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Ask HN: I feel my career is at a dead end. Any advice on what could I do?

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Re: Ask HN: I feel my career is at a dead end. Any advice on what could I do?

#21

Post by nijg »

You want a job where you can cover both coding and management but you actually prefer to just code. Are you wanting a touch of management just because you'll get a higher salary?

Like the other commenter suggested, it really is best to seek a more leadership role within technical work: architect, tech lead, product owner.

Does your company provide training opportunities? Find skills gaps that your team has and volunteer to fill them. Find gaps of responsibility that you can help with and eventually take over.

If money is the core of your issue, communicate to your manager your career path and back them up by identifying those gaps you see. It helps to frame your problem in a way that you're solving for your company and get buy-in from someone who should be supporting your success - your manager.

If your company doesn't support your transition, well get whatever training you can get on technical skills and leave.

Re: Ask HN: I feel my career is at a dead end. Any advice on what could I do?

#22

Post by beforeolives »

> what will happen in 10 years from now? Maybe company will prefer younger coders to hire and I will not be able to find a job anymore?

I think that people vastly overestimate ageism in the software industry. And experienced engineers are far more valuable than someone who is just starting out. In the worst case, if the industry looks very different in 10 years and your prospect aren't that great, you can move to project management or some other management position at that point instead of settling for it now.

Get a developer job if that's what you prefer to do; I think that you're overestimating the downsides of choosing that option.

Re: Ask HN: I feel my career is at a dead end. Any advice on what could I do?

#24

Post by wayoutthere »

Project management is one of those skills that you need to hide if you want to remain an engineer: being a good PM will just make you nominated to be the PM any time there isn’t one (which is half the time in dev jobs because technical PMs are underpaid and overworked).

So be a bad PM if you want to remain a developer. Manage your tasks and nobody else’s, and intentionally so. It kind of sucks, but the primadonna attitude a lot of senior developers take is basically because it lets you escape the PM responsibilities that get you sidetracked from an engineering career track.

Re: Ask HN: I feel my career is at a dead end. Any advice on what could I do?

#25

Post by tarruda »

recursivedoubts wrote: post #12

This is my experience, and your mileage may vary: Multiple times in my coding career I have felt stalled and/or like I was regressing. Early on, I worked on a programming language, gosu ( https://gosu-lang.github.io/ ) which ended up not really going anywhere. Once the work on it was done, I returned to more mundane web programming for a while (over half a decade.) A long while after that, and unexpectedly, I turned…

When you are working on "mundane web programming", are you employed or just freelancing? If you are employed, do you quit your job to work on these more exciting projects?

Re: Ask HN: I feel my career is at a dead end. Any advice on what could I do?

#27

Post by mordechai9000 »

lukaesch wrote: post #13

Have you considered to start freelancing? You could build a personal brand as a specialist for an industry, tech stack or you feel passionate about and decide on your own which projects/clients you want to work.

Any advice on marketing and getting contracts? Say, hypothetically someone was in a niche that could be useful, but locally there is only one company and other than that it's kind of a vacuum.

Re: Ask HN: I feel my career is at a dead end. Any advice on what could I do?

#29

Post by recursivedoubts »

tarruda wrote: post #25
recursivedoubts wrote: post #12

This is my experience, and your mileage may vary: Multiple times in my coding career I have felt stalled and/or like I was regressing. Early on, I worked on a programming language, gosu ( https://gosu-lang.github.io/ ) which ended up not really going anywhere. Once the work on it was done, I returned to more mundane web programming for a while (over half a decade.) A long while after that, and unexpectedly, I turned…

When you are working on "mundane web programming", are you employed or just freelancing? If you are employed, do you quit your job to work on these more exciting projects?

I have been in both situations over the last two decades.

I don't quit to work on these projects, I usually work on them sporadically during work hours or, during intense periods that rarely last more than a week or two early on, full time. htmx was done during the first few weeks of the covid shutdown, for example.

Re: Ask HN: I feel my career is at a dead end. Any advice on what could I do?

#30

Post by bad_username »

You may be interested to become a software architect. This role is not offered by all companies, and differs from company to company. But usually it requires a good mix of technical, business and management skills, with the emphasis on technical. In my company, at least, the architect is expected to be hands-on and be able to code the critical/foundational parts that have to be done right. So you might want to find a company where there is a meaningful architect track that is parallel to the management track in terms of compensation and career levels.
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