Ask HN: Web developer and looking for a career change, what are my options?

I am 21, and work in the same Technologies you do. I founded a company in web services a year ago (http://Bigdrop.io) which is pretty much self sustainable today. I don’t find a lot of interest in the domain any more and tire of new projects easily.

I however realised that my true passion lies with creativity, and it isn’t limited to the web or to programming.

I am currently working with India Accelerator ( http://indiaaccelerator.co ), which gives me the chance to interact with start ups, discuss and design products, play a high level technical role, meet new people, etc.

We could possibly come up with something to help you out, you can reach out to me. naved@bigdrop.io

This may seem like a conspiracy theory to some, but it is extremely consistent with my observations from over 20 years in the industry. I see inefficiency and incompetence everywhere I look, I simply cannot believe this is mostly accidental, there must be forces acting to keep things this way.

I've tried other things including: landscape gardening. Pros: - Outdoors - Get fit - Learn handywork skills

Cons: - Poor pay - Still low level of people interaction - Not that interlectually engaging

Mountain bike guide

Pros: - Outdoors - Exciting - People interaction - Nice landscape - Following a passion I have

Cons: - Turns my passion into work - Low interllectual engagement - Poor pay

I also tried running my own company doing this which was a good experience. Problem with it was that it is difficult to make as much money comparing to programming. Also above points apply.

Photographer

Pros: - Outdoors - Technical - Creatively engaging

Cons: - Loads of digital images you have to work with becomes a bit of a burden - Regularity of work - Amount of competition

Writer / Blogger

Pros: - Fun - Built the blog so learnt web development - Good for learning content marketing

Cons: - Difficult to make money - Really competitive - Lots of alone time (I wrote a few books) - Effort/ reward ratio can be quite low

Estate Agent

Pros: - Met people - Look round lots of houses - Out on the road

Cons: - Pay - Image - Office based - Can be boring

Exhibition worker (technical support, building the stands)

Pros: - Travel (I worked in UAE, Paris, London) - Working with your hands - Money can be good

Cons: - Can make a lot more money as the event organiser - Long hours - Intense

Artist

Pros: - Travel (residencies around the world) - Meet interesting people doing interesting work - Intellectually engaging

Cons: - Difficulty to make a lot of money - Your lifestyle will be out of sync with anyone else doing a normal 9-5 - Snobbery - Networking

Designer

Pros: - Interllectually engaging - Many different disciplines (eg visual, service, UX, etc)

Cons: - Need a portfolio - Very competitive - Lots of low level crappy work if you cant get the interesting stuff

Teaching English

Pros: - Meet people - Command position of authority - Interesting, engaging work - Lots of opportunities to mix tech and education

Cons: - Money not as good as developer

That's my experience of other work, partly. Of course you can also try to make your career as a developer more interesting.

Ways I have tried to do this:

- Earn more money - Remote working - Change stack - Change scale, size, length of project, whether public or private sector - Develop other things not websites eg. a game - Get really disciplined about your dev time. Eg. work the way where you can be the more productive, get a pomodoro timer, go outside, try different types of desks.

To conclude this rant, developer / programmer is one of the job roles of the age. Douglas Adams said something along the lines, that each era has its own new industrial revolution and you are lucky if you can make your living out of it. However, it poses challenges but it is new and everyone is in the same boat trying to make it work for them.

Do you have an opinion on how much of product management is politics and posturing, and how much is actually building good products? For example, one doesn't have to look very far to find substandard software and features on hundreds of highly trafficked sites or commercial products, yet I'm under the impression that getting a job where one would have the authority to fix these things would be next to impossible. (And yes, I absolutely understand that decisions are, or at least should be, first and foremost economic decisions, and subject to competing priorities. For example, just look at the positive cultural change Microsoft has undergone relatively recently, they are a good example of a company who has changed in respect to what I'm talking about.)