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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?

#781

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you find consistent work doing that? I try to work part time as a developer and usually either my clients pressure me to full time or hire someone else who will.

I'm a VA with one long-time client who can only offer me part-time work, plus the occassional small project related to the work. I also sometimes get a few side jobs from previous employers. For the last several years, I've generally worked an hour per day, M-F. Living abroad on dollars, and staying out of native-English speaking countries and Nordic ones, it's quite easy to live an average lifestyle on around $600/m…

Fascinating!

You are living an interesting life. It is fun to read about how different everyone's experiences are.

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

#782
post #767

I read a kuro5hin post about a programmer turned courier, "A Coder in Courierland," ( http://atdt.freeshell.org/k5/story_2005_3_19_133129_548.html ) and became pretty infatuated with the idea over a five or six months. The recession hit, lay offs began, and then I was a courier. I did it for a little over three years. It had its ups and downs. I returned to software development and have found a cosier community in th…

> The type of work you do affects your outlook on life. I wish you had elaborated on this.

> I wish you had elaborated on this.

Sure. I've held jobs in one or two other fields prior to entering software development, and each one of them (in my opinion) contributes to a perspective that you see the world through. Our brains change with habit, and, naturally, the thoughts and feelings that frequent your mind will become mainstays of your daily life. It took two years for me to stop feeling like every time I rode my bike to and fro, that it was imperative I do it as fast as possible.

This is going to sound silly, and I'm okay with that. But, being an engineer again, the patterns and ways my brain solves problems for work permeates into daily life. For instance, I view boiling water, laundry, and texting as asynchronous tasks that can have their own thread and let me know when they're ready. Ridiculous, I know, but I feel like our brains seek these things out to strengthen the existing connections we have and to put life into contexts we understand most. Take this with a grain of salt, because this is just my experience and I have no research to link to, at the moment.

The other interesting thing about how it changed me was, prior to being a bike messenger, I was pretty naive of classism and what it looked / sounded like; however, only now is it obvious. I make conscious choices to treat all people in service industries well because I only now understand how privileged I am as an engineer. Tipping and saying "May I have xyz" are large parts of this, as vocations such as baristas, delivery personnel, and food workers are very underpaid. I can't really change the world, but I'd like to think I can make the people in front of me a little happier by treating them well.

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

#783
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.

Also my dream. I already have a collection of about 5000 or so books taking over my house. There are bookshelves on every wall. If I ever cash out of the startup game I'm setting up a private membership library / bookstore. I already have the building picked out and my own collection will be the foundation.

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

#784
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.

Also my dream. I already have a collection of about 5000 or so books taking over my house. There are bookshelves on every wall. If I ever cash out of the startup game I'm setting up a private membership library / bookstore. I already have the building picked out and my own collection will be the foundation.

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

#785
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.

Also my dream. I already have a collection of about 5000 or so books taking over my house. There are bookshelves on every wall. If I ever cash out of the startup game I'm setting up a private membership library / bookstore. I already have the building picked out and my own collection will be the foundation.

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

#787
post #207

Woodworker. From running two small ecommerce companies I think I've learned enough about MVP, shipping, inventory management, etc. From 25 years as a software engineer I've learned about building tools to automate steps. I'd pick some "hard to find / expensive niche (e.g. Greene and Greene, Art Nouveau, etc.), but offer repeatable designs, not do custom work. That would allow for lots of jigs, fixtures, using cheap m…

+1 on the Woodworking.... I started StumpCrafters.com just a few months ago and its great. I love being out in the shop more and still getting to do a few things with code here and there. Im not quite there with the customization yet but its in the works. Check it out at: https://stumpcrafters.com https://facebook.com/stumpcrafters https://instagram.com/stumpcrafters https://twitter.com/stumpcrafters edit: formating

This is great. My friends and I played a similar game we called hammerschlaggen -- except instead of a hammer we used the sharp end of an axe and a real stump!

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

#788
post #768
post #691

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did most of an electronic engineering course and discovered that I like software more than hardware. After programming portable barcode readers and interactive voice response systems, I wrote a Windows device driver at one company then applied to write Linux device drivers at another. I was strictly honest during the job interview, saying I wanted to write device drivers but I had done only one for Windows and none…

> I succeeded and even trained someone else how to do it. When we started, he didn't know C all that well so I split the drivers into hard and easy parts and gave him the easy ones. We wrote about six drivers together. I made his parts harder and harder until he was able to write a driver on his own. This is a pretty amazing way to teach someone something as complex as device drivers. It sounds like you did an excell…

Thank you. Stephen was quite deaf (60dB loss) so we emailed each other all day, even though we were sitting together. When I noticed he was straining to hear during a conference call, I started summarising what each speaker had said. He thanked me afterwards. When he looked confused about something I said, I made sure to repeat it using the exact words I had used as he hadn't heard one or more of them. I noticed that other people thought he hadn't understood, not that he hadn't heard, and repeated what they had said using different words, which confused him even more.

Stephen's deafness did not affect his work, of course, until management made him a quality engineer for our voice over IP project. With that kind of thinking, the company wasn't making any money and owed all of us six months wages. You learn a lot about motivating your team under those circumstances. I did it by emphasising the importance of what we were doing. Of the ten software and five hardware engineers, we were the only ones joining the software to the hardware.

Apart from not being paid, it was a great place to work and I'm glad it gave me an opportunity to develop my management and people skills. Until then, I had been much better at programming computers than working with people and I was feeling a bit lopsided.

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