Ask HN: Career Advice for the Confused

4 points by makemethrowaway 1 year ago | 3 comments

I have ~6 years of experience as a C/C++ developer but no expertise in any niche. My current work is mostly uninteresting - adding minor features and bug fixes on a legacy codebase. I feel stagnant and depressed.

Should I learn Rust, Go, or another language to switch domains? How do I overcome my lack of experience in other areas? I'm looking for a job change but see very few remote opportunities for C++.

What should I do? I'm really confused. Any help would be appreciated. Thanks.

lajt 1 year ago |

I would do a Mobile app. It has a lot of benefits:

- You control its release and marketing, so it's your show A to Z.

- You talk to users about new features and bugs, which is great experience learning how to deal with user requests.

- You can hook it up to a web API, or a free-tier AWS account, or Apple iCloud (if targeting iOS), which gives good experience for connecting to a web db.

- You can also store data locally in order to learn SQL syntax using SQLite, if you don't already know SQL.

- You create the icons, splash screen, screen captures for the appstore, etc, so it provides great UI design experience.

- It has a great developer community (at least iOS does, since I have experience there); people are very active and cool and fun.

You can develop a Mobile app on the side while keeping your current job. I did this and was able to pivot to a more interesting job space doing mobile. I learned a ton.

makemethrowaway 1 year ago | |

Should I target native mobile(swift,kotlin) or something like react native, flutter etc

kacesensitive 1 year ago |

Go is fun. Rust is tough to learn but a lot of really cool projects use it.

I say just build something and go from there.