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Ask HN: If you were to switch career, what would you do?

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Re: Ask HN: If you were to switch career, what would you do?

#181

Post by ryandrake »

There are two possible interpretations of this question actually:

1. What would you do if you were not worried about finances and could simply do what you most loved for a living?

2. Given your financial and career needs/desires, what would be more rewarding than your developer job?

I'd answer these two questions totally differently, and I suspect many in this thread would as well.

Re: Ask HN: If you were to switch career, what would you do?

#185

Post by mkaziz »

ainiriand wrote: post #150

I am slowly working towards becoming a fiction writer. At the moment I am a software engineer and I feel I can make it if I put enough effort into it. My specialties are psychological terror and sci-fi.

Got any tips for someone trying to do the same?

Re: Ask HN: If you were to switch career, what would you do?

#186

Post by planteen »

kbart wrote: post #49
mrlyc wrote: post #38

When the tech world moved away from me (doing mainly embedded C for the last thirty years might not have been the best idea for my career), I became an aged carer for my disabled mum. I learned a lot about cleaning, gardening and adding subtitles to films as she is going deaf. I also learned a lot about editing spoken word audio files for pacing, volume and noise reduction as she wrote a memoir then recorded an audio…

"When the tech world moved away from me (doing mainly embedded C for the last thirty years might not have been the best idea for my career)" Strange, why do you say so? We live in the era of IoT and everything has at least one chip inside them. I also do system/embedded programming, but never felt the lack of possibilities to advance my career.

I'm also systems/embedded and the OP made me a bit nervous. I have been primarily writing C (with some C++ and other languages) for my career of ~8 years. It seems like there are enough jobs available. Certainly not as many as web dev, but at the same time I have been able to work on things I consider interesting (spacecraft, MRI, automotive).

OP, what do you wish you had done differently? Web? Enterprise Java dev?

Re: Ask HN: If you were to switch career, what would you do?

#187

Post by traviscj »

gravypod wrote: post #11

Welder. It's everything that makes a skill desirable to learn. Very easy to start, impossible to master. Pays reasonably well too if you can find work. Also most welders are people who don't put up with much BS so it's refreshing coming from pretty much any other field.

I also love welding. My grandpa wanted to teach me, but he didn't have a second helmet. So he has me wear the helmet because he can weld by sound, so he just looks the other way and lays down a bead that is more perfect than lots that I see in the wild. (He started and ran a machine shop for most of his working life.)

Re: Ask HN: If you were to switch career, what would you do?

#188

Post by qntty »

magic_beans wrote: post #96
kyoob wrote: post #77

I'd open a bookstore/cafe that sells tech and engineering books. We'd run tech classes in a space in the back, with a discount for vets and artists looking to change careers. I'd live in the apartment above the store, with a garden on the roof. The wifi would be phenomenal.

What is the point of owning tech books when a) much of the content is online and b) there are new developments in languages/frameworks all the time?

From my experience, if you want to do anything complicated in C, it's necessary to buy books. Some languages have good online resources but many don't.
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