Ask HN: How did you move from IT/software to something unrelated?
I'm a frontend developer in the greater Vancouver, BC area. After becoming burnt out at my last position over a year ago, I've had no success in finding further work and don't have all that much motivation to continue the endless cycle of humouring recruiters and sending resumes out. Not because I don't like software development, more so because of the cost of continued attempts and lack of potentially inspiring outcomes (technical, very time intensive interviews with very few compelling companies worth the effort) that I am qualified for.
Anyhow, I'd like to apply at companies that, for lack of a better description, essentially pay minimum wage and require building basic skill that I may not have developed in software. Like Starbucks, McDonalds, retail. However, computers and software are pretty much all I know and all I have on my resume. I'm reasonably outgoing, well spoken, and have some confidence that I can work with others, but making the backwards transition from my career to a more basic jobby job (no intention of being derogatory here) is surprisingly unclear.
Edit: Part of the intention as well, is to build versatile skills that might allow more job flexibility in the future. For example if I were to travel and work without requiring a skilled worker visa.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 251 ms ] threadBesides that the best advice i think is that getting a "blue collar" job is no different then getting most others. It's about who you know and how much shit you're willing to eat. I've done ever from hanging drywall to writing R code. If you're personable and willing to roll up your sleeeves you can usually get something.
This brings up a larger point I should have called out earlier: An experienced dev in a non-software field has a superpower. I'm no genius but because of my background, I was able to write software that made our engineering team more competitive, and I was able to negotiate good raises as a result. Everybody won.
Those are the escape routes I daydream about when I'm unhappy at work, anyways :)
London is chock-a-block with programming jobs. There are also meetups pretty much every day of the week (often with free beer and pizza). I basically went to as many meetups as I could and I also invested in going to some conferences in areas I was interested in (another good way to meet people). I screwed up my first interview very badly and I'm sure that the people involved are convinced I can't program at all :-). But in the end I got lots of interviews and was able to land a job in about a month (though I started a month later).
Of course the biggest question people had was, "Can you still program?" I'd been out for 5 years. Luckily I had been working on a side project in Ruby for that time period. The code was pretty awful (I was experimenting with a few different ideas) and definitely not idiomatic Ruby, but it helped a lot (i.e. it got me a foot in the door). I also needed to create a narrative for my career where teaching English for 5 years made sense. Of course, people don't plan out their lives like that in reality, but it helps people understand that there is some continuity -- you aren't just bumbling around from job to job. In the end, I had to adjust my salary expectations (because London pay is quite low compared to similarly expensive cities in North America and also because my employer was legitimately taking a risk in hiring me). But I've always been more interested in doing interesting work than receiving a large paycheck, so I had no problem with that. If you do good work and are successful, your employer should bump you up the next year. If they don't, you can very reasonably leverage your "I am working in the industry now" status to find a higher paying job.
I'm currently back in Japan, working remotely on contract for that same company. Being married to a Japanese national made it very easy to return. When I was looking for work before I left Japan, I found that recruiters and what-not wouldn't touch me. I suspect that they thought (reasonably) that I didn't have access to a visa. As soon as I touched down in the UK, they were all over me.
I couldn't quite tell if you are working in high tech now or not, but if you are looking, that's my advice (for work outside of Japan) -- work on your portfolio, etc while you are in Japan. Find a busy centre with lots of jobs and an active meetup scene and go there to meet people. Going to the UK still cost me an obscene amount of money, but I'd been very careful about saving while on JET, so it was fine. If you are short on cash, I'd say try to save up -- having enough money to scrape by for 6-8 months in the centre you pick will really help you (and you can live on beer and pizza in the mean time :-) ).
I can't give you any advice on working in Japan, since I haven't tried to get a job here. However, probably the same advice will work. Likely it means working in Tokyo or Osaka, though. Remote work seems to be picking up steam these days, but it's pretty hard from Japan. The timezone is basically the worst. I put in a lot of days where I work to midnight or later so that I can overlap with London. If you were trying to overlap with the west coast US, it would be baker's hours (starting at 3-4 am) and you are a day ahead (so probably you are best working from Tuesday t...
Work 4 months out of the year full time, or 10-15 hours a week year round and you'll make as much as you would working at McDonald's. Spend the rest of your time learning whatever you want.
If you're in North America, speak fluent English, and you can actually program, steady jobs in the $20-$30 an hour range are easy to find. (note that if you're a decent developer living in North America, I wouldn't advise working for those rates unless you have a specific reason to, e.g., you want easy jobs that are easy to find or you really need money now.
Living in Melbourne it might be a bit harder because of the time zone difference you lose a bit of the advantage North American developers have over eastern Europe, India, and other low cost of living countries.
I still think it's probably doable.
There are jobs on those sites paying decent developer wages as well, but those are harder to come by. I did a bit of work on Upwork and other sites before I started finding work through the Hacker News find a freelancer and upped my rates to $100 an hour.
Like I said though, I don't actually encourage anyone to work for $20-$30/hour unless they're living in a low cost of living country or have some other compelling reason.
You can find people willing to pay $50+/hour on upwork (or at least you could the last time I looked a year or two ago), but you'll have to spend a lot of time searching.
Edit: my last video won "Music Video of the Year" at the Oxford International Film Festival. So here's hoping!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G31_dEOvYuY
1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12422365
I'm into photography as a hobby since 10 years. I started movie making this year, it's harder than I thought to make everything right. The post production work is also more challenging than for still photography.
I would be interested if you had any good links to get started and progress? What camera did you use? I'm making a movie about some cities, but it's taking more time than I expected, for something far from the quality I had in mind :-)
Mind you, then I went back to software development because I needed the money. Still doing some research with my colleagues in my spare time.
Fortunately, being someone who is able to complete a PhD is appealing so some IT employers, even if it's a different field.
But then dot-bomb happened and it looked like the party was over. I looked down at the job opportunities after graduation. I didn't really want to spend the rest of my life wearing a tie, writing bank software and sitting in a cubicle every day, so I decided to try something different.
I became a seasonal park ranger. And it was awesome.
Like most jobs, I got it through knowing someone. My grandparents had volunteered for the NPS and were able to connect me with the right people. I became a seasonal park ranger at Yellowstone.
It's not for everyone. The pay is not great, but you do get lots of good benefits because it's a government job. And you're often living in remote areas (the nearest grocery store was an hour and a half drive from where I was stationed). It's also not conducive to family life if that's your thing (again, the closest school was 1.5 hours away and everyone around me was my coworkers). And the days are long, helping tourists, checking permits, etc. Permanent jobs are also incredibly hard to get - you usually have to do years of seasonal work to accrue enough seniority to get considered for a permanent position.
But the benefits? Being able to crack open a drink after a long day and look up at more stars than I ever thought existed - I spent many nights on the front porch of my cabin looking up at the Milky Way. Hiking, camping, boating on the weekends are easy because I was right there in the park. Clean air, clean water. A good group of coworkers (for me) who legit really care about protecting these astounding natural resources. And a feeling that you're really making a difference and reaching people.
I did this for a few years and they were among my happiest years prior to my marriage. Ultimately, I ended up going back into tech after things recovered. But there are days that I really miss the outdoors and wearing the uniform.
So I guess my advice would be to forget about skills and whatnot and ask yourself, outside of tech, what do you like to do? I mean really like to do? And can you turn that into a job? Can anyone you know network you into a job?
Isn't it crazy hard to get hired for a research position? I was told in the past that just because you had a PhD didn't mean you would automatically be able to find a job doing interesting research.
> The realities of that field have completely sucked me in forever, like nothing I've really found before.
In what way?
It's crazy hard to get hired for a permanent research position in academia at a university people will have heard of. In science and engineering <10% of people go on to PhD and <10% of those PhDs who graduate find a permanent position. If you don't feel like you were the top 1% of your year at uni, then its going to be harder, or you've been under appreciated and are good at research rather than being taught. So yeah to remain in academia being paid little actually takes you being incredibly good. But getting an operational research job in something like an innovation or RnD department, in a company, is about as hard as getting any other job once you have some experience, and are qualified for the work. A PhD is not at all required though. But in life sciences its kind of important right now. The main issue of work being "interesting" is probably if you have directly relevant experience or not, which is a lot less likely as a researcher. If you're like me though and can get interested in almost anything then pragmatism wins. Plenty of knowledge and research skills are completely transferable. Getting a PhD is not really about skill or ability its an endurance race that very few people even sign up for and even less finish. By definition finishing the race means you are capable of doing it. It's a trial by fire.
Nothing is automatic in life. The number of hopelessly incompetent people with a PhD is only slightly less than the number with an undergrad degree or without any higher education. That doesn't change. But yeah if someone sucks, they suck. That's never something that can be overcome with a piece of paper. But a PhD at the very least usually represents a level of dedication to trying to make yourself suck less that others were unwilling to sign up for. That's probably about all its ever recognised as. My experience to date is people with a PhD are hugely self starting, and capable of pushing a project along independently. Which is simply a product of being left alone floating in a room for several years expected to solve something independently.
> In what way?
The main way is that I come from an AI background by training. Many of the concepts from that field set you up for sort of reverse engineering how things might be working in molecular biology. It's not that cells and proteins are remotely like computers, but they are doing heavy computation in a strange way and AI is essentially the field of understanding strange computation. The main thing I was interested in when I was doing an AI degree were optimisation problems and specifically genetic algorithms. Turns out evolution of molecular biology -the real thing- is just vastly more interesting and complex in a way you wish you could get genetic algorithms to behave. Better yet is that the alarming rise of biotech to actually manipulate how life works, means for all intents and purposes theoretical work you do in molecular biology can directly become technology. It's basically what I was looking for in AI.
Even working half time you will make more than at McDonalds.
If you can crack the sales mystery and get good at it, there's nothing you can't have. Good sales folk make $$$$$$$$$$.
Later as a manager who was hiring, the biggest problem I had with hiring juniors was I couldn't easily tell one between another, and even with a degree from a decent University, I was unable to figure out if a) they could solve problems or b) if they could even code at all (surprisingly, many graduates cannot, and I don't have time or inclination to train them).
On the other side of the fence, candidates that put effort into portfolios like the one I described, even for a single project, made it very easy to decide if they were a worthwhile bet because they had already answered my questions with their portfolio piece: that they can solve a problem and that they can actually code.
Even interview phases, I've had seniors whom have aced the interviews and turned out completely rubbish. If only I was able to determine their aptitude from a real project before I've even called them...
Another angle is to find a company that need something built but are not a 'tech company'. Often these, assuming you can pull of the work they need, are less about the 'passing the tech interview' and more 'solving the problems' the small business is having. I started out doing this also (I worked in ad agencies making bespoke things as their only programmer).
There are avenues outside of 'tech companies' if you can do the work, if you love making stuff, don't give up on it yet!
Life decided for me that I can't be a programmmer anymore. I had an engineering degree in Computer Engineering and it was hard for me to convince myself that I can't type anymore. It just wasn't possible physically. So after much furstration I decided to make a change. I went back to school to study. This time I took up Statistics. Now I'm a PhD student in Biostatistics. Much better in terms of job satisfaction and typing is less. The latter is important for my RSI injury which never went away completely.
PS: in my master's I met all kinds of people from all kinds of background studying statistics. It broke my bubble that I'm the only one who has made a change.
Something else I learned was to not overdo it.
So, that was almost a cure for me, but whether it'll work for you or not is an entirely different thing, depending on what the root of the problem is. You would probably also need to address posture and muscle tension issues, like I do, and you just plain should not attempt any kind of serious rehab without a good physiotherapist helping you.
The switch into investments and the wrist braces basically saved my career...
https://www.amazon.com/Bracoo-Breathable-Superior-Ergonomic-...
Also, so glad to hear you were able to find something you like doing. RSI is stuff of nightmares.
My suggestion to people to avoid RSI is: Just don't work too much, focus on health and small things in life. Work is just a part of life, it is not life.
I'm with you on the extreme pressure cooker that is tech jobs, and tech recruiting. It's almost as if the dial is either 0 or 11.
So much in dev and elsewhere depends on the specifics of the organization structure and who your manager is.
Good luck.
Made and sold this yesterday - http://i.imgur.com/byR2660.png
I haven't made the switch just yet, because I want a slightly larger bank account before I draw down from it to finance a couple of purchases. I've also basically self-taught for a real estate license. One doesn't need the license to buy and sell real estate for oneself, but the knowledge is very handy and I may get a license anyway just to be able to work with an agency for the experience of it. Doing this sort of thing requires one to build skills that translate to any industry (sales, "people skills", etc.).
For clarity: that is to say it can be immoral, but isn't immoral just because.
i use fb groups and my personal connections 50-50. i would not use Airbnb because it is usually for the short term. it is important to talk to people before you let them rent. try to judge their character. in general i avoid people who seem too cold/business-like about it, because i know people who like me stay longer and will be more fun to live with.
I eventually went back into software -- writing is not great for one's bank balance unless you hit it extremely big; my gross income is now more than triple what it was during those years as a full-time writer -- but I'm still an occasional journalist and even more occasional author, and those were an excellent six years.
I think the tl;dr is to try to turn what you enjoy doing in your spare time into your secondary profession.
You don't need any special skills to get a job at a hostel. I think that it would be much more beneficial for personal development than serving coffee or flipping burgers. It's very good for interpersonal and intercultural communication skills. Depending on which shift you work, you could still get in a full day of coding on side projects on some days.
I worked in that industry and was even able to get a European work visa based on it (along with the technical skills). Send me a message if the idea interests you. (@joshhostels on Twitter)
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14390812 and marked it off-topic.
So now, most of my job is to assess training needs, design a programme solution - along with its curriculum, script, storyboard etc - then develop the actual eLearning, test-test-test then launch. So quite similar to a software development cycle - except most often this is a one-man job and shouldn't last more than a couple of months.
Initially I was naive enough to think hey, I got this, but there's a reason why MOOCs generally have high drop-out rates. The bar for eLearning is extremely high. You also have to take account of other limitations, from outdated IT systems to the sizeable number of computer illiterates/ Luddites to the organisation's own conflict of whether the training should look 100% corporate (aka boring) or creative (learners cry hurray!)
But I find that I enjoy navigating through them and finding the right balance. I also learnt a massive amount about how to teach, what good designs mean and how to listen to users. In terms of opportunities - well there's enough I suppose, at least for me I can work on my edtech project - for children, cos hey it's just more fun ;) - with a backup contract work to keep the money going.
It was mainly accidental that I got into digital learning. I was pretty traumatised from my degree, even today I still feel irrationally reluctant to code.
But I've always been passionate about design and education. I also wanted to "self-heal" if you like, to repair myself as a person and as a learner. And what better way than to learn how to learn and teach??
One of the best parts of my job is I can get away with being "dummy". I tell my subject matter experts that it's helpful to assume this position, so I can be empathic to all types of learners, but really I'm a slow learner myself haha. And yes you do end up designing better eLearning! Being in Learning And Development also gives a good overview of the whole organisation, as you need to understand how it works and where the gaps are in order to tackle them with training (or not.) I learnt a lot, and dare I say I am much more confident as learner, teacher and professional.
Lately though I've been feeling that I have a debt to pay. I consider myself lucky to "survive" depression, and to live in a good country with lots of opportunities. So I am moving to my own edtech project focusing on literacy for children, with lots of interactive eBooks :)) I do have a backup remote gig though.
If you're really interested, google up "Instructional Design" and "eLearning" just to get a flavour of the field. As I said, there are WYSIWYG tools but increasingly organisations are moving towards mobile-friendly courses, which is great news for developers as it means more coding opportunities. Have a look at "Adapt", an open source authoring tool which requires a bit of HTML/ JavaScript knowledge. "Unity" is also increasingly being used ... and there's a growing trend for VR learning.
Hope that's helpful, if not just email me via my profile.
"Many institutions move towards eLearning" - the impression I got from this topic is that its pretty much every time one of those "Ipad cases" - spend $$$ on Ipads even if they are useless, just to show how modern your institution is. Almost every time I hear about this, its some news-article over hyping eLearning that is so badly implemented that the teachers hate it.
If you know what you are doing (not the wishy washy way) then I would really like to ask you some questions.
My rule is to start from first principles and work my way up as logically as I can. This helps to cut through the bullshit - yep, I agree with you that there is too much of it in L&D. However it's also useful to know core pedagogy theories and the latest fads, because it will help you speak in their language. Some of them are genuinely useful, but I find myself drawing mostly from design and behaviour science.
Digitalisation is a serious strategy though. You will be surprised at how dated some systems are in the biggest companies, and the amount of reluctance to adapt in the workforce. The mistake most companies do is to rush with digitalising their training, when there does need to be a proper transition sensitive to the workforce's needs and perceptions.
Although I've sung praises about eLearning here, personally I prefer blended learning - but the best ones require skill in creating the complementary digital component well.
It makes sense that some people burn out due to bad experiences and after recovering come back.
I'm sorry to be blunt, but if this is the case then your skills are very much rock bottom. So you have two options:
1. get better at your job. IT is in boom now, so if you can't find a job in a reasonable amount of time then there is something very wrong and you should do something about it.
2. admit that you are not only not any good, but you don't even care. But don't try to sugarcoat it with something like "to build versatile skills that might allow more job flexibility in the future" - at this point in time, being a frontend dev is probably the best occupation to have "job flexibility". In this case, of course you should try to find out what you like doing, eg. if you have a hobby, that you could take more seriously, for example.
Your best bet would probably be to combine 1 & 2, eg. just suck it up until you get hired as a UI dev for a company that allows repositioning later. For example, you can start at a financial firm as an IT person, learn the business and then use internal mobility to move to the business side of things. I've seen this happen multiple times. Of course, this approach requires significant effort on your part but offers great returns.
Not necessarily, I think interviewers and tech teams can 'smell' enthusiasm + interest + motivation very well which (A) after burnout is around zero regardless of skills, (B) in a fast-changing field "in boom now" aka. full of fluff and trends and wheel-reinventions is much more crucially important in the first place --- just rarely ever spelled out or recognized like that
"IT is in boom now"
Are you by any chance living in the 80-90s? :p. Apologies but I beg to differ. My personal opinion is that the field has peaked, which is why you are finding people writing up a webpage and calling themselves a startup. Of course there are exceptions but I am referring to the majority here. There is also large amount of redundant work happening.
IT is and will always be a complimentary field and cannot stand on its own. We are now going through a transitional phase where what was once classified as a white collar job is shifting on the gradient towards blue, so it lies somewhere in between. Maybe Cyan? :).
Companies are outright desperate for even entry level skills. If you can't even find work in this field, that is very atypical, and I think it is reasonable to assume that something is going on there. Maybe it's substance abuse, maybe it's a complete lack of skills, but it's something, because there are far more jobs than people to fill them.
If he had said he wanted to do something like become a teacher or tech tradesman of a different kind, that would be a different story, but legions of people in the low-paying, low status, dead-end entry level jobs he is describing can only dream of rising into IT employment, and there are plenty of "coding bootcamps" to "help" them get there. This guy already has an opportunity that millions dream of, and though his grip on it may be tenuous, he needs help in firming it up.
Maybe you can find a non-dev role where having development experience is extremely useful? For example, customer success/support on a SaaS product often is very difficult to fill with human to human contact employees who can diagnose front end bugs a customer might be seeing, run some data queries... stuff that would otherwise result in a long turnaround for an answer by putting in a support ticket with engineering. Support staff with technical chops are extremely hard to find and high value add in enterprise software. I think you can find something more productive that plays to your strengths horizontally in the types of orgs you have been working for instead of dropping in the hierarchy of industry skillsets altogether.
Job-finding skills, maybe. But those don't necessarily correlate with job-doing skills. All of my job searches have been >3 months ("Absurd! In this job market?! You must be awful."), yet managers have made it clear to me that they've been extremely satisfied with my work.
OP, if you're anything like me, you need interview practice and networking.
* Interview practice is easy. Drill yourself over and over and over until you're comfortable with the kind of things that get asked during interviews. Then, once you're comfortable, find someone to do mock interviews with you.
* Networking is hard. Your best option is to talk to people you previously worked with and let them know you're looking for a job. If you're not in contact with former coworkers, try going to programming meetups and talking with people.
Make sure that the website is built rock-solid so you don't shoot yourself in the foot as a front end dev ;))
Interview practice is something I haven't done enough and could stand to do more of. I think one of the things I need to do is take a hard look at all the reasons why I may have failed and see where I can improve. At the very least, unfortunately, most interviews are inconsistent and expectations haven't been set appropriately before hand. Some on-site right away; some never on-site; some a miniscule phone conversation plus a 6 hour coding take-home project. Oddly, intense algorithms haven't come up yet.