere wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m glad you have time for this! I’m 37 and haven’t had time for personal tech projects in years; family, home ownership and life have all gotten in the way. I’m on the management side (senior director equivalent), but I do make more than any of my engineers and I probably spend 50% less time working. I do a mix of people management, architecture design and executive communication, but it’s 95% stuff that falls into…

Are you openly bragging about making more money while working half as much as the people you are supposed to be responsible for? I would be embarrassed to write that.

The knock on management from a lot of folks I’ve talked to is that managers end up working harder for less money — this is actually the case at the line manager level, but if you can get past that things improve quickly.

Personally, I think it’s a suckers game to look for meaning or purpose at work. I’m there to do a job, get paid, then use that money to find my own purpose. If you want to use work as your creative outlet, great — but you’ll probably be frustrated.

Re: Ask HN: I feel my career is at a dead end. Any advice on what could I do?

#82

Post by _0o6v »

ggambetta wrote: post #41
tonetheman wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would love to work at google. I am an older coder and founder but I doubt highly I could pass the tests to even get an interview. :(

Give it a try :) I interviewed twice and was hired twice, at 30 and at 39. Don't believe the naysayers, the interviews are actually super reasonable! It's algorithmic, but not leetcode; it feels like "let's figure out this problem together in the whiteboard, colleague" .

Having to reverse a binary tree or some other associated nonsense for a frontend UI role meant I turned the interview process at Google down. That and about 6 prospective hours of interviews for my application to then be sent to a "hiring committee" who ultimately decided if I was worthy enough of a job at Google, it just wasn't worth the hoop-jumping.

Re: Ask HN: I feel my career is at a dead end. Any advice on what could I do?

#83

Post by Tade0 »

dimmke wrote: post #70
Tade0 wrote: post #36

> Maybe company will prefer younger coders to hire and I will not be able to find a job anymore? 32 here, but most of my professional circle is my age or older. Programming is not Logan's Run and outside of maybe bold and snappy SV startups companies cannot afford to sneer at experienced professionals wanting to join - not in the current market at least. My advice would be to talk to your superiors about this - perha…

I'm 29 and the amount of anxiety I read about in programming as a profession is staggering. All the people trying to get into it worried that they're not cut out for it, only for 10 years later to be worried that they're aging out of it. I wish I could understand where it comes from. There are so, so, so many programming jobs out there. There are no hard and fast rules about anything. I love the comparison to Logan's…

My pet theory is that it used to be something hard and for the young and innovative, but was eventually commoditized.

My aunt was one of the IT pioneers in the late 80s in Poland(her first task was to figure out how to put together her work machine - fun stuff), and was only laid off in 2010 - two years before retirement - due to stuff unrelated to her performance.

I think currently it boils down to us being expensive resources - I was told repeatedly at my current workplace that we (the team) are "a cost", so we should focus on delivering instead of ensuring quality, which is kind of ironic given that I know we're pushing code which simply doesn't work so we aren't actually delivering.

Bottom line is that we're expensive and that causes anxiety among the decision makers, who in turn transfer that anxiety onto us.

This is my best guess anyway.

Re: Ask HN: I feel my career is at a dead end. Any advice on what could I do?

#84

Post by foogazi »

_0o6v wrote: post #82
ggambetta wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Give it a try :) I interviewed twice and was hired twice, at 30 and at 39. Don't believe the naysayers, the interviews are actually super reasonable! It's algorithmic, but not leetcode; it feels like "let's figure out this problem together in the whiteboard, colleague" .

Having to reverse a binary tree or some other associated nonsense for a frontend UI role meant I turned the interview process at Google down. That and about 6 prospective hours of interviews for my application to then be sent to a "hiring committee" who ultimately decided if I was worthy enough of a job at Google, it just wasn't worth the hoop-jumping.

What was the TC difference between GOOG and the job you have?

Might be worth it for some people out there

Re: Ask HN: I feel my career is at a dead end. Any advice on what could I do?

#86

Post by nojvek »

bookboy345234 wrote: post #75

> I like coding (that's why I started this job, I also consider myself good at coding) I like to learn and explore new things. Choosing managerial track is far more dangerous than being developer in the context of job secruity. Managerial roles vary from company to company and you can not show what you learned as a manager, since its mostly depends on the team members which you do not have much control. Once you leav…

Good managers are rare.

In my experience the best managers deeply understand the business and deeply understood what motivates people and what they’re good at. They are expert match makers of problem -> skill and help bring the best out of people. They are servant leaders.

Managers have a lot of leverage. An experienced manager who understands their art is worth their weight in gold.

Re: Ask HN: I feel my career is at a dead end. Any advice on what could I do?

#87

Post by michalf6 »

recursivedoubts wrote: post #12

This is my experience, and your mileage may vary: Multiple times in my coding career I have felt stalled and/or like I was regressing. Early on, I worked on a programming language, gosu ( https://gosu-lang.github.io/ ) which ended up not really going anywhere. Once the work on it was done, I returned to more mundane web programming for a while (over half a decade.) A long while after that, and unexpectedly, I turned…

htmx looks really neat, I think I'll be using it for some quick and dirty prototyping.

Re: Ask HN: I feel my career is at a dead end. Any advice on what could I do?

#88

Post by systemBuilder »

ggambetta wrote: post #5

Come to Google! No forced management track so you can code for as long as you want, no ageism (colleague just turned 60; I'm 40 myself), will probably let you support a family, great WLB :)

fine print2: Google is a place where love of software goes to die. A place where PhDs work on CI/CD systems and edit robots for text config files.

Re: Ask HN: I feel my career is at a dead end. Any advice on what could I do?

#90

Post by PenguinCoder »

foogazi wrote: post #78
tonetheman wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would love to work at google. I am an older coder and founder but I doubt highly I could pass the tests to even get an interview. :(

> but I doubt highly I could pass the tests to even get an interview. I don’t get this “won’t even try” attitude for a job interview - what is the worst thing that could happen?

Waste of time, effort, energy, and fear of rejection. Plenty of downsides.
Post reply on HN