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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?

#91

Post by wil421 »

geoffmac wrote: post #68
ElectronicE wrote: post #28

I got a super comfortable job for the past 15years as a work from home C++ server programmer. It has allowed me to be around and watch my kid grow rather than be away 8-6PM and just come home to dinner and put them to bed. It was very good pay at the beginning but it hasn't keep up and now it's not that good (to bad either). A few years ago I started playing with electronics (Arduinos, Raspberry PIs and stuff like th…

' and now it's not that good (to bad either)' looks like a few other skills have depreciated too

Criticizing the parent for grammar and even not using capitalization or punctuation. You aren’t even following the norms for quoting on HN.

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

#93

Post by Tenobrus »

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 explicitly what this question is about though, the OP specifically says they want to know about lateral moves in the same industry.

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

#94

Post by fizx »

caust1c wrote: post #59
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…

> Also I'm never sure if its because the applications I work on are badly designed, or I just dont really understand modern design. FWIW, I think there's a lot of people out there who would claim that Scala is a bit of a step backwards for the professional community. It's a fine language, but not a (socially) scalable one due to it's immense expressiveness.

Scala is rough IMO less because of the expressiveness, but more because you have at least 4 paradigms in common use, none of which play well with each other. Let's see, I count (1) Futures/Async (2) Threaded (3) Akka/Play/Actors (4) Finagle, (5) Reactive Streams.

There are so many impedance mismatches between them and so many diamond dependency conflicts that it's impossible to get any moderate size project done without going to microservices so that e.g. your Redis client and your HTTP server aren't complaining about different subtly incompatible versions of Netty.

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

#95

Post by ericmcer »

swedish_mafia wrote: post #4

I believe this is a time when a lot of software engineers are asking the hard questions about their careers. Here's why: The technologies have become simpler and the barriers to entry have become low. Once upon a time, if you knew the mainstream languages (C++ and Java) it meant you paid your dues learning the hard stuff. Today, with nodejs becoming mainstream, and the cloud at the backend, developers who come from a…

The expected output of a software engineer will always be based on the ability of the average engineer. As technologies make some areas easier the bar will just be raised in other areas. It isn't like employers will just pay the same amount for someone with less skill doing less work.

So NodeJS is easier than previous server technologies, well the role of a pure back-end developer has evolved to include dev-ops, db administration, security, Q.A., automated deploy/testing. Front-end development is also more complex than ever before, if you only have an "html programming" background, you are going to have a pretty difficult time setting up a modern transpiled web app using on of the JS frameworks.

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

#96

Post by p-funk »

nathanaldensr wrote: post #62
komali2 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you ask them why they turned you down, what do they say? Have you tried asking for resume feedback?

Most of the job ads (Dice, Indeed, etc.) obfuscate the actual company behind a recruiter and no-reply email addresses. I would love to reply and ask, but in 99% of cases the reply email is noreply@somerecruitmentfirm.com. I have talked to a couple of real people, one over the phone and one over email. In both cases I feel like I had a good rapport built. The first guy turned me down because his company only had the b…

Since you mentioned Indeed, I thought I'd mention I had a similar sort of "resume black hole" experience. For a long time, I wasn't really thinking and just applied through those job board sites, directly from the posting. Later, I started using those sites just to research companies, and then go to the company site and apply there, and all of sudden I get five responses in a week. If there's no company listed, a lot of times you can google portions of the job description and it leads to a real company. My resume formatting would often be messed up by the job board sites, so it probably went straight to the garbage. There's really no reason to go through a recruiter if you can avoid it.

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

#97

Post by ccdev »

Thanks for the replies, everyone. Keep them coming! I didn't expect this topic to get this popular.

The reason I asked this question is that I am facing a career slump as a software engineer, and finding out that the software industry is brutal if you don't know how to carve a path for your own career.

And when I mean career slump, I really mean it. I'm living with my mom at age 35 which is quite the opposite of what someone expects of a software engineer at this age. Most people I know are buying/have bought houses and starting families. And I'm not at a point of self-sustainability yet. I can barely keep up with the insurance payments of my own car, and just keep the vision of having my own place to live in (once more, as I lived alone before things got tough) close to my mind. No longer be dependent of my family, get some privacy, some autonomy and instead of living every day switching between errand boy and going to a coffee shop for the free internet, to apply to jobs, or simply taking a break from my parents.

So that's pretty much me right now. I have 10 professional years of a "whole lot of nothing", no big signs of progression, maturity, or taking on more responsibilities. I didn't major in Computer Science, but I still expected my first programming job to be like, getting a mentor, working alongside a group of (in-house!) programmers, being able to ask them many questions and learn all about formal development practices.

Well, I got none of that in the places that I worked at. So seeing your stories gives me a good idea and hope that I can just move on from the past and have better companies approach me with hope and optimism, like I'm a bona-fide junior eager to learn.

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

#98

Post by sshumaker »

southphillyman wrote: post #55
khazhou wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find the notion of age discrimination at 30+ to be simply ludicrous. I’ve been at multiple top tech companies, and the very common age ranges were mid-20s to (estimated) late-40s.

Older devs exist but they tend to be very senior with a lot of responsibility in my experience. Where does that leave the competent but non architect level dev who doesn't want to be responsible for that level of pressure? Maybe a 40 yr old wants to just take a mid level CRUD job for the purposes of keeping up with his mortgage and has no other ambitions beyond that? It seems like being "just a guy" is looked down up…

Is the 40 year old comfortable taking the same salary as an early/mid career dev? Therein lies the rub.

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

#99

Post by nathanaldensr »

p-funk wrote: post #96
nathanaldensr wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of the job ads (Dice, Indeed, etc.) obfuscate the actual company behind a recruiter and no-reply email addresses. I would love to reply and ask, but in 99% of cases the reply email is noreply@somerecruitmentfirm.com. I have talked to a couple of real people, one over the phone and one over email. In both cases I feel like I had a good rapport built. The first guy turned me down because his company only had the b…

Since you mentioned Indeed, I thought I'd mention I had a similar sort of "resume black hole" experience. For a long time, I wasn't really thinking and just applied through those job board sites, directly from the posting. Later, I started using those sites just to research companies, and then go to the company site and apply there, and all of sudden I get five responses in a week. If there's no company listed, a lot…

I've been doing that whenever possible. I even have my wife helping! It does work for some of the posts where the actual employer's name is listed, but for recruiter-obfuscated posts, it's much more difficult. Sometimes we are able to reverse-engineer the original company using location and other information, though. It's still a draining experience.

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

#100

Post by mod »

I owned a brick & mortar business and decided I couldn't keep doing it. The particular type of business has a late-night lifestyle attached to it, and a crowd that I felt was "bringing me down."

I left the business (I'm still a silent partner) and took a web development job. I had been building my own websites & things for about a decade by then, but had no professional experience.

I'm 5 or 6 years in now and getting bored with it. The bulk of the learning is over.

My life has been a series of big changes and disparate job-types, and it feels like another one is on the horizon. I sometimes lament not being the best-in-class in almost any discipline, but I find that I'm adequate or above-average in a great many things and there's maybe some comfort to be had in that.

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