Ask HN: What are well-paying alternative jobs to being a software developer? I have been a software developer for the past 11 years and have mostly enjoyed it. Lately I have been so burnt out and most days dread waking up. My question is what are some other jobs that pay well (I am the provider of the family)? I have some saving and could take time off to see if that helps things out but currently I feel like a new career might be the real solution. |
Sales professions get a bad rap and rightfully so in some cases. However, if you find the right role, it’s incredibly rewarding to help customers solve problems, beat out competition, and have a measurable metric (money) to determine your level of success/contribution (or vice versa).
That last sentence is a big part of why people get burnt out, as in my opinion. It’s also something very difficult to measure in software engineering and attempts to do so (e.g., number of commits, lines of code, frequency, etc.) are nebulous measures. They also are useless with regards to determining if the business itself is successful/what your contribution to that success is.
a) presumably understand tech / can learn quickly b) will have street cred from your past experiences c) will presumably bring some kind of network / rolodex with you
So, don't stress - if you can put a confident foot forward, you probably have more going than you realize. It's just a matter of how you sell it to a future employer.
There's plenty of highly technical things from databases to Jira that appreciate dev experience more than sales experience.
After that, I found it helps to move between teams and projects often. I last about 1-3 years with overlapping contracting jobs. Pays well, about $30 an hour on average, for as many hours as I want.
Honestly, I'm still edging the ~buildout~burnout vortex, so when I start to feel the first tendrils of that morning-sickness, I just let clients know that their number is up and that although I'll give them some time, they need to replace me.
It's happened that doing that in slack revitalized the whole workspace for a few more months.
edit: I neglect to mention, after the Great Rest my wife and I started serially travelling... so work is something I snatch time for, instead of "waking up to the grind". Covid put a pause on that, but it's in the air!
What country are you in? Around here, interns still in college can earn more than that.
There are often jobs that pay more, but they're either the fixed-price ones, or have fewer hours.
I might have to give the deposit back if I can't start soon :)
Example, I've always been a bit put off by the plethora of syntaxes and frameworks in javascript, and I lawnmowered my toes off with angular one fine july, but recently discovered svelte-kit.
It's a cinch, a few practice projects, a few paid ones, and one upwork refund later, I'm getting quite confident in my abilities to turn out decent stuff fast.
And the "fast" is the most important thing, with my new found impatience for not being thirty anymore.
Also consider trades like carpenter or electrician. Many software engineers also like this type of work because it involves building & fixing stuff, but it's more tangible, easy to disconnect from when you're not working, and requires less abstract thought. It still pays very well, though it can be hard on your body.
Thanks
Eventually, I burned out on all of it and went into real estate. That's a major jump and I wouldn't recommend it unless it's a field that really calls to you. Someone below mentioned licensing - there are a whole lot of niche fields that make the world go around. Think escrow officer, home inspector, insurance salesperson, home appraisal... not all of these might pay much, but there's a certain stability to them because it does take effort to get a license.
Speaking of which... if financial upside is part of your goal and you can get through the licensing, and if you like working with the general public... there's a good lifestyle to be made as a financial advisor / planner.
Police officers make decent money (depending on location) and have great pensions since they're public sector union employees. I know a guy that took all the overtime he could get his last year. He made $160k and was then entitled to $80k pension (half your highest paid year. Downsides are that it's mostly sedentary and carries physical risks.
Teachers make decent money in a handful of states. You can make $90k in as a secondary ed biology teacher. Downsides can be policies you don't agree with (like no grades lower than 50%) and potential physical risks depending on the student body.
Many trades make good money. I have a friend who is a construction manager for a gas utility making $85k. His workers can make that and more with overtime (union gig too). Before that he worked at UPS and it wasn't unheard of for drivers to make $100k.
So far the only ideas I’ve come across are the standard “do some related project for resume purposes and then apply to anywhere/everywhere until it works” or “go back to school for a 2nd/more relevant degree and try again”
Neither of which is particularly practical for me, but perhaps this is the way.
It’s pretty much data analysis and comparing apples to apples as close as you can get, adjusting for differences between homes; And while the forms you fill are repetitive, the homes you see are usually anything but. You can run your own shop and make a comfortable 300k+ a year, and if you really want, you can expand your services outside of working for appraisal management companies and mortgage companies.
There is a deficit of new blood entering the profession, and certainly not as many technically skilled people getting into it. This does mean that a lot of processes are a bit archaic (like submitting files in XML, or counties having aged FTP sites for their parcel maps), but the tide on a technical front is changing, ever so slowly (no one does their reports on index cards or uses microfilm readers like my grandfather used to).
One thing that might be tough if you look into this route is finding someone to train you. Most of these old guys (and truly I mean old guys) are happy with their little kingdoms of the area they cover, and their reluctance to train the new appraisers wanting to enter the field has created the lack of qualified workforce that has had people like me working overtime during the pandemic.
Great job, and has been the best choice of my life, and would not go back to front end dev or call centers; Cause nothing has given me the freedom of working for myself and running a business with my father, with the ability to start my own business when he retires.
You might as well try this first before doing something more extreme. If it doesn't help then try switching careers.
Pay for these positions easily starts in the 6 figures, with some PA specialties starting closer to $200k.
- Technical Sales Role
- Product Manager
- Data Scientist
- (Technical) Program Manager
- Solution Architect
- (Technical) Management Consultant
- etc.Another option could be teaching IT (private) - organize lectures about your expertise, etc
I mean stuff like GitOps/trunk-based development, release management, feature management, monitoring, review apps (see on Gitlab), Git itself (still not universal) and so on.
Both models had DevOps consultants though - someone who advises the management on the best ways to do DevOps so each developer doesn't do it in their own way & so never-ending discussions about what's the best way are avoided (those didn't write a single line of code).
⊂ "software development" (which the author hates) or what am I missing here?
It’s a very long road to get to a decent paying flying job and if your reference is “well-paying like software was”, it basically never happens.
And starting in air traffic control has an age limit of 30 years old[1], so it might be too late for you already. Talk about even worse ageism than software!
1: https://work.chron.com/many-years-college-need-air-traffic-c...
Captain at a major airline is attainable, it just takes time. Looks like that’s capping out at $270k right now (I’m sure I’m missing some benefits or something). Pilot pay isn’t nearly as affected by geography and multiple days of work mean an otherwise insane commute (like multiple states) is possible. An airline captain in a small town in Iowa is doing better than a software engineer. But the software engineer in Silicon Valley is doing way better. This was all prepandemic and I imagine that’s shaken up remote work pay a lot. So who knows.
But if you want to get out software because it’s a grind, stay far far away from the airlines. Sure you don’t have a scrum master breathing down your neck. You have complete autonomy to do the exact same thing over and over the exact same way until you retire. Imagine building the same app for the tenth time but no, literally, it’s the exact same app and it’s not the tenth it’s the thousandth.
Massive stress, very long hours working in the dark, against hard deadlines, no chance to step away, overseen and monitored constantly.
Pilots are also notoriously poorly paid.
I imagine your pay would go down as you start, but you're going to have to accept that for any change in career.
Seems like the work might get boring, right?
One major difference in comparison to software is the extremely long project timelines. Loss model refits/remodels are planned years in advance, it can easily take 6 months back and forth waiting on states to respond to filings, etc.
Test positions vary. QA might mean tedious manual testing, or it might not. What you'd probably want is a software developer in test (SDT) position.
This is maybe a rare good experience, but I was a software developer in test (SDT) early in my career, and enjoyed it. The salary bands were the same as dev positions at that particular company. I wrote test strategies and automated everything: end-to-end tests, CI pipelines, performance tests, etc. I gave a few internal talks, switched teams/projects frequently (once per year), and met whole bunch of people.
A big difference for me between QA/SDT and Dev/Eng is I could be more passive. I didn't run meetings and had less responsibility for the project. I never talked to a customer once, although you need a sense of what they want. If my tests weren't 100% finished/passing, the thing is still put in front of users anyway. When you find bugs, the fixes are prioritized against everything else (i.e. non urgent). Usually I wasn't finding major issues anyway, but working on regression tests to ensure most things are basically working from release to release.
YMMV. It's still a lot of work, but different. If you're a competent dev, you'll stand out easily as an SDT.
Nah.
Maybe having direct access to work politics provides an advantage? Maybe a manager is able to sacrifice others to avoid being fired themselves? Maybe taking credit and offloading blame is the name of the game?
Thanks in advance for any consideration of this question!
Much more subtle is the relationship you have with the team you're leading. If you have a culture/vibe of mutual trust and respect, and know when the manager helps ICs versus when ICs help the manager, then the line is blurred, and the team kind of sinks or swims together. You're all playing on the same team, and your role is to some extent a metaphor of the team/product as a whole. What is a lead singer without a band, or vise versa?
If you foster an adversarial relationship, or an overly top-down, bossy kind of vibe, that schism between you and your team can devolve into something that won't withstand the downturns. Bad managers and situations lead to finger pointing and nastiness. Who gets canned in that scenario? Depends on the company and the relationship each person has with the folks up the ladder. But before this kind of situation has come to pass, there should have been some red flags raised. As a manager, if you don't/can't get along with your team, you should find a different team to manage, because you can't ever be effective without their support.
If you're a CEO planning a layoff, your #1 priority is to minimize disruption to the organization. The worst employee is one who is still on the payroll but demoralized; hopelessness is contagious, so not only are they probably not productive themselves, but they make everyone around them unproductive. If you lay off a good manager, they're gone, but you've also demoralized all their reports. You get the same effect if you lay off a core engineer, one with deep knowledge of the codebase that everyone goes to for questions. However, you can lay off a garden variety IC, one that keeps to themselves and just does their job, without any serious repercussions to the org. And you can lay off a whole division without serious repercussions for the rest of the org, because everybody who knew them will no longer be there. This is why many companies try to structure layoffs as "We are exiting this line of business, and that is why the people who worked there are no longer with us."
The one big exception is executives, who usually have less job security than either ICs or managers. I've heard this as a reason why executive salaries are so high; few qualified people will take the job without the knowledge that they'll get F-U money in 2-3 years, because there's a decent chance they'll be fired and unhireable by then. This also fits into the framework above: typically, when an executive gets fired, it's because the business they lead is underperforming and the staff is already demoralized. At this point you lose nothing by getting rid of the executive in charge, because everyone wants to see him gone anyway.
The same logic applies to bad managers; you can and should fire these quickly, because they demoralize all of their reports.
It occurred to me recently that this may be why we have layoffs at all. The fairest approach, and one that maximizes general welfare, is to give everyone an equal pay cut when the company's revenues go down. The problem is that this demoralizes everyone. The good people will leave anyway, while the bad people will sit and do nothing useful while bleeding the company dry of the rest of its cash. So instead, companies create much greater pain across a smaller number of people, and then ensure that the people most affected are no longer with the company so they don't affect overall company morale. The ones left behind are more inclined to think of themselves as lucky, or skilled, or grateful they weren't the ones canned, which are all positives for performance.
I have been interested in software sales as well but that seems like it could be hard to break into as an engineer.
I was freelancing when I made the move to real estate, so in that regard I was already comfortable in a self-employed role. Many people in tech (myself included) are excessively introverted. If this describes you, you'll want to consider how you feel about a career move where lots of contact with the general public is necessary, and how you'll cope with that for yourself.
Yes, the licensing is straightforward - I'm licensed in two states and am considering getting my license in a third. That said, it's a lot like how we talk about the 10x engineer in software - there's a huge gap between having a license and actually being a skilled professional. The average US agent makes something like $60K a year, whereas the top earners (and of course market matters...) make many multiples of that. Real estate is not a monolith - there are many different directions you can take a career. If you aren't comfortable with being an entrepreneur / self-employed person, you'll have a harder time of it.
Again, happy to talk more about licensing, how to choose a brokerage, finding your niche, etc. Likewise, if you go down that path I'm happy to introduce you to mentors, contacts, etc where possible.
I am currently in technical sales (Presales is the name of my org).
This absolutely is not the case. There aren't a ton of folks crossing over but one of my team members did so and has been quite successful.
While it wasn't from a software engineering role, I moved to technical sales from the org's support group so I have the faintest sense of what pitfalls that you may go through.
At the end of the day, many folks in Support groups and R&D groups can fall into the trap of thinking narrowly about a problem. Let us take the problem of getting data into an application. In this scenario a customer asks you if your tool supports 'real time data'. The direct answer is no, it takes time for the tool to fetch / process / present the data from the source system. From a technical lens, this is absolutely, 100% correct. From a selling lens, it's helpful to redirect the conversation towards the customer's goal. Their goal is that they have the lowest latency data possible. This isn't a binary yes / no situation like the previous question.
Now it's relevant to ask questions like:
- What is the source system?
- Is the source truly the originator of the data or is it a downstream consumer of a pipeline?
- If it's not the originator, then how frequently is this pipeline run? Real-time? Micro-batch? What is the latency here?
- Is the source a fixed price system or a cloud-native platform (e.g. Snowflake, BigQuery, etc) where there are marginal costs per query?
- How many consumers will there be of this data? 1? 100? 1000? 10,000? Data approaches often can be cost / performance effective at one scale but flounder at another.
The net result is that the key question that you have to ask involves focusing on the _problem_ the potential customer wants to solve, not just the mechanics of how to solve it.
That plus
- the politics of the deal
- answering the question at the right level of grain for an audience (engineers get different frames of the same answer than VPs / Executives)
- positioning your differentiated techniques and technologies early in the deal to nudge out competitors (they will be doing the same)
- explaining broad or complicated techniques in a consumable fashion (aka a ton of PowerPoint slides) and a number of other aspects
Feel free to ping me (email is in my profile) if you want to chat more about this.
I will be a 3rd generation appraiser, following in the footsteps of my father (who has been in the industry at different levels for 30+ years), and his father (who got into the profession my answering a newspaper ad for FHA appraisers). For the longest time I balked at going into “the family business”, and it took me beating my head against a wall at places that didn’t give a shit about me or my skills to find the one place both of those things were taken seriously.
A side note for those reading this that have ADHD, I cannot stress how much of an overlap there is with appraisers and having some sort of attention disorder. This is not a bad thing, but a pattern I’ve noticed in talking to appraisers from around the US, but many of us seem to have self selected into a profession that works really well with the way that some forms of ADHD work. The specific report forms we fill provide structure and readability of the written reports we prepare, but the randomness and dopamine hit of a new subject and comparable sales to analyze every report keep it fresh.
Any questions anyone has, more than happy to answer!
Or because their managers are bad, or the company is rife with politics.
BTW if they put the guy on PIP then that basically means they were in the process of firing him already. So if they called it a "layoff" that was for cosmetic purposes.