Ask HN: Career change at 22

If your true passion is health care, all the prelude about programmers becoming blue-collar or how they look awkward is irrelevant and just muddles the decision process.

If you want to use forums for feedback on your question, go to the pre-med and medical school forums. Also ask working doctors if they're happy with their career decision. Is their motivation and disposition similar to yours? Is filling out endless insurance paperwork for reimbursements overwhelming their desire to practice medicine? Is private practice or hospital staff better? Etc. etc.

I'm getting paid very well to do this work (much more than any blue collar worker in my area). It is challenging as there are always new things to learn but some pieces are falling into place and work well (ie React, Redux/well managed client-side state, etc).

I think this time is more exciting than any other for web application development. I think comparing software development jobs to blue collar is somewhat dishonest as it ignores the high compensation aspect -- if you tried having this discussion with an actual blue collar worker, I 100% expect you would learn some new things.

You sound burned out. This is what you should do:

* figure out what drew you into this work to begin with -- figure out a path to get back to that and focus on it

* stop paying attention to all the hype and buzz -- focus on what you care about, don't dwell on overly pessimistic articles (they get page clicks and there is always something new that threatens our income)

* focus on getting better at what you do

* make a long term plan to learn more about computer science topics that are useful to your long term goal -- this kind of knowledge doesn't churn as much

* write more code -- instead of reading doom and gloom, go write code

I suspect part of your issue is working for a smaller consultancy. Go work for someone for whom the web is a core part of their business -- it is best if it is their business. As in they are 100% reliant on it and you are contributing to their product which grows their company. Focus on finding a team with experience that you can learn from rather than a slightly higher salary.

Thirty years later (and another career shift!) all I can say is, if you're unhappy in a profession at 22, you will not be happier if you waste even more years chasing down a blind alley. Worse, the older you get the more your options narrow — path dependency is a thing for people as well as for technologies. If you're in a job where you can't imagine being in it five years hence, or ten years hence, let alone thirty years from now, you should get out while you're still young enough, and write off the first career as a learning experience. It's not all bad: whatever you do next, you'll have a broader context than your peers who went into the medical sciences straight out of school.