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Ask HN: What made you choose your current career?

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Re: Ask HN: What made you choose your current career?

#3

Post by kaolinite »

It was the logical choice, really. I'd been programming since a young age, it was logical that I'd become a programmer.

I often wonder if there's a job out there that I might enjoy as much or even be better at. Only other profession I might be interested in is watchmaking (sounds crazy but there's actually a huge demand for watchmakers), but the cost of tuition and the risk I might not be good at it means I'll probably never give it a shot.

Re: Ask HN: What made you choose your current career?

#4

Post by jonkelly »

No one chooses insurance, it chooses them. Joined a management consulting firm out of school, got assigned to a bunch of insurance cases. Escaped to Oracle. 1998, got a call from a friend of a friend: I hear you know a lot about insurance...I just got a million dollars to start an online version of GEICO...are you in? 17 years later, my career is insurance.

Re: Ask HN: What made you choose your current career?

#5

Post by k__ »

First I played video-games all the day. Then I had to fix/upgrade my own PC because I couldn't afford to pay anyone to do it. This got me deeper OS and networking knowledge than the normal user. From building and repairing PCs and building networks for friends came editing configuration files and later writing scripts, first to get things running on my bad machines and then to cheat in games or automating some IRC stuff. Which led to becoming a programmer.

The only thing I knew after school was how to do stuff with computers and playing games, so I did a degree in computer science and worked as a developer.

I didn't really choose to be a developer, I just did it most of my adult and adolescent life and some time people asked if I could code for them and they paid me.

Sadly this led to boring jobs, since I never really searched for anything, I just did what people asked me to do.

Re: Ask HN: What made you choose your current career?

#8

Post by Sukotto »

Technological generalist: programmer, project manager, product developer, database guy, etc.

Why am I in tech? Partly due to participating in the Duke of Edinburgh's Award program and partly because I just took whatever was interesting at university until I was forced to pick a major... when I tallied up my course credits, the shortest path to a useful degree was "computer science" so I did that.

Why does my career look like the plot to "Memento"? Because each time I reached a point where my work was no longer that interesting, I looked around and started doing something else.

So I went from front-line cast member at Disney World[1], to a university grad, to Java dev for a small dev shop, to Perl/CGI and Javascript at a tech mega-corp, to acquire/process/present data on a trading floor, to semi-retirement, to Japan, to a web-dev shop, to an ecommerce mega-corp. At the moment I don't do any development but that will likely change soon as I miss it.

I feel I've been really lucky. I could easy have (and almost did) crashed and burned but somehow it has worked out so far.

The trick is to look at every opportunity and ask yourself "if I turn this down and never get another chance, will I look back and wish I had done it?". If so, think hard about what really matters to you and do whatever will maximize that.

[1] I took a year off university to go work at Disney on a cultural exchange program. It was an awesome experience, I met my future wife (who was on a similar program) and gained extremely valuable customer-relationship experience.

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