Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: Career change at 22

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 66 posts

Re: Ask HN: Career change at 22

#21

Post by d--b »

This post is so weird to me I can't even tell if it's serious or not

First you say you're 22 yo and have been working for 10 years? You started working at 12? Weren't you supposed to go to school?

Second, take it easy on blue collar culture. Web development, however crap you think it is, is nothing like working on an assembly line, both in terms of pay and in terms of fun. Plus you seem to equate blue collar culture and bad manners. This is not great. You will find people with good manners and people with bad manners at all level of society.

Third, if you want to study medicine go for it... you're only 22. Just know that the studies are long, the pay is probably not as good as it used to be, and that a lot of doctors may be replaced by machines in the next 50 years...

Re: Ask HN: Career change at 22

#22

Post by majewsky »

cstross wrote: post #10

I went in exactly the opposite direction back in 1989, aged 24: had initially studied for a degree in, then qualified as, a pharmacist, and practiced for a couple of years. Found it really wasn't for me, so went back to university and did an accelerated conversion degree in CS. 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 wast…

> 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

Can't agree more. I changed from theoretical physics to CS upon realizing that a) it's not my true calling and b) I'm not cut out for the highly competitive research community ("publish or perish " etc.), coincidentally also at age 22.

Found a well-paying developer position within a few weeks, and my employer allowed me to work part-time and do a CS bachelor in parallel. I just finished that, and I'm very happy with my choice.

What I'd recommend is that you seek some in-person counselling (unis usually offer career advice counseling to their students) and talk it through thoroughly.

Re: Ask HN: Career change at 22

#23

Post by dktp »

How is dressing well, using sophisticated language and acting like higher class at all relevant to the job? Your description (of everything you hate) pretty much describes me (24 year old web developer). There's several reasons to why I'm like that, but mostly it's that I deeply hate pretentiousness. It doesn't take clothes, sophisticated language and acting like higher class citizen to be good at your job.

That being said, I might not be the best person to suggest you one way or another. But if you hate the business, do something about it. If that's changing your career path, go for it. If you hate these 3 things specifically I'd assume medicine might be exactly what you're looking for.

Now back to development. Web development is by far the easiest to get into (think wordpress, frameworks like RoR, Laravel, Django) and chances are that just changing from web development to some other more challenging field withing development might work out for you. If you enjoy the problem solving development offers that is.

For me personally, that's exactly what I love about the IT business. It's extremely easy to show what you know/what you're good at (unlike for example most social studies). And the rest doesn't really matter.

Re: Ask HN: Career change at 22

#24

Post by aliston »

I would suggest trying to course correct within software rather than giving up entirely.

How many blue collar workers have the job flexibility that you have? How many blue collar workers are making 200, 300, 400k a year? How many blue collar workers have built products that are literally used by millions of people every second?

Take some time off to reevaluate and get some perspective. Our industry has plenty of flaws, but I don’t think the typical complaints of blue collar workers are one of them. The sky is the limit in our industry.

Re: Ask HN: Career change at 22

#25

Post by walshemj »

Dont take this the wrong way you need to get over yourself mate quoting stuff like "people from lower social classes" tells me all I need to know about you.

And BTW my first job was at a word leading RnD organization and the uniform there was jeans wellies and a lab coat.

Yeh its easy to lean to code I learnt machine code at 14 the hard part is producing a usable end result.

Re: Ask HN: Career change at 22

#26

Post by wellboy »

You seem to not be sayisfied with your work, because it is not challenging. However, web programming is the most simple/dull use of coding skills/computer science.

There are so many ways to go deep, which you will see towards the end of your degree: After completing your degree, you can work in

- Machine learning

- A.I.

- Big data

- Mathematics

- Start your own company. This is even more challening than the above, because besides coding the product. you need to be excellent with people, what people want, what they say and what they mean, excite people for your product, figure out how to get 100,000 users with $0 funding.

- Autonomous driving

- Work at Google and Facebook to solve all other very challenging computer science problems.

Re: Ask HN: Career change at 22

#27

Post by majewsky »

vletrmx wrote: post #7

When you say thinking of a career change. Do you mean quitting the course of study you are currently on? If so can I suggest sticking with it till you graduate, then if you still want to pursue medicine the door is still open to you, but you haven't lost your current qualification for nothing. Edit: grammar

Depends on how long he's been studying. If he's in his first or second semester, I'd suggest to change majors. If he's already writing the final thesis, I'd follow your suggestion.

Re: Ask HN: Career change at 22

#28

Post by ttoinou »

I think pivoting could be a great idea if you plan on combining your future skills with your current skills (for example knowing how to code to be more efficient OR starting a new business). I don't know if that's feasible with the medicine area though.

Good luck !

Re: Ask HN: Career change at 22

#29

Post by viraptor »

> They dress badly, they swear alot, simply they look like people from lower social classes.

If you go into medicine, guess what kind of patients you have to interact with daily. And depending on your chosen path, how skewed the ratios are doing to be due to socio-economic status impacting health.

Re: Ask HN: Career change at 22

#30

Post by jdiez17 »

I agree with your description of web development work, I would personally find it very difficult to do that professionally because of the lack of rigor and blasé attitude to software quality.

However, web development is not the only way you can make money by programming computers. I encourage you to look into either scientific programming or embedded software development. Your peers would be much more competent in their respective areas than you would typically expect working in a webdev consultancy, and generally you will find a better work-life balance in these type of companies. They also don't expect you to have a GitHub profile full of weekend hacks, they are just looking for someone who knows their stuff and can work within a multidisciplinary team.

If you are in the UK feel free to send me an email (see my profile) and I can give you some tips for where to start looking for professional work in these areas.

Good luck!

Post reply on HN