Ask HN: Career change at 22

This is going to sound very harsh, but I think you need to hear it.

What you’re saying here comes across as extremely immature (even for someone who is 22). I don’t believe your perspective is beneficial for your own personal development, happiness or long term career sustainability. I also disagree with your characterization of both the industry and the people who work in it. To be blunt, it’s laughable to me that you, at your age and level of experience, can dismiss an entire industry as a “punk business” just because you personally don’t like it and disagree with how many people in it choose to work. And to be clear, rhis isn’t personal for me; I don’t work in web development and I have my own reservations about the long term outlook of various subfields in tech. But the way that you’re speaking about it, in both your tone and contempt, belies a hubris that is honestly mind boggling to me.

Yes, you’re technically right when you say that web development is inherently an “unscientific” field - but it’s not clear to me why this means that the field itself constitutes a “punk business”, or why its practitioners are “script kids”. Web development (and software development in general) exist in a continuum of engineering rigor. If you stepped outside your bubble, you’d see that there is a significant amount of 1) value contributed by the web development industry, 2) qualified practitioners who cannot be accurately described as “script kids”, 3) serious care in engineering excellent frontend interfaces, both in user experience and functional stability at scale. But the fact that you can’t see any of that indicates to me that you’ve either not spent a significant amount of time in the industry, not met people who take the craft very seriously, and essentially parrot the same criticisms everyone else has.

This is before I even get to your vapid, classist perspective on the incumbents of the tech industry. It sounds like you don’t have any passion for web development or medicine; what I’m inferring from the way you’re talking about the industry and the people in it is that you’re far more concerned with how difficult your work is perceived to be than how excellent and useful your work actually is. If you have a problem with people who have “blue-collar” mannerisms, you’re going to have serious difficulty interacting with a significant number of human beings who can’t simply be ignored. People are different, have different idiosyncrasies and generally enjoy different things. The way that you speak about them and their work is polarizing and will likely offend them if you’re as honest about your feelings as you are here.

In my opinion, you need to take a serious look at who you are as a person, who you want to be and what will make you happy. I suggest internalizing Bahamut’s comment in this thread as well. You’re espousing a very hypocritical worldview if it’s more important to you that a person dresses and speaks a certain way so as not to offend your civil sensibilities than that they are qualified and can produce excellent work in their field.

Well it sounds like you can afford the costs of medical school so just plan out your pre-med undergraduate requirements and get on it. There's nothing remarkable about being age 22 and many people have successful career transitions at far more advanced ages. It sounds like you're fishing for arguments to justify it to someone else and there's no need for that, if you're sick of webdev then do something else. It's your life, after all.

Definitely don't come to the West and try to talk with the upper classes with your current English level.

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

Doctors swear plenty, but they generally avoid doing so in mixed company. As for dress, well, they effectively live in scrubs for up to a decade.

But they do indeed end up with much higher social capital than a typical software developer (even devs making equivalent to board-certified MD compensation) or skilled tradespeople, which is what I think you are getting at.