Ask HN: Have you successfully done a career do-over, and how did you do it?

I was a bored private equity lawyer, working like a ninja, ashamed by my firm’s clients. I did a one year Masters in Environmental Economics, did some really interesting work and then joined someone else’s start-up and ran a few side projects. That gave me the experience and confidence to really go out on my own. To anyone else about to pivot their life I would say: 1. A British one year masters (not an MBA) is a great way to build a network and learn enough skills to make a fist of your next step, learningon the job. 2. Don’t do an MBA. Ever. 3. Learn start-up skills on someone else’s start-up before blowing your own cash on your own dumb-ass mistakes. 4. Read Hacker News everyday!

It is getting easier to enter and it is getting harder to establish a sustainable business. We see a trend towards bi-modal development in SW as we see in other parts of society. Quite possibly the change is happening faster these days.

What may well have become easier is maintaining an edge as a business in the industry provided you have reached enough scale to leverage low interest rates, tax engineering, global aligned trade frameworks and low cost labor.

Dependency Injection. It's an over complicated term for a really trivial pattern in development.

func addOp(a, b, op){ return op(a) + op(b); }

Here op is a function being injected into another function. Nobody uses the term in functional/procedural programming because this pattern is obvious and ubiquitous in Higher order functions like map, reduce or filter.

When people use DI though it's used in the context of OOP, where a dependency is an object getting injected into another object through a constructor. People using this pattern tend to create programs that are littered with very abstract objects that can only work when injected with dependencies. Also the injected objects themselves may be DI dependent as well leading to crazy dependency chains (reminds me of inheritance ugh). All of this is done in the name of "modularity" and "unit testing." As you can imagine this pattern produces a sort of False composability where your code is littered with very abstract objects that are rarely ever reusable. If you want to compose object A and object B, you have to specifically design/code object A so that it can handle object B or vice versa. Because all object composition involves custom modifications to the code of an object it is a sort of broken implementation of modularity and reusability.

In a function, the only requirement for composability is matching types. All functions that return ints can be composed with one another without additional modifications. This is true composability and true modularity. The above example doesn't need dependency injection the same result can be achieved with this:

func add(a, b){ return a + b; }

add(op(a),op(b));

So you can see why the OP listed DI as one of his complaints. He must be dealing with a highly Object Oriented code base that employs this pattern extensively.

I interviewed at a Fortune 100 tech company when I was 35. The head of the development center declared to me that "people don't come here to retire". I was hired because they needed a niche skill that I possessed.

I'm mostly talking about people that, for one reason or another, appear to wander around with no clear career progression or direction, so it looks like they are "junior" in experience despite being "senior" in total years worked.

And I think that re-doing careers by switching professions (as you say, chemist -> QA) is different than re-doing career in the same profession. Something like the former is different because it's easier for companies to treat you as a clean slate if you switch to something that has little overlap with your former profession. But I want that clean slate treatement just re-attempting my profession.

For instance, maybe I want to re-do my entry level years because I never got into Computer Science, and would like to get an internship at a leading tech company, because that is a better start than my reality, which was just graduate with no internships, no support group of professionals, nor recommendations for good companies. It was just me going solo and blindly applying to local jobs at Craiglist for low-budget clients.

So yeah, I'm not talking about career switching into another profession, but more like hitting the reset button on one, to do it better the second time around.