Ask HN: Thinking about my career

2 points by udkl 9y ago ↗ HN

This weekend I had a sudden urge to draft a plan outlining an approach towards my future career.

I'm in my late 20's and have been a full-stack developer for the most part. I have a masters in computer science. I would have gone on to do a PHD but did not realize my (apparent) affection for research until later.

Looking back, I've drifted through jobs that have not been fulfilling enough or complex enough. I spent my time writing SPA web apps (nodejs,ReactJS, good experience and learnings) or writing enterprise software in Java (meh)

Looking ahead, I want to take a more determined approach towards what I choose to work on.

The criteria I've decided on is : Technology that is mature and will be around for a long time with high probability, solves complex-interesting problems, which currently has and will have good jobs with good pay and a side effect of which will be a gain of transferrable skills.

An example project that meets the criteria : Kafka - Kafka is mature-ish, solves complex & interesting problems (distributed systems), open source (can immediately start working on it), has jobs, decent pay and has transferrable skills relating to Java, distributed systems and data systems.

My plan is to dig deep into the technology, understand the domain, start contributing to the codebase and take up a related job.

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Any comments on the criteria as well as suggestions for projects would be appreciated.

1 comment

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troymc 9y ago ↗

That seems like a reasonable plan to me.

The big question is, would that be "fulfilling enough or complex enough" for you?

Maybe the answer is yes. I suppose you won't know until you've been doing it for a while. Even if it doesn't satisfy you, Kafka is still a useful tool for your toolbelt, so the whole adventure won't be a waste of time.