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

243 points by ccdev 8 years ago | 167 comments

I'm not talking about switching professions at some point in your life. More specifically, doing your career over again in the same profession, in order to redeem your past failing career.

Either you got "too comfy" in your job, didn't learn much, then found a very tough time being a good fit for other jobs. Or you simply have stopped being a good hire for other reasons. What did you do to redeem yourself in the eyes of your respective industry?

rb808 8 years ago |

I suspect its not as easy as many people make out.

I was a great C++/OO dev for 10 years before I got bored, starting doing management, business focussed roles and more high level devops style work. After 10 years of that I wanted to move back into pure coding. With great experience should be easy right? Wrong.

I got a mid-level java/python dev job and it was difficult, I was out of touch and everything was different or new. Languages, styles, CI/CD, DI, git, containers, unit testing its a huge amount to learn. After a year I got laid off because I was getting paid like a senior but not keeping up with the grads.

A few years later I'm productive and useful in this new world but I dont really like it. I'm enjoying Scala and functional programming but with so many libraries and tools I feel like everything is so difficult and complicated. It takes a lot of study effort to keep up. Also I'm never sure if its because the applications I work on are badly designed, or I just dont really understand modern design. I have a business specialty which keeps me employable but I miss the old days when things were simpler.

Being "old" at 40+ really isn't so easy - I'm not sure you can ever redeem yourself in the eyes of the industry. Best you can hope for is get a non-tech domain specialty and find a big stable company that values experience and try to keep working on interesting projects. Once you're laid off or fired once its really hard to be the super confident hacker you were at 25.

EDIT - thinking about if you want advice. Get a business specialty or technical niche. Dont get too lazy, if you aren't learning on the job for a few years in a row, change the tech in the project or leave. It should be easy to keep employed but you have to keep working at it. Best career money-wise is to move to management, but its difficult to move back. Dont take the high paying job on a dead end project without a plan to get out.

_diyu 8 years ago | |

I'm only 32 but that's kind of where I'm at right now too.

Mastered Objective-C and Mac & iOS development 10 years ago, now it's all Swift and nobody's really hiring for iOS devs in my area (Chicago suburbs), and nobody's hiring for native Mac developers anywhere, period. And all the best practices in iOS have changed drastically since then, too, in terms of both coding and UX.

Learned Ruby on Rails 8 years ago, but it changed so fast that most of what I knew about it has become irrelevant, and I never was very good at Rails in the first place.

All the best practices I've learned in HTML/CSS/JS/jQuery/Less/Sass are becoming outdated pretty quickly.

Spent 5 years mastering Clojure but it's obviously very niche and I don't have any experience with big data or anything else Clojure is usually used for, only traditional web apps.

It feels like there's no way to keep up with the industry while staying relevant and employable.

Liuser 8 years ago | | |

When you get into technology, you should go under the assumption that you will be a student for the rest of your life. Otherwise you will get left behind. My Dad is in tech (I followed his footsteps). For as long as I can remember growing up he always had a book with him in his free time. He started with punchcards.

matte_black 8 years ago | | |

I was in your position, been working with iOS since the beginning until I decided to just get the fuck out of iOS and start doing some useful things.

Went all in with building single page applications in JavaScript and Node, front end, back end, and database administration, and haven’t looked back.

Fuck iOS now, native mobile development benefited from a craze where everyone thought mobile apps were the new web apps, but the truth is, most mobile apps only make sense in the context of a larger application ecosystem, usually supporting a web app.

nerfhammer 8 years ago | | |

<snark>don't worry, all the people making apps and new javascript/css frameworks have moved on to cryptocurrencies now</snark>

Declanomous 8 years ago | | |

I know a few iOS devs in Chicago. I've definitely heard about the trials and tribulations of switching from Objective C to Swift, but I'm surprised there aren't more jobs out there. Is the commute to Chicago too long for you?

The iOS devs I know are either in marketing or work freelance though. So I'm not sure how much like "a normal job" it is for them.

blitz_skull 8 years ago | | |

Is there a private message feature here? I may have an opportunity you'd be interested in.

caust1c 8 years ago | |

> Also I'm never sure if its because the applications I work on are badly designed, or I just dont really understand modern design.

FWIW, I think there's a lot of people out there who would claim that Scala is a bit of a step backwards for the professional community. It's a fine language, but not a (socially) scalable one due to it's immense expressiveness.

fizx 8 years ago | | |

Scala is rough IMO less because of the expressiveness, but more because you have at least 4 paradigms in common use, none of which play well with each other. Let's see, I count (1) Futures/Async (2) Threaded (3) Akka/Play/Actors (4) Finagle, (5) Reactive Streams.

There are so many impedance mismatches between them and so many diamond dependency conflicts that it's impossible to get any moderate size project done without going to microservices so that e.g. your Redis client and your HTTP server aren't complaining about different subtly incompatible versions of Netty.

meritt 8 years ago | |

> Languages, styles, CI/CD, DI, git, containers, unit testing its a huge amount to learn

I feel that a key trend in modern development is often needlessly focused on the mastering the complexity behind the coding infrastructure/deployment pipeline and ignores the actual business needs. Not suggesting these practices are useless by any means, but that for most startups it's putting the cart before the horse.

john_moscow 8 years ago | |

>After 10 years of that I wanted to move back into pure coding. With great experience should be easy right? Wrong. The trouble is that the "just coding" experience gets very quickly outdated. Your knowledge of Win32 API or WPF isn't really relevant on a Python job. Interestingly, the skills that don't get outdated mostly lay outside the technical part: your ability to manage people and resolve conflicts, your ability to present ideas and convince others, your ability to spot business niches and shape products under limited resources.

In the old times one could argue that being a good engineer (i.e. finding simple solutions to tough problems) makes a difference, but I'm not sure how much this holds anymore for software engineers, since the complexity isn't in about fitting your business processes into the SQL/backend/frontend bounds, but rather in defining those processes and making proper assumptions about the market.

mistermann 8 years ago | |

You might want to look into Python, specifically within data science / machine learning area. So far it seems to me to be much more pragmatic philosophy, for example if you can accomplish something with 10 lines of code, it seems acceptable in the community to use just 10 lines of code, rather than writing some elaborate framework of 30 classes, interfaces, factories, DI, unit testing as if you're sending people to the moon, all spread over numerous application tiers for maximum obfuscation.

Also, due to the uncertainty inherent in ML, I find there's a much lower prevalence of dogmatic know-it-all zealots who insist you must(!!!!) do something a certain way, because <a whole bunch of reasons that don't make any sense>, who inevitably will have moved on by the time the entire thing starts to collapse on top of itself.

YMMV of course, but worth looking into.

tw1010 8 years ago | |

> Once you're laid off or fired once its really hard to be the super confident hacker you were at 25.

This is the point of all those self-help books about grit and things like that. Their point isn't really to accelerate your progress when you're feeling good and confident. Their purpose is to help you regain the confidence once you lose it, to make you robust to setbacks.

6a68 8 years ago | |

It sounds like you were away from coding for a really long time (10 years!), then you got back into it, picking an area you didn't know much about, expected it to be easy, maybe didn't put in the time outside of work...this approach wouldn't work for anyone, no matter their age.

Here's a manager-y question for you: how could you have done things differently when you went back to being an IC, to have had a better transition? Maybe doing more prep work before you left the manager track? Maybe going back to C++ instead, or an area that was closer to what you used to work on? Maybe doing open source work in that new java/python target area, to get experience, build a portfolio, and be sure you liked it, before you bet your livelihood and reputation on it?

rb808 8 years ago | | |

Yeah I could have been smarter, but there aren't that many interesting C++ roles around and the role I took was a horizontal move in the company.

atsaloli 8 years ago | |

What's DI?

crimsonalucard 8 years ago | | |

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.

Sohcahtoa82 8 years ago | | |

DI is Dependency Injection, which is a $1,000 term for a $5 concept.

A Python class without DI:

    class SomeClass(object):
        def __init__(self):
            self.someDependency = GetDependency()

A Python class WITH DI:

    class SomeClass(object):
        def __init__(self, dependency):
            self.someDependency = dependency

...

That's it. DI is just explicitly passing ("injecting") a dependent object into an object, rather than requiring the object to call a function to get a reference/pointer to the dependency or make one.

burkemw3 8 years ago | | |

For me, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dependency_injection

iBelieve 8 years ago | | |

Dependency injection: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/130794/what-is-dependenc...

_sdegutis 8 years ago | | |

I'm guessing Dependency Injection? In context meaning writing code that's easily testable, and writing lots of tests, which goes hand in hand with the other TDD/BDD buzzwords that job descriptions often throw out there.

ElectronicE 8 years ago |

I got a super comfortable job for the past 15years as a work from home C++ server programmer. It has allowed me to be around and watch my kid grow rather than be away 8-6PM and just come home to dinner and put them to bed.

It was very good pay at the beginning but it hasn't keep up and now it's not that good (to bad either).

A few years ago I started playing with electronics (Arduinos, Raspberry PIs and stuff like that). After a while I started looking and picked up a few easy jobs related to that in Upwork as a way to do something different as doing the same thing for 15years can take it's toll.

Shortly after I was picking more and more advanced jobs. I picked a few big clients and moved them off Upwork. I'm now doing advanced embedded system programming and electronic design as a side gig on weekends and afternoons and making more money than my main programming job (which I can't seem to be able to leave).

And that's the story of how I found an alternative to my comfortable job. If I ever leave it I will never go to an office again, I will just expand my embedded freelancing.

ccdev 8 years ago |

Thanks for the replies, everyone. Keep them coming! I didn't expect this topic to get this popular.

The reason I asked this question is that I am facing a career slump as a software engineer, and finding out that the software industry is brutal if you don't know how to carve a path for your own career.

And when I mean career slump, I really mean it. I'm living with my mom at age 35 which is quite the opposite of what someone expects of a software engineer at this age. Most people I know are buying/have bought houses and starting families. And I'm not at a point of self-sustainability yet. I can barely keep up with the insurance payments of my own car, and just keep the vision of having my own place to live in (once more, as I lived alone before things got tough) close to my mind. No longer be dependent of my family, get some privacy, some autonomy and instead of living every day switching between errand boy and going to a coffee shop for the free internet, to apply to jobs, or simply taking a break from my parents.

So that's pretty much me right now. I have 10 professional years of a "whole lot of nothing", no big signs of progression, maturity, or taking on more responsibilities. I didn't major in Computer Science, but I still expected my first programming job to be like, getting a mentor, working alongside a group of (in-house!) programmers, being able to ask them many questions and learn all about formal development practices.

Well, I got none of that in the places that I worked at. So seeing your stories gives me a good idea and hope that I can just move on from the past and have better companies approach me with hope and optimism, like I'm a bona-fide junior eager to learn.

southphillyman 8 years ago |

Can't speak on it personally but about 3-4 years ago during my last job search I searched a few "Getting a dev job after 30" type queries. I was around that age and concerned about all the ageism claims. Apparently there are forums full of former developers either out of the industry or struggling to remain in it. There was a lot of talk about depression and guys being suicidal because they couldn't keep up with the industry, etc. Really eye opening to me at the time as the industry seemed strong as ever, even for outdated stacks.

If you're not getting any offers that's one thing I guess, but imposter syndrome is real in the industry. We all worry about being up to some rockstar level and all the grueling interview processes out there. Then we brush up for a couple of weeks, hit the market, and field multiple offers again.

khazhou 8 years ago | |

I find the notion of age discrimination at 30+ to be simply ludicrous. I’ve been at multiple top tech companies, and the very common age ranges were mid-20s to (estimated) late-40s.

southphillyman 8 years ago | | |

Older devs exist but they tend to be very senior with a lot of responsibility in my experience. Where does that leave the competent but non architect level dev who doesn't want to be responsible for that level of pressure? Maybe a 40 yr old wants to just take a mid level CRUD job for the purposes of keeping up with his mortgage and has no other ambitions beyond that? It seems like being "just a guy" is looked down upon the older you get which is not fair when there are plenty of those types of roles out there (mostly given to younger people)

tinymollusk 8 years ago | | |

You find it ludicrous because you haven't experienced it or seen it with your own eyes?

tw1010 8 years ago | | |

I think this phenomenon is hugely dependent on location.

forgotAgain 8 years ago | | |

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.

hemling 8 years ago |

47 here. I drove my career into a dead-end.

Always been a generalist. Tried many times to do startups and saas products. It never got me anywhere. Between my projects, I worked as a freelancer, while living in many different countries. I took anything I could get. Earned enough money, then tried again. I have broad work experience, but nothing deep. Started a family late in life (with 44). Now I feel my career is a dead-end. Plus I seem to have lost my ability to put up with all that technological mess and the ever-new-shiny-thing.

I'm in a real slump. It's been a long time that I slept well.

Last year I created an online course. It's self-hosted and on Udemy. Compared to the time I have invested it generates peanuts, but I enjoyed the process of teaching.

So this is my plan out of the slump: teaching and corporate training. I figure that once I have created sufficient products, I may be able to make a living. And I'm trying to get my foot into corporate training. Though I'm an introvert, I do enjoy a lot helping others to learn and acquire skills.

I'm working on my public speaking abilities as well. Last year I gave a talk at a conference. I was nervous as hell, but at least some seem to have enjoyed my talk.

It's a long hard way, but I feel it's the only viable for me.

btw - if anyone here wants to chat, get in touch, email in profile.

thisiswilson 8 years ago | |

I'm only 30, but I feel the same way. I've just never been interested in keeping up with the latest tech, I just like to get things done with the tools that work. PHP, JQuery and WordPress still work. I'm a generalist as well and have held positions or have done a fair amount of work in most areas of marketing in my 9 years in the industry.

I think your idea of teaching and doing corporate training is the right direction. You could then take your lectures and record those and build courses on those. That's how you create that content-momentum and spend less time building, thereby improving your ROI.

Good luck!

szermer 8 years ago |

I started out doing telephone technical support 20+ years ago.

After the bubble in 2000 I moved back to NYC to work with my dad as a Private Investigator. I did that for 8 years until I realized I was too young for that life.

I applied to only one grad program (RISD) because their ID program sounded interesting and I wanted to get into the design world. Focusing on only one school made it a challenge and allowed me to fine tune everything. Like a cosmic coin flip.

After finishing up the program in 2010 (I specifically wanted a 2 year program because of the double hit of negative income and cost) my wife and I moved out to the Bay Area. I went from taking an internship at a design firm ($15/ hr as a 36yo is humbling) to my current role of building out a UX design team of 20 designers in Providence, RI.

In the 7 years of working in the Bay Area I burned through 8 jobs. Some were wonderful stepping stones, some were side tracks, a few were painful situations of treading water with waves constantly going over my head — but all were learning experiences that made my skillset hard to beat in the marketplace.

My current role is funding my family (oh yeah, had 2 kids in that 7 year span…. Don’t drink the water in Rockridge unless you want kids) to relocate back to Providence, RI. It feels nice to come full circle back to the place that gave me a chance to experiment and reinvent myself.

My advice… life is about collecting experiences. Don’t let any single experience define you. Be proud of your accomplishments, learn from your failures, and be nice to everyone you work with. My network has helped me out countless times.

Everyone roots for the underdog.

josephgrossberg 8 years ago | |

As someone who just found himself 41 and jobless, I found this a great perspective on things. TY for sharing, especially that advice paragraph!

brd 8 years ago |

It's all about latching on to domain expertise. Rarely is a developer a pure technologist, there is always some niche you've become involved in whether it be related to payments or UX or a subset of businesses functions. Assuming you have some meaningful knowledge of something non-technical, you can take that with you into a different area of software development.

I've transitioned across various technical roles by understanding software architecture, business process mapping, master data management, manufacturing, and a slew of other relatively niche areas of domain expertise. I don't think my work was anything unique, I was just aware of the niche components of the projects I worked on and did a good job marketing that knowledge.

bubbleRefuge 8 years ago | |

That's right. Its about domain and specialization. I'm 48 and have a really good remote gig b/c I've got about 10+ years in one specific enterprise software domain. Interviewing for mainstream technology generalist job is where you get hammered with the Google-style interviews.

ccdev 8 years ago | |

I am trying to specialize more in graphics, though I still have to figure out how large is my skills gap between "doing solo graphics projects" and "full-time graphics programmer", especially in math. After getting advice on my resume on how to hide the slow career growth, I've been told to spin it to show I am interested in this niche and show direction towards that.

If you had been able to read my un-revised resume, it would probably read like a story that feels the same in the beginning as it is in the end, with no clear conclusion. So I am working on a new version with a different spin.

fizx 8 years ago | | |

It's probably better to specialize in business verticals than tech choices, and better to choose something that doesn't have so many kids learning it to build games. YMMV

larrik 8 years ago |

I fell into an obscure technology stack out of college (AS/400...in 2005). It was comfortable, but technologically unsatisfying and completely useless for my resume. I kept my skills sharp after hours, and then took a pay cut to jump ship to a "proper" programming job, which lead me to a great high paying remote gig after a scant 18 months there. It was for a lot of reasons, and it was scary (had my first kid shortly before the jump), but it was completely worth it and not that hard. Just, be good at it.

partisan 8 years ago |

I was working as a .NET Developer (still do), but around 2010, I was neck deep in a codebase that was passing around DataSets, stuck in VB.NET, no real leveraging of code. I interviewed for Amazon and tanked miserably, which was a wake up call for me as I wasn't aware how much I had let my skills slip.

I knew I had hit something of a low point so I started learning on my own again outside of work. I picked up several non-MS languages and technologies which helped me to understand better how I should be using the MS stack. I eventually found DDD, CQRS, distributed computing, and other concepts that colored my design perspective. I petitioned for, and through threat of leaving, got the department permission to use C# and I started to refactor code when I touched it.

It was a tough road. I sometimes didn't have patience with myself, but I started counting the little victories and kept going from there.

I am currently learning front-end frameworks, ES6, and Typescript. Nobody asked me to. I just know I will learn something in the process that I can apply in the future even if I never get a job related to this tech.

ChuckMcM 8 years ago |

I'm not sure what this means: What did you do to redeem yourself in the eyes of your respective industry?

Are you talking about someone who screwed up enough times that the mean free distance to a negative referral is essentially 1.0 ? I don't see industries as having 'eyes' but I have known industries that are relatively small communities.

I have known, and hired, a number of people who have 'redone' their career when the thing they started with didn't pan out, a chemist into a QA person, a semiconductor process engineer into a UNIX developer, a mom into a product manager. That sort of 'do over'.

And I've met folks who 'grew up' in a company doing one thing for 15 to 20 years and then failed to find an opportunity to continue doing that thing. Only to switch into a different career all together. Most commonly that is, "Hey you weren't you 20 years at BigCorp? What are you doing these days, 'mostly consulting'" sorts of conversations.

haskellandchill 8 years ago |

I have done a career do-over. I took a lower paying position that involved pair programming. It was like developer rehab after the startup grind left me wondering if I could even contribute as a programmer anymore. The firm had a good reputation and recruiters were all over me, which was good. Then I took a much higher paying enterprise type job where it doesn't matter how I code and there is no point in doing anything better. Not sure what my next move will be, might get knighted as a data scientist soon, who knows. Good luck!

swedish_mafia 8 years ago |

I believe this is a time when a lot of software engineers are asking the hard questions about their careers.

Here's why: The technologies have become simpler and the barriers to entry have become low. Once upon a time, if you knew the mainstream languages (C++ and Java) it meant you paid your dues learning the hard stuff. Today, with nodejs becoming mainstream, and the cloud at the backend, developers who come from an "html programming" background can now build scalable and enterprise grade applications without breaking a sweat.

That leaves the "hard core" dev in a little bit of a fix. "Where do I go from here?" The front end is where the complexity is today. Its hard to compete in the AI and machine learning roles when there are phds doing this for ten years who are on the same table. Devops is also simple enough for someone with 3 years of experience of be on top of the game.

Now add to that the fact that the number of devs with 8 years of experience (what I consider the senior dev) grows bigger and bigger each year..

The next slow down I believe will be brutal to our industry.

unit91 8 years ago |

I was a Fortran developer for a few years in the Aerospace business. After a while, I got sick of 1977 and just wanted to be a "regular" full stack guy.

At the time Rails 2.X was current and Clojure was pretty new. Both looked pretty neat. I learned Rails and Clojure on my free time, went through Michael Hartl's Twitter knockoff to learn, and applied for jobs.

Nobody really loved how little I knew about modern web dev, but several told me they could see I was bright-ish and sufficiently motivated that they'd take the chance. It was hard and stressful at first, because I didn't know anything (JavaScript, jQuery, what's a "callback" function?, etc.) but I picked it up fairly quickly.

Made $80K my first year (pretty good junior dev salary in Texas) and it's been better every year since.

rm_-rf_slash 8 years ago |

Not sure how applicable this is, but I’ve gone back to school to get an M.Eng now that I know I don’t want to do (or only have the skills for) applications development forever. The focus is ML/AI but I’ve found a surprising amount of enjoyment out of working with hardware in the rapid prototyping class I’m currently taking. In retrospect, sticking with just one domain was probably why I got bored in the first place.

I haven’t necessarily switched careers, but it’s still not easy. If I could go back and give myself one piece of advice, it would be to knuckle down and learn differential equations and linear algebra. That’s the difference between understanding how machine learning works and tinkering around with TensorFlow.

volkk 8 years ago | |

just started taking an online intro course to deep learning. really hoping that i'm not simply wasting my time and that if i actually want to one day pursue it, that i won't need to have a PHD in this field

GreeniFi 8 years ago |

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!

Havoc 8 years ago | |

I'm curious about the questionable PE clients if you don't mind elaborating a little bit. I'm in the PE space myself and haven't seen anything particularly shady? Obviously you can't go into details, but perhaps you can add a bit more colour to the comment?

GreeniFi 8 years ago | | |

I should probably point out that I only joined all the dots on the gangster bits many years after I left. At the time I only saw legal but morally dubious deals. Basically - if your business generates substantial negative externalities, you're in a very morally grey area.

GreeniFi 8 years ago | | |

PE firms buying businesses off gangsters before selling them on fat margin to more established investors. However it was the straight up corporate clients at the firm who were always on Human Rights Watch lists that depressed me most.

didip 8 years ago |

Aren't most software engineers already doing this?

Initially I was SDET, doing a bunch of boring JUnit work.

Then I wanted to get into video game industry while I was still young. Learned Microsoft Visual C++ along the way.

Then I got sick of the video game industry, the internet industry looks pretty cool, so I switched to it. Picked up PHP, Python, and Ruby all together at the same time.

Then I got sick of SysAdmin telling me what to do, so I learned a bunch of Linux skills and config management to become DevOps.

And I am kind of there now. I always fantasize of working on native mobile app, maybe one day I will make a switch again.

EnderMB 8 years ago |

Mine is a similar story to others, although I can't really say if it's a success or not.

For the past eight years I've been a C# developer, working my way up from mid-level to senior developer across a number of companies. I've built dozens of websites, contributed to open-source projects, and have given talks at local user groups.

The problem with being a single-stack person, especially in the .NET world, is that you look on at your peers on the Linux stack and wonder if you're missing out, so I left a cushy job as a senior developer at a large agency to be a standard developer at a software firm, one that focuses on everything but .NET.

I'm a month in, and it's been hard going from being the guy that knows things to the guy that struggles. Getting to grips with Linux and the terminal was surprisingly easy (probably because I was an avid Powershell user on Windows), but I've struggled to learn languages and frameworks quick enough. I have enough of a grasp of Python and Ruby to be able to look at code and know what's going on, but I'm still miles behind others, and it feels like a gap that won't be easily/quickly solved, regardless of the time I put into learning/doing. Despite the logic being almost exactly the same, it's crazy how one can go from making stupid mistakes in a PHP script to fixing a long-standing bug in an ASP.NET MVC site in the space of a minute.

gxs 8 years ago |

I think what this thread is highlighting more than anything is the importance of building real, meaningful relationships as you progress through your career.

As you progress, make a name for yourself as someone that delivers and build relationships with people. It's amazing how willing people are down the line to bring them on to their team/company in different roles if they already know you to be good and enjoyable to work with.

I'm already 33, and this is something I haven't been the best at, so definitely a wake up call for me.

ctdonath 8 years ago |

Did embedded software for a couple decades at numerous companies. Was good at it, but saw the path was going to slowly drift into the weeds (company was aspiring to build products competing with what competitors had discarded as obsolete). Noticed one of those rare ground-floor technology shift opportunities was occurring in the industry...

Told my students in my side/after-hours gig as professor "there's a rare ground-floor technology shift opportunity occurring in the industry, now's your chance..."

A friend was co-founder of a startup. One day, while in his home for unrelated reasons, he was on the phone with CIO lamenting their [then] inability to find iOS developers. He saw me, pointed, shouted "don't leave!", hung up, and asked if I wanted to do iOS development. "Yes!" I replied with enthusiasm. He then asked if I actually knew iOS development. "No! but I'd jump at the chance & reason to learn!" We arranged a 6-month trial period, I worked long hard nights learning & implementing iOS code, and within 3 months was hired as the 2nd employee.

A few years later, that business was sold, and moved on to doing apps for major corporations.

Upshot: technology & business path was stalling out, used an opportune connection to take a risk in jumping to the near-start of a new yet equivalent technology path. Was able to leverage deep "magic" skills (intuition, arcane knowledge, refined techniques) to "do-over" my career, starting with decades of experience into a realm just years old.

nathanaldensr 8 years ago |

I'm dealing with this right now. I have a ton of experience--since I was a young teenager, in fact--of being a software developer, mostly in positions of technical leadership. Most of my resume consists of architect jobs. And yet, to pay the bills, explore a new area of the country, and expand on complimentary skills, I took a job as a senior DevOps engineer contractor at Idaho National Laboratory. Since my contract ended and I've started applying for jobs again, it feels like I'm being treated as damaged goods. I can't tell whether it's the fact I live in the Idaho Falls area or whether it's the Senior DevOps Engineer title. I get the standard "We've decided to pursue other candidates" non-reason. I have no data on which to base tactical changes to my approach. My applications are just falling into a black hole.

I know I am a very qualified candidate for any of these positions, and I have lots of GitHub contributions where people can actually see my work. That doesn't seem to be enough, however. Can't I just talk to a real person? My communication skills are excellent, and whenever I have gotten in front of the hiring manager, it nearly always leads to an offer. Am I the victim of algorithm-driven hiring?

To plug myself a bit: If anyone is looking for an experienced .NET architect who's done a bit of everything (including my own startup), drop me a line. I favor working remotely but I'll relocate to a desirable area for the right position. [nathan] at aldenfamily |dot| net.

Oh, and OP, you didn't mention if your question applies to you, but if it does, hang in there. We don't have much control over the ridiculous state of hiring in IT, so there's not much we can do except plug along.

wffurr 8 years ago |

My first programming job out of school was on really obsolete tech: IBM Unibasic aka Pick Basic in an ERP system. It's a career trap on par with taking a COBOL programming job right out of university: https://medium.com/@csixty4/pick-was-post-relational-before-...

I broke out and rebooted my career by quitting and going to grad school full time and getting a Master's degree in CS from a fancier university in a tech hub city. My phone blew up with recruiters when I graduated and posted my resume online.

su30mki117 8 years ago | |

Any tips that you can give to someone who is about to finish his Master's when it comes to looking for jobs?

wffurr 8 years ago | | |

Brush up on your algorithms and whiteboard coding. Tech interviewing is a skill that you can practice and master.

Cracking the Coding Interview, Topcoder, Euler Project, etc. are good places to do this.

PascLeRasc 8 years ago |

Does anyone have any stories of career do-overs that aren't just a renaming of "software engineer" on both sides?

dsnuh 8 years ago | |

Exactly. Most of these read as "I went into a different specialization of the same field".

Where is the engineer that just chucked it all and opened a donut shop? That's the level I want to know about. Most of these are just stories of people making lateral moves in the same industry.

Tenobrus 8 years ago | | |

That's explicitly what this question is about though, the OP specifically says they want to know about lateral moves in the same industry.

edgarvaldes 8 years ago | | |

That's because the opening line: "I'm not talking about switching professions at some point in your life"

Dowwie 8 years ago | |

Sure. I do. I still haven't quite made it to first base with the new career but that's because I am solopreneuring and building the first platform. This takes time! However, I have come a long way.

My story doesn't feel unique. I learned what was necessary to then acquire skills used to create experiences by building lots of software every day for years. I gave back as I grew. This process continues today.

I've done this over and over, across disciplines. However, tech has captured my focus entirely for the time being.

ojbyrne 8 years ago | |

Perhaps because the OP specifically asked for experiences not involving career changes?

WaylonKenning 8 years ago |

I reached the end of my career progression in IT Architecture. Started as a Solutions Architect, then reached Enterprise Architect. And there's no where to go after that.

So I took the leap and tried something different - became a Product Architect focusing on a specific technology. Now I'm a Mobile Product Manager, something that pays (probably) less than an Enterprise Architect, but tests out new skills like investment proposals.

My ultimate end goal is CTO. I think having an end goal in mind helps me focus on what do I need to do in this job or the next that gets me closer to that goal.

throwaway_234 8 years ago |

I got too comfortable and thought I dont need to be harassed or witness others being harassed. I'm leaving this craphole and I'll be able to get another job when Im ready to go back to work. That was June of last year and I was ready to get back to work in September. Yet all those recruiters knocking on my door and landing me 30 phone & in person interviews never prompted an offer. Though six long months later and as of two weeks ago I started a new gig.

Im not sure why it took so long as it never did before, but it's either there is more supply then before for UI/UX Designer & Developers roles, I'm getting old(42), I do both design & development which the UX side ppl say Im not experienced in the study testing where this button should go(let's talk about that for hours) to developers saying I dont know React. Also, I thought ppl in my field might have been talking about how I just up and left my last job without mentioning the harassment(after Me Too movement started to roll i reached out to the heads of this big company reminding them that I reported a female colleague's harassment was ignored then harassed myself .. im a dude).

Overall I am glad that's behind me/working now and it just took time and potentially making ppl shut up about me when they dont know the whole story.

JeremyNT 8 years ago |

I'm not sure whether this qualifies exactly, but when I first got into tech I thought ops was what I wanted to do. I always dabbled in programming (I did learn rails when it first came out) and followed generally the state of web development, but my skills simply never developed in that direction. I was boxed in by my job, and I learned nothing new there. I ultimately decided there was no path forward - so I went backwards.

I switched from a senior Linux admin to a junior rails development job a bit over one year ago now.

It's humbling to start over at my age. The degree to which one can specialize in IT is striking, and the amount of knowledge you learn and internalize is vast. I learn something new nearly every day now, and little (though some) of my prior skillset directly translates.

I'm very glad I took this step, but it's not been easy. I think a lot of humility is required, especially for somebody who is comfy and well established in their current position. But I'm lucky enough to work somewhere with patient and helpful colleagues, who do not view my age and lack of direct experience as a detriment.

One benefit of starting over when you're older: this time around, I fully realize how much I don't know, and I'm never afraid to ask stupid questions. The same was certainly not true of 24 year old me.

hcnews 8 years ago |

I was at one of the FANG companies for 6+ years, joined right after graduation. However, I couldn't get senior due to me being naive (I have no ego, hence wasn't able to collaborate effectively with teammates, pissed a few off a few times), positioning of the product (none of my team members got promoted to senior while I was in that team). Last year I opted to change my jobs when my promo was denied again. I had hard time finding other teams to switch to (because of mentions of pissing off people) and also was completely bored of my existing team. FWIW, my technical work was never in question, just that no one supported me at promo times etc.

I am now in another good software company (similar to FANG, probably a level lower in terms of core compsci ability). The big change I have done is to accept that not everyone is learning all the time and not to try to do the same (its software engineering not research). I learnt this throughout the interview process by talking to lot of good college friends (who also work in tech in Bay Area) and acquaintainces recommended by friends.

My change isn't complete yet, hoping that this change will lead to better collaboration with team members and work output. Job title might improve too at some point in the future, though I am not too worried about it.

ahussain 8 years ago | |

> The big change I have done is to accept that not everyone is learning all the time and not to try to do the same (its software engineering not research)

What do you mean by this?

hcnews 8 years ago | | |

Basically solve a small problem at a time (however uninteresting it is; a lot of things are uninteresting to me), never try to put the whole world in my head or continually come up with ground breaking stuff. I also realized that most other people are doing the same and this helped me align better with them.

nightsd01 8 years ago |

In university, I was studying biology. In my free time however, one day I had the strange desire to build a simple app that would simulate the solar system.

After spending months learning how to build software, I realized just how deeply satisfying software development was to me. So I started doing small, low paid freelance work building apps to build up a portfolio. Every time a project ended, I’d move on to bigger projects with higher pay. I’ve never looked back. I dropped out of school and my passion & skill have grown ever since. Eventually I had a good resume and the recruiters came to me.

Now I am working at an amazing company in the Bay Area. I love it. It’s a job where I actually look forward to going to work every day, which is fortunate and lucky.

Given that the software world is always changing, I am always learning something new. Lately I’ve been learning React-Native.

mod 8 years ago |

I owned a brick & mortar business and decided I couldn't keep doing it. The particular type of business has a late-night lifestyle attached to it, and a crowd that I felt was "bringing me down."

I left the business (I'm still a silent partner) and took a web development job. I had been building my own websites & things for about a decade by then, but had no professional experience.

I'm 5 or 6 years in now and getting bored with it. The bulk of the learning is over.

My life has been a series of big changes and disparate job-types, and it feels like another one is on the horizon. I sometimes lament not being the best-in-class in almost any discipline, but I find that I'm adequate or above-average in a great many things and there's maybe some comfort to be had in that.

itomato 8 years ago |

After so many years of growth and development in any industry, you have to change and shift to stay relevant.

A big part of being relevant is being interested. If you aren't relevant or interested, you aren't of any value in that particular niche of that particular industry.

What I chose to do when faced with this was to move into an adjacent field where my skills were applicable and relevant to the new and interesting challenge.

When the situation arose yet again, I took the knowledge gained by having applied my skills in new ways to focus on applying them in a constant state of change to help others in different niches.

It's all one big spiral staircase of shark's teeth, where there is no shortage of change, growth or people willing to take your place.

nurettin 8 years ago |

Early 2000s, I was a full time procrastinator, college introvert, MTG/DND geek and homework/thesis freelancer. German government increased fees to a point which I could no more afford it, so I dropped out and found a real job.

w0de0 8 years ago | |

If you will forgive me indulging in stereotyping: this is a very German response. Two sentences, brutally honest about the self, logically complete, and subtly amusing.

badkangaroo 8 years ago |

Started off as a concept artist for a few years, then started doing particle effects, moved into 3d environment modeling for a few years, and did a few characters, then moved into character modeling for a few years, then animation, then character rigging, then rigging automation through mel script for a few years. then worked as a technical artist for several years, then learned more programming stuff, then wrote a bunch of unreal script for a few projects for a few more years, then learned C# for unity and now i've been writing C# for VR apps for a while...

Dowwie 8 years ago |

Often, it's the situation that architects your decisions. If you can delay debts and dependencies, you can afford to do more. Live within your means. Downsize your needs. Practice frugality.

NumberCruncher 8 years ago |

Everyone should read

https://www.kalzumeus.com/2011/10/28/dont-call-yourself-a-pr...

Tl,dr: do not be the guy who writes code in x language for y bucks / hour and applies to vacancies online. Be the guy who generates business value and talks to people in the industry. Start doing it today!

wuliwong 8 years ago |

I got my Ph.D. in physics in 2010, worked for about 1 year in research then took a year to try and build my own startup while collecting unemployment. I didn't successfully get a startup going but I learned enough web development during that time that I have been doing it professionally ever since.

turc1656 8 years ago | |

How were you able to collect unemployment if you decided to leave to try to get a business started?

Trundle 8 years ago | | |

He's already answered but just in case we have any other Aussie's reading, we actually have a system that lets you do that called NEIS.

You have to do a short business course—From memory it was one hour a week for 10 weeks or something like that—and then you can collect unemployment while working on your startup for I think a year.

The bar to get in is pretty low. I'm sure that a lot of my class/group were intentionally unemployed and just looking for an easier alternative to pretending to look for work, and they didn't get kicked out. That said the metrics they were tracking to make sure you were progressing were more regular small business focused rather than trying to create the next Google focused. Revenue, customers, etc. That fit what I was doing but might not for you the reader.

wuliwong 8 years ago | | |

I got laid off and then made that decision. And I basically just started building websites that I thought would be cool. Trying to "get a startup going" might be giving myself too much credit.

ojbyrne 8 years ago |

Get another job. “Stopped being a good hire for other reasons” makes it sounds like you’re experiencing a lot of rejection. Finding a new job is a numbers game, but also the more you search, the better you get at interviewing. Don’t give up, treat your job search like a full time job, be diligent.

danschumann 8 years ago |

I don't think it's a good idea for people like me..

I'd rather try to figure out a way to make my career (my skills) fun again. And find a way to get curious.

Or, to expand slightly past my skillset ( like management ), and learn that skillset, but as a superset of my existing skills.

keyle 8 years ago |

This industry is the very definition of career do-over. Every 5 years or so we change our activities. No one writes code or design like 20 years ago. With a career of 50 years, we are all doomed to have to change.

Adapt over time. Don't just jump. Take on new responsibilities. You will find experience crosses many fields. It's a lot about domain knowledge (e.g. financial industry) and we carry a lot of stuff over with us. Never undersell yourself, experience is king. Always be keen on learning, asking questions to younger self. Cross pollinate, experiment and be curious. Too many old devs just corner themselves. They shouldn't, they have a gezillion experiences and it always comes down to a race condition ;)

movedx 8 years ago | |

Well said.

Stay flexible and keep learning. I like the 4% rule: keep increasing the difficulty of a daily challenge by 4%, i.e. keep pushing your self to reach higher and higher.

crimsonalucard 8 years ago | |

The industry only changes superficially. The fundamentals stay constant. Don't master languages; master the fundamentals.

xstartup 8 years ago |

I was a Symbian S40 app developer, after that Symbian C++ S60, developing J2ME applets. Left the job, launched my own app. Made first million doing that! Then I recreated the same app for Blackberry then finally Android, made tons of money doing this. Then it got soo crowded, clones kept coming and I lost my competitive edge. Then I launched a web app in a niche and built SaaS business. At this point - I had all money I ever wanted but I lost motivation, I started getting back to my roots. Hacking on projects, building expertise across dozens of different technologies. It was as if I am trying to justify what I've earned. Naive me! But then I realized that tho I am among the people who claim technology as their passion but this is not what attracted me to this field. What attracted me was a solving problem which many had in common. So, I left hacking and started building small products again. Launching 4-5 more products, all successful - I never failed at anything. But still, sometimes I feel that I just keep getting lucky. This thing still haunts me till date. I am not able to relax or take a day off either. Life has become hell lately, I feel I've to fight to survive. The world just doesn't make any sense to me!

cryodesign 8 years ago | |

So you seem really successful and financially sorted, but yet 'life has become hell' and you feel you have to fight to survive? Do you mean financially?

ebbv 8 years ago |

Yep I was a programmer at a university until 2002 when I had driven my own career into the ditch along with my personal life. I had to start over from a lower position after gathering my wits about me, and work my way back up.

The hardest part was getting that second chance, if you had a more senior job and you're applying for a lower one it's obvious to people there's something going on there. Your best bet is going to be honesty, and convey very clearly you've learned from your mistakes and that you want to improve, your open to feedback, etc.

Good luck.

swyx 8 years ago |

i am somewhat bemused that this got 38 upvotes in 16 minutes. i have no idea how hacker news' new page works.

akulbe 8 years ago | |

It means there's lots of eyes on the article and the folks agree. No surprise there.

aaronchall 8 years ago | | |

The 72 votes in 38 minutes as of now means that the few who upvoted it from the /new page are being validated by the general community after it got on the front page.