Ask HN: How do I move up my career/life?

I'm a 25 year old Indian software developer working in India.

As for my education, I actually studied in the United States for my MS in Computer Science (from a large public university; not ivy league), and is one of the rare Indian students who actually returned to India immediately after I got my degree. I cannot pinpoint exactly why I returned; it was a combination of me being an introvert + I really felt like I didn't belong there. (Don't get me wrong here — all Americans (and non Americans, for that matter) I met in USA were wonderful nice kind people; it's just, I didn't belong there).

After returning back to India, I got a software engineering job which I would've gotten anyway even if I never went to America (I try not to think too much about this).

I have 2.5 years of work experience, and at work I do Laravel for the most part, with occasional Python and Go. If I may say so myself, I'm an expert in Laravel, great with python, and just a beginner in Go. I'm constantly learning and improving myself.

I work on a specific product (that our company sells to many other companies; basically what I'm saying is, this product is not something a specific client asked us to build — it is a web application we built and sell and make money from), ie., I'm NOT a consultant programmer or anything like that.

I've become good enough at my current job that it's no longer stressful.

I'm making decent money (decent enough for a single guy living in a tier-2 city in India), and I don't have much expenses. No loans or mortgages or crap like that.

My problem is that I don't know where to go to from here. Like, I'm in a good, comfortable place. I want to get to a better, even more comfortable place, and I don't know what to do.

I've considered applying to other jobs, but the work environment in most other places around here is hectic and is not worth with going to. And most other jobs here are those consultancy/outsourcing type jobs which I'm not keen on doing. Also, I doubt if any of those would be intellectually stimulating.

I tried my luck applying to FAANG companies, and well, I didn't get them. Unlike previous years, this year I didn't even get a callback after I applied (I used to get to the interview stages). Maybe they decided I might never improve lmao.

Perhaps I should move abroad? But where to? Going to USA is out of the question with the H1B lottery and associated crapshoot that I don't want to subject myself to. Plus, that's a country I choose to return from.

Or perhaps I should try to get away from my web developer job and get into something else?

Let's see. Consider machine learning. I'm good at math, yet I had an extremely difficult time in my artificial intelligence class; therefore I might end up being bad at ML, but who knows. Although there's plenty of ML jobs here, it's difficult to get those jobs if you're not already in ML. Hard to get my foot in the door.

I have more interest in type systems and programming language theory and things like that. While I'm not an expert, I know little of Haskell and Racket, and I think I'd enjoy doing more of those in a professional capacity. But then again, the job market for those kinds of things is next to nil here. A career at Jane Street interests me more than a career at Google, but I don't think I'm great enough for them to move me to one of their offices abroad (they don't have offices in India).

Should I learn ML/Data Science and get into that? Should I move abroad? Should I do anything else?

So, I'm asking for general career and life advise here. I don't have any active pressing problems, but my life is just meh. Borderline depressing.

Thanks for reading thus far, and sorry if I wasted your time.

My current job unfortunately doesn't allow me to freelance. It's explicitly mentioned in the terms.

However, you kind of explicitly mentioned what I've been trying to get at — having more net worth.

I've been involved in hiring at most companies I've worked at and I can assure that hiring is a complete disaster everywhere. In fact, you mentioned that you were introverted but if you volunteered to help out with interviewing at your current company you might find it to be an eye opening experience.

It does tend to be better at faang companies, but not that much better. Still lots of ego and superstition.

One option to consider would be to just keep applying to either faang companies or companies with generally higher prestige that might lead to faang companies.

You can also look into doing contract work for them which tends to be an easier onramp to working there full time (but still quite hard).

You can also take this time to poke around at what you find interesting. This will likely also help your career a lot in various ways.

I've been in your situation a lot of times in my career "well this is boring. Now what?" I don't want to say this is advice exactly because you never know where it goes - but for me I've always looked around to see what seems most interesting and worked on that. Mostly because I'm a very lazy person and if I'm not deeply in love with my work it feels like pulling teeth.

Selfishly I'd love to have you back in the US! We need all the developers of your caliber we can get. But I totally understand not wanting to mess with visas. I have some friends who are on H1-B's. I would go crazy with all the nonsense they have to do. I had no idea how long it took before talking with them about it.

One last thought, ycombinator has been doing a push towards becoming international lately. You could take some time to think of something the world needs and you could plausibly build with great effort and then apply to YC with just the idea. Perhaps something that could only be built with a deep knowledge of Laravel.

Getting into YC is a longshot but you may find the questions in the application and sketching out your startup idea illuminating in it's own way. You can also apply again with more than just an idea next time if you don't get in. Or seek other funding (though that road is probably more difficult in India than in the US. Who knows though, there must be parts of India with a startup scene.)

Good luck friend!

This sentence stood out to me. If you're comfortable you're not growing. Punch above your weight-class and get hungry! Light that fire within yourself!