Followed Bill Gates' footsteps and bought a section of farmland. I grew up in FFA, and knew I wanted to raise beeves, etc since I was young. After a divorce, I pulled the trigger. Software funded beeves.
What is FFA?
Future Farmers of America:
Ask HN: Developers who switched careers, what are you doing now?
171–180 of 344 posts
Re: Ask HN: Developers who switched careers, what are you doing now?
#172Moved to renewables. Wanted to try and help with climate change and needed new challenges. Solar is a fantastic industry. Lots of room for improvement feels like internet did in thr mid 90s. Just a ton of enthusiasm and a sense you're part of something big and important.
Are you doing software in that field, or are you an entirely different sort of engineer now? If so, did you have to obtain some kind of certification? Can you tell us about how that works?
Re: Ask HN: Developers who switched careers, what are you doing now?
#173Earlier quoted context omitted.
Most developers work on meaningless, "make the rich richer", products anyways
But you can find something meaningful (very easy), or start your own business (easiest moment in history to rise 1million), or teach in a bootcamp... There are 100 options. Wasting a wonderfull mind just because... sad
Dunno, finding something meaningful to work on has been really hard for me, personally.
It's either a big drop in revenue or bullshit projects
Re: Ask HN: Developers who switched careers, what are you doing now?
#174Not sure if this is what you mean, but I 'switched' from an ML consultancy to entrepreneurship. I now build and market my own projects ([1], [2]) and try to gain enough ad revenue to replace my former salary. Started 1.5 months ago, and enjoying every minute of it! No longer occupying my mind with corporate power dynamics saves a lot of cognitive bandwidth, but to my surprise it has been replaced. I thought I'd feel…
I did something similar. Building is the easy part. Getting meaningful traction is difficult. My own projects: https://cxo.industries https://tradecast.one
I should mention I'm going to Open Source a lot of the dev tools I built, including a back-end SDK + Flutter renderer to make life easier building mostly CRUD apps in Flutter.
I'm using Nim on the back-end, but a Python SDK is going to be added soon after the initial release.
Re: Ask HN: Developers who switched careers, what are you doing now?
#175Walked away from 20 years of software development last year. I've been day and swing trading stocks for last 2 years. I'm now trading full time and doing great. I don't miss the daily stand-ups, scrum meetings, planning meetings, "quick chats", one-on-ones with management, weekly department meetings, monthly company meetings, and late night critical support calls one bit!
Day trading doesn’t work. What is your secret ? You can make millions selling your book.
Re: Ask HN: Developers who switched careers, what are you doing now?
#176Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sorry for the blunt question, but how does it feel to go from something where you make something valuable to ...that? (At least I feel what I do give me meaning)
Hey, if you were working in advertising or crypto, you’re probably about breakin even in the “meaningfulness” department
I'd argue that daytrading is less of a net negative for the world than working on ad tech software.
Re: Ask HN: Developers who switched careers, what are you doing now?
#177Earlier quoted context omitted.
Here’s the thing. If I could just code without being a slave to a scrum master or being product micromanaged.. I would never leave the industry. I worked five years in mobile gaming when the Apple Store first opened. Released 13 titles, had my hands in a half a dozen others, three teams in two countries, 15 employees at our height (95% remote). Never had a standup, planning meaning, grooming.. etc.
I'm surprised you made it 5 years. It seemed like the App Store collapsed to free within a year or two.
You make it sound like there's no money to be made in Apps, but that's clearly obvious to not be true. Switched to freemium with In App Purchases is the model I see every where, and I am constantly amazed at the fact that $0.99, $1.99, etc are paid multiple times by the user to the point that they could have bought a AAA console new release with the IAP paid.
These apps also include ad sales to the IAPs. The money no longer needs to come from the initial download.
Re: Ask HN: Developers who switched careers, what are you doing now?
#178Earlier quoted context omitted.
Most developers work on meaningless, "make the rich richer", products anyways
But you can find something meaningful (very easy), or start your own business (easiest moment in history to rise 1million), or teach in a bootcamp... There are 100 options. Wasting a wonderfull mind just because... sad
What a load of shit. This is the same mindset folks who pop up to yell at some Google engineers have. Why are you using your skills to collect data for adtech! You could be helping bring clean drinking water to the world!
People value what they value, and should be able to work in fields that bring them happiness and don’t break the law without your judgement. Who are you to tell anyone what’s meaningful?
Re: Ask HN: Developers who switched careers, what are you doing now?
#179Walked away from 20 years of software development last year. I've been day and swing trading stocks for last 2 years. I'm now trading full time and doing great. I don't miss the daily stand-ups, scrum meetings, planning meetings, "quick chats", one-on-ones with management, weekly department meetings, monthly company meetings, and late night critical support calls one bit!
I've been exploring day trading recently and have not yet found the angle that works for me and also fits my lifestyle/budget. It's hard to find reliable sources of education on the topic because it seems like so many materials are teaching hindsight technical analysis that looks good on paper but is really just BS to sell a e-book or Discord subscription. I'm still exploring what time frames I want to trade and if I…
The best way of day trading is to exploit a market inefficiency that nobody (or very few) are aware of. As soon as this inefficiency is know to public it will disappear, that's why there is not much sensible material for day trading to learn from, maybe except for the psychological aspect, which is very important. Try to find a system that works for you and be quiet about it. Unfortunately, 95%< of day traders didn't find a system that works and quit after some time.
Re: Ask HN: Developers who switched careers, what are you doing now?
#180I switched to teaching after 20 years (sidenote: I'm not the only one mentioning "20 years". Is there a common thread?) I've been doing it for one and a half year now, so maybe it's a bit too early to draw conclusions, but I really like it and gave me new energy. In software dev I began to feel like the Ecclesiasticus: "everything that looks new, has been done before". I also felt like IT is often making things worse instead of helping out.