Product designer. :)
Ask HN: If you were to switch career, what would you do?
41–50 of 881 posts
Re: Ask HN: If you were to switch career, what would you do?
#42Something with absolutely no deadlines.
Digging ditches sounds really great at times.
Re: Ask HN: If you were to switch career, what would you do?
#43I'm actually thinking of switching into video editing career slowly, just as a backup for my current programming profession. The reason is I'm not sure whether I can survive as a competitive programmer in my late 30s and also I think I kind of like editing.
Unless you have a very good reason to believe you're in a low-competition area for video editing, I'd avoid making this move for career reasons.
Video editing is a far, far higher competition field than programming.
Lots more people wanting to do it, lots less jobs, on average for lots less pay and much worse hours.
Re: Ask HN: If you were to switch career, what would you do?
#44- Film director or screenwriter - Electronic musician (Just hardware, no software involved) - Cartoonist / Illustrator I lack the skills for all of them but at least I'm allowed to fantasise :) I don't regret being a programmer though, computers are probably my favourite thing.
There has never, ever been a better time to be an amateur film director. And the best way to learn the skills is by making films.
I was a professional filmmaker for almost 20 years before my move into VR, and I can assure you I didn't have a lot of cinematic skill when I started :)
You can cheerfully shoot a festival-worthy film on a modern smartphone. If you want to go a bit higher-end you can rent all the kit needed to outfit a professional two-week shoot for a few grand. You'll still need to find people to cast and crew, but that's a solvable problem.
It's a terrible time to be a professional filmmaker, because of distribution woes, but if you want to make films and you have another job (and you're not terribly worried if they don't get distribution beyond some festival showings), there has never been a better time in the history of the medium to do it.
Re: Ask HN: If you were to switch career, what would you do?
#45Indie movie maker (with story, screenplay, editing, cinematography, directing and money all being mine so that I am in total control of creativity). Making movies has been a long time dream for me. I will do that when I am older and have enough time and finances to experiment, more than what I have been able to so far. And when I do that successfully, I would be simply swapping software & moviemaking for what is prof…
See my comment above - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13336068
You can make a feature on your smartphone. Time is more of an issue, but you really, really don't need much cash. And you can make a short film in a weekend on a zero budget, comfortably.
See this article on "Layover" - made for $6k - and remember that you could shoot for much less.
http://www.thewrap.com/redefining-micro-budget-filmmaking-th...
Hell, Sundance sensation "Tangerine" was shot on an iPhone.
Turning that into a full-time profession is a different animal, though. If you really want to do that as a career, I'd advise learning a lot about the realities of the indie filmmaking life before jumping. It's not a great time for that move.
Re: Ask HN: If you were to switch career, what would you do?
#46Something with absolutely no deadlines. Digging ditches sounds really great at times.
Fuckin' A.
Re: Ask HN: If you were to switch career, what would you do?
#47I always wanted to do translation - but video game translator is another job that doesn't pay well since everyone wants to do it, so this pays better.
Other issue is how much thinking about code has ruined my creative writing skills. There were no sign of humanities at my school, not that anyone would've had time for electives, and the "tech writing" class I tried was more interested in how to use styles in Word than anything else!
Re: Ask HN: If you were to switch career, what would you do?
#48Herder.
Most likely taking care of goats.
Re: Ask HN: If you were to switch career, what would you do?
#49When the tech world moved away from me (doing mainly embedded C for the last thirty years might not have been the best idea for my career), I became an aged carer for my disabled mum. I learned a lot about cleaning, gardening and adding subtitles to films as she is going deaf. I also learned a lot about editing spoken word audio files for pacing, volume and noise reduction as she wrote a memoir then recorded an audio…
"When the tech world moved away from me (doing mainly embedded C for the last thirty years might not have been the best idea for my career)"
Strange, why do you say so? We live in the era of IoT and everything has at least one chip inside them. I also do system/embedded programming, but never felt the lack of possibilities to advance my career.
Re: Ask HN: If you were to switch career, what would you do?
#50Something with absolutely no deadlines. Digging ditches sounds really great at times.
Along the same lines, something with no multi-day projects. When I go home, I'm really done for the day. And tomorrow, I start fresh with no lingering issues.