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Ask HN: Have you successfully done a career do-over, and how did you do it?

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Re: Ask HN: Have you successfully done a career do-over, and how did you do it?

#151

Post by ccdev »

ordinaryperson wrote: post #143
ccdev wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm definitely choosing path 1, which is to become a senior dev. I prefer technical-focused jobs. Learn from mentor programmers, get into teams and learn formal development practices, and then help out programmers less experienced than myself. I've never held a senior title, never led a group, nor even been involved with the process of hiring other programmers. I currently live in Chicago which is pretty good for COL…

In that case, I'd recommend specializing in one particular language/framework/domain. Whether it's NodeJS, Python, C#, Swift -- pick one and run with it. "General programmer" is fine for management but not great for senior developer. It seems little odd that at 35 you're still in the $25/hr range. Either you got a late start or maybe there's some soft skills you need to improve (running a meaningful meeting, developi…

>It seems little odd that at 35 you're still in the $25/hr range.

Don't underestimate the negative effects of having no job lined up when you're let go from your current one. You can't realistically negotiate for an ideal salary when you're currently making zero. Taking a less-than-optimal job offer is still better than being homeless, though.

For reference, my first web development job paid $12/hr (part-time) in 2007, in the Chicago area. I found this job by cold-emailing job listings on Craigslist.

Re: Ask HN: Have you successfully done a career do-over, and how did you do it?

#152

Post by hemling »

47 here. I drove my career into a dead-end.

Always been a generalist. Tried many times to do startups and saas products. It never got me anywhere. Between my projects, I worked as a freelancer, while living in many different countries. I took anything I could get. Earned enough money, then tried again. I have broad work experience, but nothing deep. Started a family late in life (with 44). Now I feel my career is a dead-end. Plus I seem to have lost my ability to put up with all that technological mess and the ever-new-shiny-thing.

I'm in a real slump. It's been a long time that I slept well.

Last year I created an online course. It's self-hosted and on Udemy. Compared to the time I have invested it generates peanuts, but I enjoyed the process of teaching.

So this is my plan out of the slump: teaching and corporate training. I figure that once I have created sufficient products, I may be able to make a living. And I'm trying to get my foot into corporate training. Though I'm an introvert, I do enjoy a lot helping others to learn and acquire skills.

I'm working on my public speaking abilities as well. Last year I gave a talk at a conference. I was nervous as hell, but at least some seem to have enjoyed my talk.

It's a long hard way, but I feel it's the only viable for me.

btw - if anyone here wants to chat, get in touch, email in profile.

Re: Ask HN: Have you successfully done a career do-over, and how did you do it?

#153

Post by stevekemp »

ElectronicE wrote: post #28

I got a super comfortable job for the past 15years as a work from home C++ server programmer. It has allowed me to be around and watch my kid grow rather than be away 8-6PM and just come home to dinner and put them to bed. It was very good pay at the beginning but it hasn't keep up and now it's not that good (to bad either). A few years ago I started playing with electronics (Arduinos, Raspberry PIs and stuff like th…

That sounds like a pretty rewarding expansion of your skills.

I've spent the last year coming up with fun projects of my own, based around ESP8266 devices, and while I don't think I'd ever want to make a career out of it there is something very refreshing about developing in such constrained environments.

It always reminds me of writing code in Z80 assembly on my home computer back in the 80s.

Re: Ask HN: Have you successfully done a career do-over, and how did you do it?

#154

Post by bewe42 »

ordinaryperson wrote: post #113
ccdev wrote: post #97

Thanks for the replies, everyone. Keep them coming! I didn't expect this topic to get this popular. The reason I asked this question is that I am facing a career slump as a software engineer, and finding out that the software industry is brutal if you don't know how to carve a path for your own career. And when I mean career slump, I really mean it. I'm living with my mom at age 35 which is quite the opposite of what…

What do you WANT to do (besides make money)? Generally speaking there are 3 broad career paths for developers these days: 1. Senior developer/team lead 2. Management 3. Startup founder / worker ========== Senior dev: ========== PROS: Actually get to build stuff all day. Fun to program the latest and greatest. Be respected as an expert by your peers. Less meeting and paperwork hassle than other roles. CONS: Can be sat…

There's also

4. Freelancer

which is somewhat 1 + 3

PROS: freedom of choice, less bs

CONS: Pressure to market yourself. Dealing with feast or famine, instability.

Re: Ask HN: Have you successfully done a career do-over, and how did you do it?

#155

Post by xstartup »

I was a Symbian S40 app developer, after that Symbian C++ S60, developing J2ME applets. Left the job, launched my own app. Made first million doing that! Then I recreated the same app for Blackberry then finally Android, made tons of money doing this. Then it got soo crowded, clones kept coming and I lost my competitive edge. Then I launched a web app in a niche and built SaaS business. At this point - I had all money I ever wanted but I lost motivation, I started getting back to my roots. Hacking on projects, building expertise across dozens of different technologies. It was as if I am trying to justify what I've earned. Naive me! But then I realized that tho I am among the people who claim technology as their passion but this is not what attracted me to this field. What attracted me was a solving problem which many had in common. So, I left hacking and started building small products again. Launching 4-5 more products, all successful - I never failed at anything. But still, sometimes I feel that I just keep getting lucky. This thing still haunts me till date. I am not able to relax or take a day off either. Life has become hell lately, I feel I've to fight to survive. The world just doesn't make any sense to me!

Re: Ask HN: Have you successfully done a career do-over, and how did you do it?

#156

Post by matte_black »

crimsonalucard wrote: post #138
matte_black wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tough to get hired on fundamentals these days.

A lot of jobs out there only test you on fundamentals. Hackerrank questions allow you to pick whatever language you like.

In most jobs you will not get a foot in the door if all you claim to know is fundamentals. If you do not know the languages or frameworks they work in the interview is over as they are not going to spend the time training you. They want you to get in and be effective as soon as possible, not pay for your on the job training.

Re: Ask HN: Have you successfully done a career do-over, and how did you do it?

#157

Post by partisan »

I was working as a .NET Developer (still do), but around 2010, I was neck deep in a codebase that was passing around DataSets, stuck in VB.NET, no real leveraging of code. I interviewed for Amazon and tanked miserably, which was a wake up call for me as I wasn't aware how much I had let my skills slip.

I knew I had hit something of a low point so I started learning on my own again outside of work. I picked up several non-MS languages and technologies which helped me to understand better how I should be using the MS stack. I eventually found DDD, CQRS, distributed computing, and other concepts that colored my design perspective. I petitioned for, and through threat of leaving, got the department permission to use C# and I started to refactor code when I touched it.

It was a tough road. I sometimes didn't have patience with myself, but I started counting the little victories and kept going from there.

I am currently learning front-end frameworks, ES6, and Typescript. Nobody asked me to. I just know I will learn something in the process that I can apply in the future even if I never get a job related to this tech.

Re: Ask HN: Have you successfully done a career do-over, and how did you do it?

#158

Post by EnderMB »

Mine is a similar story to others, although I can't really say if it's a success or not.

For the past eight years I've been a C# developer, working my way up from mid-level to senior developer across a number of companies. I've built dozens of websites, contributed to open-source projects, and have given talks at local user groups.

The problem with being a single-stack person, especially in the .NET world, is that you look on at your peers on the Linux stack and wonder if you're missing out, so I left a cushy job as a senior developer at a large agency to be a standard developer at a software firm, one that focuses on everything but .NET.

I'm a month in, and it's been hard going from being the guy that knows things to the guy that struggles. Getting to grips with Linux and the terminal was surprisingly easy (probably because I was an avid Powershell user on Windows), but I've struggled to learn languages and frameworks quick enough. I have enough of a grasp of Python and Ruby to be able to look at code and know what's going on, but I'm still miles behind others, and it feels like a gap that won't be easily/quickly solved, regardless of the time I put into learning/doing. Despite the logic being almost exactly the same, it's crazy how one can go from making stupid mistakes in a PHP script to fixing a long-standing bug in an ASP.NET MVC site in the space of a minute.

Re: Ask HN: Have you successfully done a career do-over, and how did you do it?

#159

Post by crimsonalucard »

matte_black wrote: post #156
crimsonalucard wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of jobs out there only test you on fundamentals. Hackerrank questions allow you to pick whatever language you like.

In most jobs you will not get a foot in the door if all you claim to know is fundamentals. If you do not know the languages or frameworks they work in the interview is over as they are not going to spend the time training you. They want you to get in and be effective as soon as possible, not pay for your on the job training.

Personally I have found that this is relevant only for front end work. For the backend you just need rudimentary knowledge of a framework/language to get your foot in the door, then the actual testing is language agnostic.

Re: Ask HN: Have you successfully done a career do-over, and how did you do it?

#160

Post by wffurr »

My first programming job out of school was on really obsolete tech: IBM Unibasic aka Pick Basic in an ERP system. It's a career trap on par with taking a COBOL programming job right out of university: https://medium.com/@csixty4/pick-was-post-relational-before-...

I broke out and rebooted my career by quitting and going to grad school full time and getting a Master's degree in CS from a fancier university in a tech hub city. My phone blew up with recruiters when I graduated and posted my resume online.

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