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Ask HN: If you were to switch career, what would you do?

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Re: Ask HN: If you were to switch career, what would you do?

#751

Post by SigmundA »

chiph wrote: post #321

Recreational vehicle repair. Sales are way up since the industry almost died after 2007/2008, and the manufacturers are producing crap quality in order to satisfy sales demand. It's not uncommon for someone to spend $400k on a new RV and have to take their new purchase back for a months worth of rework -- only to find out there's no service openings for 5 months. What's stopping me is the up-front capital requirement…

I have thought about this too along with selling the house and going full time in the RV.

One interesting sub-niche of this is RV solar installation, this seems to be booming as well with few who know how to do it right. AMSolar is the premier one and are booked solid months out.

Re: Ask HN: If you were to switch career, what would you do?

#752

Post by bbcbasic »

jawns wrote: post #87

It's interesting that the majority of these answers are professions that pay nowhere near what a software developer's salary would be. If the question were, "What other job would you like to do, if it paid at least as much as software development?" I could probably come up with some creative answers. But even though I'm not particularly driven by money, given that I have a family to support, mortgage to pay, etc., I…

Based on this extra condition to make as much money, I would develop real estate

Re: Ask HN: If you were to switch career, what would you do?

#753

Post by contingencies »

debt wrote: post #461
misiti3780 wrote: post #137

I would be a modern day philosopher/thinker (like Taleb, Dawkins, Harris). I would start with the classics and read everything, learn ancient Greek, Aramaic, as well as Italian, French and German (maybe Russian also, who knows) I would study the first proof in mathematics all the way up through modern probability theory. I would throw away my cell phone and do all of this work from a nice modern loft in the Trastever…

The CEO of Palantir Alex Karp is a philosopher.

Must have failed ethics.

Re: Ask HN: If you were to switch career, what would you do?

#754

Post by muninn_ »

oneshoe wrote: post #683
muninn_ wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was going to go register that domain. It's a site already apparently... http://www.shelfoverflow.com

Well, you should be only registering .io domains anyway ;)

Why's that? (Honest question)

Re: Ask HN: If you were to switch career, what would you do?

#755

Post by homarp »

whiskers wrote: post #525
homarp wrote: post #431

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the ones you can't find right now with the message you want. e.g. the pleasure of being a maker. the pleasure of finding things out.

Have you seen the Andrea Beaty books? http://www.andreabeaty.com/ I have them for my daughter and the messages are very positive for exploring ideas and experimenting.

I've seen "ADA TWIST, SCIENTIST!" but not "Fluffy Bunnies". Thank you, I will look at them.

So far, the one we like the most is "Secret Science Alliance" but it's not for younger kids.

Re: Ask HN: If you were to switch career, what would you do?

#756

Post by sedachv »

RUG3Y wrote: post #240
s_kilk wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> much of the content is online Hmm, no. many of the classics of compsci are not available to read online, and there are even some which are practically impossible to find even as shitty scanned pdfs

I'm curious about the books in this list, I'd like to read them. Do you have any recommendations?

Here are a few of the books on my bookshelf that are not available as ebooks for purchase and would probably be very hard to find pirated copies of:

    The Psychology of Computer Programming
    The Paralation Model
    Handbook of Human-Computer Interaction
    Object-Oriented Programming in Common Lisp
    Computer-Aided Financial Analysis (Miller)
    Probability, Statistics, and Queueing Theory (Allen)
    The Brain Makers
Note that I sold off most of my library and regularly sell books once I am done reading them, so this is just a small sample of the material that you will not find online, that I have personally read. Also all the older/rare books I have borrowed from/read at my local public library (public libraries have a surprising amount of computer books), and the university libraries I have been associated with earlier.

Whoever discounts computer science books today because "you can find it all online" does so out of a very deep ignorance of computer science. Between Google Books and the Internet Archive's scanning project digital copies do exist, but are inaccessible.

Re: Ask HN: If you were to switch career, what would you do?

#757

Post by contingencies »

syntaxing wrote: post #213
magic_beans wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is the point of owning tech books when a) much of the content is online and b) there are new developments in languages/frameworks all the time?

Mechanical Engineer here (I feel like HN tends to forget about us...). Most of the higher level stuff is pretty hard to find online, especially for heat and mass transfer or fluids. Most other mechanical or electrical engineers I know keep their textbook with them at work either as a reference, to look for some derivations, or to find some empirical data/results.

Mmm. I'm trying to learn ME a bit this year. Wrestling with endless Solidworks tutorials. Buying stuff just to pull it apart. Working towards a relatively ambitious goal in little modular steps. Trying to figure out how to buy off the shelf and have as little as possible in the way of custom parts. It's really interesting but seems very cross-disciplinary... the manufacturing process, cost, material properties knowledge, modeling processes and so on seem quite distinct, with no real high level overview to assist. Then there's the Solidworks project management ontology which differs from git and seems to play bad with it. Then there's the fact I live in China and know no ME's, and that everything I do in industry occurs in Chinese so I am learning at least two names for everything. A real adventure... :)

Re: Ask HN: If you were to switch career, what would you do?

#758

Post by contingencies »

thecourier wrote: post #71
mrlyc wrote: post #38

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), 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…

ETFPOS programmer here. yeah, it's easy to become obsolete in this area, considering most of the time we work with legacy code

We are currently conceptually iterating a user experience for a forward looking network of vending machines. The idea is the user buys food via smartphone app, pays via that, turns up just to pick it up (or a proxy delivery company comes and does it for them). So there's ~zero physical interaction, no cash handling, and like 10 different ways to pay, from digital currencies to credit card gateways to appstore in-app payments. We are very seriously considering completely avoiding NFC/contactless/stored value payment cards, which would essentially negate any requirement for payment hardware or related programming.

Re: Ask HN: If you were to switch career, what would you do?

#760

Post by dilemma »

pmtarantino wrote: post #414

I'd love to open a bookstore and a publishing house. But I also would love to be art curator, or something related to art dealing. I read a lot of books (fictions, too) about collecting, fakes, etc. I find that world quite amusing, but I think it is impossible to do a career there without money or networking.

I'm doing this.
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