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Ask HN: What is the smartest career path to take?

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Re: Ask HN: What is the smartest career path to take?

#91

Post by badpun »

idoby wrote: post #11

Higher paying jobs don't pay higher for no reason. One of those reasons could be that you have unique skills worth paying for. Another reason is as compensation for squeezing every last hour of work out of you. Not saying you can't get a higher paying job and be happy with your work-life balance, but buyer beware when it comes to this. You might actually be in a good place in this regard. If you start a business, you…

> Higher paying jobs don't pay higher for no reason. One of those reasons could be that you have unique skills worth paying for.

In tech, often the high pay comes from knowing the latest hottest tech. My devops friend is making 2x the usual devops pay only because he's competent around a combination of latest cloud and big data technologies.

Re: Ask HN: What is the smartest career path to take?

#92

Post by cyberpunk »

hckr_news wrote: post #73
cyberpunk wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Around 100euro/hour - depending on the city. Nah, quality of life wouldn't be there for me, personally. London is still probably highest rates for devops in the EU, Munich/Frankfurt/Amterdam/Paris aren't far behind but the work is more boring, Berlin rates are less but everything is quite cheap..

I have a few questions. Are you a digital nomad? If you do tend to move around often, how does income tax affect you? How do you manage the stress or anxiety (if any) of perhaps you could say instability of your role not being permanent? What ways do you manage the client to step back a bit if they ask you to put in more hours than you’d like?

More of a contractor, I tend to have full time (8-10 hours/day) work with usually 6month+ duration.

I'm not a digital nomad, have a house and a child :}

No anxiety really, just keep some money set aside and after some years you sort of know if you'll be able to easily find a job or not.

In the absolute worst case, if I couldn't get another contract, I could always go perm, but I've not had to make such a decision yet.

Re: Ask HN: What is the smartest career path to take?

#93

Post by cyberpunk »

zlast wrote: post #79
cyberpunk wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really, I like to keep my HN account sep from reality. Happy to reply on here though :)

No problem. What different roles did you do? I'm a software engineer (new grad), and have been thinking of switching roles to learn more, i.e sales engineering. How did you make the transition?

I started out as a C dev, then moved to ops, then consulting (infra, etc -- pre cloud), then devops style work (embedded with dev, cloud ops, automation etc), spent a while doing presales for a consultancy setting up CI/CD stuff POCs..

Re: Ask HN: What is the smartest career path to take?

#94

Post by idoby »

julianeon wrote: post #68
tw600040 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

//Higher paying jobs don't pay higher for no reason Completely disagree. there are software developers working so much and making peanuts and there are developers that know how to BS and work may be 1/5th and make thrice or 4 times the pay. Completely disagree that higher paying jobs demand more.

True, but for every 10 jobs paying 80k, in probably 8 of them you can keep it to 40 hours strictly, whereas for every 10 jobs paying 150k, it's the reverse: in 9 of them, you have to work more than 40 hours a week. (Maybe the 1 other guy has a Harvard CS degree and can immediately pull up his LinkedIn inbox if his manager implies a threat). There may be extenuating circumstances if, say, you work remotely from Nowher…

I've worked $150k/year jobs, the expectations of work pace/output are implied, but completely there.

They'll pay lip service to mental health and work-life balance, but you'll see the real incentives in who gets bonuses/promotions and who gets "managed out".

Try to have a minor mental health episode in a tech company. Just try. Then tell me how long the line is at the unemployment office.

Re: Ask HN: What is the smartest career path to take?

#95

Post by davedx »

pradn wrote: post #55
davedx wrote: post #13

> But I'm also cautiously thinking how your earning potential lowers as you age. It's not happened to me yet, my earning potential has only increased as I've gained more experience (41 now), especially since I went freelance. I would say in your 20's is a great time to take risks. Usually doing this will give you great experience you can then apply throughout your life, too. For example: - Work for a startup. Here yo…

I think your 20s are actually a bad time to join a startup. Every dollar you earn in your 20s is worth more than a dollar you earn later in your life, because of compound interest. Financially, you're nearly guaranteed to make more money at a FAANMG, and you don't have to play the lottery or (generally) work crazy hours. You might learn a lot by jumping into a startup, but your chances of failing are probably higher…

You seem to be conflating joining a startup with founding a startup. I mean join one as an employee.

I also don't think you should try and exclusively maximize your dollar earnings in your 20's, personally. But it's just an opinion.

Re: Ask HN: What is the smartest career path to take?

#96

Post by davedx »

chundicus wrote: post #21
davedx wrote: post #13

> But I'm also cautiously thinking how your earning potential lowers as you age. It's not happened to me yet, my earning potential has only increased as I've gained more experience (41 now), especially since I went freelance. I would say in your 20's is a great time to take risks. Usually doing this will give you great experience you can then apply throughout your life, too. For example: - Work for a startup. Here yo…

I've been curious about the freelance route, but unsure what this really looks like in practice or if it's even possible for me to get into it. 1) How did you get started? Is it feasible for more junior engineers to get into it or not so much? 2) How do you find work consistently enough to make a living? What does the work often look like?

> 1) How did you get started? Is it feasible for more junior engineers to get into it or not so much?

I got started with a combination of crappy freelance websites (I found some small assignments on elance etc), reddit/r/freelance, and had some small jobs for friends and previous employees. After that I found a great gig on Hacker News's "Seeking Freelancer" forum. Then I moved into longer term onsite contracts, hourly rates are a bit less flexible but you have more security and a more stable turnover.

2) How do you find work consistently enough to make a living? What does the work often look like?

As I said -- longer term contracts give you stability here. Other freelancers go for more lucrative short-term projects. There's lots of combinations. My first project was like 3 weeks, and I've been at my current assignment for almost 3 years now.

Re: Ask HN: What is the smartest career path to take?

#97

Post by candiodari »

badpun wrote: post #89
candiodari wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a good other way to go, I've met 2 people who played the game this way. They became engineers at huge, kinda pointless, companies (Alcatell-Lucent) and achieved a decent but not spectacular position. Something akin to tech-lead. Leading a decent team, but not as a people manager. Then they joined a not-gonna-happen startup (to do with optical fibers) as a CEO, investing something like $50k of their own money…

> huge, kinda pointless, companies (Alcatell-Lucent) Why is Alcatell-Lucent kinda pointless?

It's an ancient, huge, French-Swiss company. You can start working there, you can end your career there and nothing much will happen between the two. You'll never matter, you'll work on problems but nothing that makes a difference, you'll never be credited with anything, you'll never earn any real amount of money, and whether the page numbers in your design doc are correctly formatted will have double the career impact that the design itself has ... The only thing that matters to anyone at the company is how many years you've worked there or if you've invested large amounts of money in the company.

If you want your entire career to be exactly like, let's say, the first year of your master study at university, with exactly defined problems to be solved, then get a thank you, maybe a nice compliment if you've done exceptionally well, then to see your solution disappear and never even be used anywhere (and certainly not voluntarily by a customer) or if your family has enough money to build a house out of 100 dollar bill bricks, it's the perfect place. A place where people use extreme social pressure, even crimes, to get the slightest of advances within the company, because there is no future there. I would make damn sure all my interests lie outside of work though, even in that case.

Re: Ask HN: What is the smartest career path to take?

#98

Post by pmiller2 »

david38 wrote: post #83
pmiller2 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’d like to push back a bit on “work for a startup in your 20s.” Sure, if you want to work at a startup, I would say early career is the best time to do so. Best case scenario, you learn a lot, your company has a successful exit, and you make some decent cash. The other side of the coin is that for every well run startup where you can learn a lot, there are a bunch that are terrible, where you won’t learn as much, yo…

You can always quit. I’ve spent time at startups and some have quite good, one fantastic. The benefit is that in a small startup you get so much more exposure and are not siloed away.

That’s easy to say when you’re a bit established and sitting on some savings. It’s not so easy for someone starting out from college, or someone who, for whatever reason, doesn’t have the savings to do so.

Counterpoint to “more exposure and not siloed away”: this can easily lead to overwork, either self or externally imposed.

Re: Ask HN: What is the smartest career path to take?

#99

Post by hypnqs »

vax425 wrote: post #77

Congratulations! You've got the fundamental building block of what I call "The Dev Lifestyle". You can work PILLARS, CONTRACTS, and SIDE HUSTLES - mix and match to suit you. Your PILLAR job is the one that provides a modest salary and very valuable benefits. It must not require many meetings and you need to be able to keep it with as little effort as possible, otherwise the rest of The Lifestyle becomes impossible. D…

Re tax rate, how does that work? What are you writing off to get a ridiculously low tax rate?

I was under the impression that overall tax is usually ~10% higher for contractors in the US.

Re: Ask HN: What is the smartest career path to take?

#100

Post by qqj »

i want to counter all the sensible people offering you to save money and such while you're young. let's say you want to spend a decade building your reputation, expertise, and saving money. and lets say you have to compromise in order to do this, meaning you'll be working at ok places but you won't care deeply for the work you're doing.

after about 4 years of that 10 year long stretch you're going to lose motivation/track of the grand plan and wonder what the hell you are doing with your life. if you ever get out of that depression you'll regret every moment you wasted on a plan that amounts to serving a decade of your best years in prison, so that you can come out the other end having forgotten what you were going to do, or if you do remember having lost all the enthusiasm and will to do it. not to mention you're likely to go through significant life events like meeting your significant other, breakdowns, etc.

humans are not timeless fixtures of character and personality. this fact is exacerbated by the accelerated rate of change in the world. you're not who you were last year, and 5 years from now the difference a year makes is only going to only grow larger.

do what you really want to do. do it now. do not ever compromise.

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