Does anyone have any stories of career do-overs that aren't just a renaming of "software engineer" on both sides?
Ask HN: Have you successfully done a career do-over, and how did you do it?
41–50 of 180 posts
Re: Ask HN: Have you successfully done a career do-over, and how did you do it?
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
How were you able to collect unemployment if you decided to leave to try to get a business started?
I got laid off and then made that decision. And I basically just started building websites that I thought would be cool. Trying to "get a startup going" might be giving myself too much credit.
Ah, that make sense. Incorrect assumption on my part that you decided to leave.
Re: Ask HN: Have you successfully done a career do-over, and how did you do it?
#43I suspect its not as easy as many people make out. I was a great C++/OO dev for 10 years before I got bored, starting doing management, business focussed roles and more high level devops style work. After 10 years of that I wanted to move back into pure coding. With great experience should be easy right? Wrong. I got a mid-level java/python dev job and it was difficult, I was out of touch and everything was different…
I'm only 32 but that's kind of where I'm at right now too.
Mastered Objective-C and Mac & iOS development 10 years ago, now it's all Swift and nobody's really hiring for iOS devs in my area (Chicago suburbs), and nobody's hiring for native Mac developers anywhere, period. And all the best practices in iOS have changed drastically since then, too, in terms of both coding and UX.
Learned Ruby on Rails 8 years ago, but it changed so fast that most of what I knew about it has become irrelevant, and I never was very good at Rails in the first place.
All the best practices I've learned in HTML/CSS/JS/jQuery/Less/Sass are becoming outdated pretty quickly.
Spent 5 years mastering Clojure but it's obviously very niche and I don't have any experience with big data or anything else Clojure is usually used for, only traditional web apps.
It feels like there's no way to keep up with the industry while staying relevant and employable.
Re: Ask HN: Have you successfully done a career do-over, and how did you do it?
#44Can't speak on it personally but about 3-4 years ago during my last job search I searched a few "Getting a dev job after 30" type queries. I was around that age and concerned about all the ageism claims. Apparently there are forums full of former developers either out of the industry or struggling to remain in it. There was a lot of talk about depression and guys being suicidal because they couldn't keep up with the…
I find the notion of age discrimination at 30+ to be simply ludicrous. I’ve been at multiple top tech companies, and the very common age ranges were mid-20s to (estimated) late-40s.
You find it ludicrous because you haven't experienced it or seen it with your own eyes?
Re: Ask HN: Have you successfully done a career do-over, and how did you do it?
#45I got too comfortable and thought I dont need to be harassed or witness others being harassed. I'm leaving this craphole and I'll be able to get another job when Im ready to go back to work. That was June of last year and I was ready to get back to work in September. Yet all those recruiters knocking on my door and landing me 30 phone & in person interviews never prompted an offer. Though six long months later and as of two weeks ago I started a new gig.
Im not sure why it took so long as it never did before, but it's either there is more supply then before for UI/UX Designer & Developers roles, I'm getting old(42), I do both design & development which the UX side ppl say Im not experienced in the study testing where this button should go(let's talk about that for hours) to developers saying I dont know React. Also, I thought ppl in my field might have been talking about how I just up and left my last job without mentioning the harassment(after Me Too movement started to roll i reached out to the heads of this big company reminding them that I reported a female colleague's harassment was ignored then harassed myself .. im a dude).
Overall I am glad that's behind me/working now and it just took time and potentially making ppl shut up about me when they dont know the whole story.
Re: Ask HN: Have you successfully done a career do-over, and how did you do it?
#46Can't speak on it personally but about 3-4 years ago during my last job search I searched a few "Getting a dev job after 30" type queries. I was around that age and concerned about all the ageism claims. Apparently there are forums full of former developers either out of the industry or struggling to remain in it. There was a lot of talk about depression and guys being suicidal because they couldn't keep up with the…
I find the notion of age discrimination at 30+ to be simply ludicrous. I’ve been at multiple top tech companies, and the very common age ranges were mid-20s to (estimated) late-40s.
I think this phenomenon is hugely dependent on location.
Re: Ask HN: Have you successfully done a career do-over, and how did you do it?
#47I believe this is a time when a lot of software engineers are asking the hard questions about their careers. Here's why: The technologies have become simpler and the barriers to entry have become low. Once upon a time, if you knew the mainstream languages (C++ and Java) it meant you paid your dues learning the hard stuff. Today, with nodejs becoming mainstream, and the cloud at the backend, developers who come from a…
If you know C++ well, definitely recommend taking a look at embedded software/firmware development. If you look at an embedded project using a micro controller the embedded environment is still space constrained by available onboard flash and RAM. If you want to move up the stack and look at a raspberry pi/beaglebone type project, the development environment is very much 'DOS/Unix' command line application based with…
The pay isn't that good. Web is were the money is at.
Re: Ask HN: Have you successfully done a career do-over, and how did you do it?
#48I was a Fortran developer for a few years in the Aerospace business. After a while, I got sick of 1977 and just wanted to be a "regular" full stack guy.
At the time Rails 2.X was current and Clojure was pretty new. Both looked pretty neat. I learned Rails and Clojure on my free time, went through Michael Hartl's Twitter knockoff to learn, and applied for jobs.
Nobody really loved how little I knew about modern web dev, but several told me they could see I was bright-ish and sufficiently motivated that they'd take the chance. It was hard and stressful at first, because I didn't know anything (JavaScript, jQuery, what's a "callback" function?, etc.) but I picked it up fairly quickly.
Made $80K my first year (pretty good junior dev salary in Texas) and it's been better every year since.
Re: Ask HN: Have you successfully done a career do-over, and how did you do it?
#49I was at one of the FANG companies for 6+ years, joined right after graduation. However, I couldn't get senior due to me being naive (I have no ego, hence wasn't able to collaborate effectively with teammates, pissed a few off a few times), positioning of the product (none of my team members got promoted to senior while I was in that team). Last year I opted to change my jobs when my promo was denied again. I had har…
> The big change I have done is to accept that not everyone is learning all the time and not to try to do the same (its software engineering not research) What do you mean by this?
Basically solve a small problem at a time (however uninteresting it is; a lot of things are uninteresting to me), never try to put the whole world in my head or continually come up with ground breaking stuff. I also realized that most other people are doing the same and this helped me align better with them.
Re: Ask HN: Have you successfully done a career do-over, and how did you do it?
#50I suspect its not as easy as many people make out. I was a great C++/OO dev for 10 years before I got bored, starting doing management, business focussed roles and more high level devops style work. After 10 years of that I wanted to move back into pure coding. With great experience should be easy right? Wrong. I got a mid-level java/python dev job and it was difficult, I was out of touch and everything was different…
> Languages, styles, CI/CD, DI, git, containers, unit testing its a huge amount to learn
I feel that a key trend in modern development is often needlessly focused on the mastering the complexity behind the coding infrastructure/deployment pipeline and ignores the actual business needs. Not suggesting these practices are useless by any means, but that for most startups it's putting the cart before the horse.