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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?

#61

Post by slothtrop »

I would echo the common sentiment here that personal projects could help you in your development, and break away from monotony. At the very least, learning something along the way and demonstrating it can increase your marketability if that's something that concerns you. This is my current strategy. I'm not exactly anxious about my future, but I think it's reasonable to hedge bets with lifelong learning.

Another primary driver for my starting side-projects, which I swore I wouldn't do because "I already program enough at work" (I think this is fair when I'm burned out from it but I feel that less and less often as I improve), is that I want to be more creative and less consumptive in my free time, with something I would value.

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

#63

Post by tilolebo »

derwiki wrote: post #58
tilolebo wrote: post #42

There are companies out there who value the experience of senior software engineers (and I mean real seniority, not the job title that you update to senior after 3 years in the field). Such companies will have a career ladder up to Principal or Distinguished engineer. You will have to share your knowledge, of course, but without having to give up coding and do people management, if you don't want that. I'm 39, happy…

Principal (even many Staff roles) at my company is reduced coding and many have direct reports, so YMMV. To stay coding, stay “senior” level.

I work with a Principal engineer in my team, who used to be the team lead. He works on IC level only, doing a mix of architecture and operations work, with some interviewing on the side.

No direct reports. There are multiple Principals in the same situation. No direct reports, they just usually work on a scope that involves multiple teams,but they don't lead them.

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

#64

Post by indigochill »

I'm just a couple years behind you and have been having a related discussion with my manager recently. He identified that for developers, there are (at least?) two paths of progression: either you move into a management role (like technical director) or you move into some sort of domain expert/specialist role.

Like you, I wanna make stuff, not manage people, and I told my manager that as well so we could set progression expectations. What this has looked like for me is still that I'm not doing as much coding as I was as a junior, but I am documenting a lot of things, formalizing development processes, teaching peers about dev ops practices, and so on. I keep on top of new developments, understanding what's worthwhile for our team and why, and disseminating that information to the rest of the team.

My feeling is that you can be safe from younger coders if you continue to learn from your work and show the expertise you've gained from your years. On the other hand, I have also seen senior-titled engineers whose code was indistinguishable from fresh graduates, and that's a bad place to be.

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

#65

Post by maverickJ »

1. You might be leaking energy: Try write down the different activities you have done during coding over the past 10 years and see if any of theses activities has been antagonistic with each other. If you have found antagonistic activities, try eliminate them and give yourself a year to work on complementary activities in coding. It might reveal a thing or two to you.

2. It's incredible hard to predict an accurate version of the future. A better alternative might be to set yourself to quickly adapt to changing scenarios and being strong on timeless foundations.

3. Align your strengths with the output of the company: Find your strengths are and what you enjoy and figure out how to align it with the outputs of the company and serving humanity. I find that having a goal bigger than ourselves tends to energise us.

4. If you need to move to something different, it might require you paying a price; I think of it as paying a premium on your first deal.

5. Have a personal motto:I have observed that organisations tend to become the motto they ascribe to themselves. Maybe individuals can leverage this?

Some posts from leverage thoughts that my help below:

https://leveragethoughts.substack.com/p/do-not-engage-the-mi...

https://leveragethoughts.substack.com/p/early-career-tactics...

https://leveragethoughts.substack.com/p/paying-a-premium-on-...

https://leveragethoughts.substack.com/p/humans-and-work-thre...

I hope this helps and I wish you the best.

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

#66

Post by smoe »

dm03514 wrote: post #16

The problem is that, at same time I feel that coding can't be a lifetime career: Is this actually true?? I’m concerned because I read that you’re making decisions based on this assumption and I’m not necessarily true this assumption is inline with reality. I’m 36, and have been moving away from coding for the last couple years too, I’m deeply concerned because engineering seems to earn more across the board than proj…

I have taken a bit of a different approach. For the the first 10 years I have been focused purely on coding while dabbling a bit in UX and Design while rejecting any management opportunities given. The last 5 have been a mix of the prior and management, product owner, growth, founder. I plan to continue this while staying at smaller companies where your responsibilities are what is currently needed and very hands on, not strictly what your title says.

This I feel gives me the most flexibility for the future. I’m not necessarily concerned about not finding a job in programming until I retire, but I like to make life decisions (e.g. where and how to life) first and job decisions second.

I haven’t done a whole lot of programming in the last 1.5 years or so, but so far I’m not feeling that I’m falling much behind given that I’m doing around 15 hours of mentoring, code reviews and problem solving sessions with programmers per week.

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

#67

Post by Quixotica1 »

I’m in a similar situation. If you are good at talking with people and managing them, then companies will naturally try to coax you into positions where that’s what you do. A lot of people can code, and naturally a smaller subset can code and manage people well. I believe that all you can do is be as honest as possible with your company without making ultimatums. See if they are receptive to changing your role so that you are doing more coding. I feel your issue though because it’s easy to think “but I started making a lot more money when I started managing people, if I go back to coding, will my pay still be justified? Will future raises/promotions be forfeited because I go back to coding. Is coding “going back”? Is this furthering or regressing my career? Etcétera.

My only advice there is if you’ve successfully managed for a few years and you make the switch back to coding, to go back to management will not be hard, at your company or at another. Good luck

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

#68

Post by kamaitachi »

I'm in my mid-50's and coding full-time for a living.

Twice in my career, I've found myself in senior management roles (CTO in an EMEA organisation, and Software Eng Manager in a medium sized tech company).

In both cases, it's fair to say I wasn't having fun in those roles. I stayed in each for 4-5 years. And in both cases, I left the role to return to a pure coding role (I went freelancing, and eventually ended up as an employee in a company in both cases).

The adjustment was tough. Luckily, I'd been coding in my spare time, so the tech transition wasn't too hard.

But finding myself suddenly in a position of almost zero influence was tough.

I suddenly wasn't setting the agenda. I also found myself disagreeing with my supervisors' decisions but I had to temper my replies (I knew I had more management experience than some of them, but I needed to stay in my box, to a large extent).

In some aspects, it's an ego problem. As a senior manager, you're invariably in a highly visible role, and that brings a certain level of ego boosting.

Also, in my case, there was the various visible attributes that comes with a senior role - company car, personal assistant, international travel, visibility up the org tree, etc.

Luckily, I ended up in a financial trading company so my compenation now is probably where it would be if I had stayed on a management track in other companies.

Do I regret my decisions? At this stage, no (my most recent "reversion" was nearly 7 years ago). I'm happy writing code and not being involved in the politics and BS of management.

But there are times I also miss some aspects of management.

In terms of it being a long-term career choice? I feel it's easier to find roles as a freelance developer than as a freelance manager (or management consultant).

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

#69

Post by sriram_malhar »

If you are considering moving back to a technical career, perhaps my experience (over the last 34 years) will be of use to you. There is an excellent living to be made purely as a technical person without having to unduly fear your job going to younger folks. I chose to take six months off each year since 2001 (*). I have never had anyone report to me ever, yet I have strived to be good enough technically that I am often the person people turn to, from higher management to the entry-level programmer. I do short-term consulting engagements (almost always hands on technical work), and I am never in a hurry to get the next gig. This is what I have learnt.

First, think in terms of entire systems. Clients pay, and pay handsomely, for honest solutions to their (technical) problems. Don't think of the solution as a "coding" issue alone. There's design (of interfaces, of documentation), there is hardware (IoT, network), there are deployments with 24/7 operations, there are installations in unforgiving environments ( sensors in a corrosive humid tank) and so on. Each one of this is a technical challenge. At the end of the day, clients want a system that is a pleasure to use and is maintainable and extendable by someone else.

Second, get good at all aspects of delivering a system entirely on your own. That is, you don't have to do it by yourself, but you should be decent enough to pitch in as a replacement for any part. This provides opportunities for endless learning, and in my experience, breadth of experience is rewarded.

Third, many real-world problems are not shiny and cool, and younger people don't want to do them. HN is biased towards Open GPT more than say, wastewater management systems, so one could be forgiven for feeling uncool and out of date all the time. Nah, it is a big world out there. And there's plenty of opportunity to use Rust or Elixir or whatever tickles your fancy.

Fourth, if you go my way (not working one's tail off for the whole year), I'd advise you to downscale expectations in terms of money and lifestyle. Once you learn to make peace with making less money, you will find that you will have loads of work coming your way, enough time and plenty of money to enjoy life where it counts. Most good things in life (health, travel, books, sports, entertainment, vacations) are surprisingly affordable. And you need time to enjoy them with your loved ones.

Good luck.

(*) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21645117

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

#70

Post by dimmke »

Tade0 wrote: post #36

> Maybe company will prefer younger coders to hire and I will not be able to find a job anymore? 32 here, but most of my professional circle is my age or older. Programming is not Logan's Run and outside of maybe bold and snappy SV startups companies cannot afford to sneer at experienced professionals wanting to join - not in the current market at least. My advice would be to talk to your superiors about this - perha…

I'm 29 and the amount of anxiety I read about in programming as a profession is staggering. All the people trying to get into it worried that they're not cut out for it, only for 10 years later to be worried that they're aging out of it.

I wish I could understand where it comes from. There are so, so, so many programming jobs out there. There are no hard and fast rules about anything. I love the comparison to Logan's Run, I've had the same thought myself. I know many people in their 40s and 50s who still code in their day to day.

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