Ask HN: How do I find a new career?

Unfortunately most of my friends were in a worse position than me prior to the layoffs. Most are more educated than me, but work menial office jobs that don’t pay well.

I remember talking to someone working in insurance claims processing, offering that their company was hiring, but apparently you need a degree to do that.

> The biggest challenge for me is what a coworker once called the “golden handcuff”

The one silver lining is that this market seems to have broken the golden handcuffs on me. I’m not incredibly driven by money, and would gladly take a job I enjoy for less money, but oddly enough, until recently it was always easier to find money than a job I didn’t hate.

> I came across a fascinating masters degree in Coursera which allows me to earn a masters in a field I have no professional experience although I’m quite interested in. There was no requirement for a bachelor’s degree in that field nor the general tedious process of admission to a graduate degree. It simply required that you’d be able to keep up with the course work, like complementing knowledge you don’t have from a bachelor in that area by yourself. This is certainly a longer term commitment but for me sounds fantastic to get to a place where I could match software salaries without ever looking at a software company again!

I’ve wondered how this would look on a resume. “No I don’t have a bachelors, but I have a Masters in X. Wouldn’t this lead to some always conversations that would confuse and raise suspicion?

Hah - yeah. There is no money in YouTube - trust me.

Are you capable of doing physical work for a living, or (to be blunt) are you only suited for office-type work? You can make a decent living as a UPS driver or postal worker, tradesperson (requires apprenticeship, but you get paid during it), or plenty of other careers. Competition in the white-collar business fields, where you're competing with the whole world, is much stiffer than competition in the local blue-collar fields, where you're competing with other people in town.

> How much money do you need?

Obviously this is a tough question because CoL can vary a lot, but I just want enough to live a middle class lifestyle covering living costs and having some spending money to enjoy, but preferably not something that will eat up all my time (a friend of mine was a nurse which pays well on pepper but she was desperate to get out because of hellish hours)

> What’s your personality like?

I’d like to think I’m easy to get along with, and moderately sociable, but I don’t have outgoingness for something like sales. I’m still a tinkerer/hacker at heart, but I’m just not good enough to be competitive on a job market.

> Were there any programming adjacent roles you thought were interesting?

Yes, there are still even programming roles that I think would be interesting, but “interesting” seems mostly out of reach. I’ve always been interested in security, but not the sort of positions I could get. Occasionally I’ll still see a programming job that I think would be interesting, but they’re usually highly technical senior positions in domains I wouldn’t qualify for anyway.