Ask HN: Career change at 22
After years I am not satisfied with web development and it doesn't make me happy. I can see really young, inexperienced people going into this business, things are changing really fast and there's no methodology, no "scientific" way to do it. I can say that web development is somehow punk business with many "script kids" involved.
The second thing I don't like about the job is lack of social contact. You spend big amount of time in front of a computer and when you want to be the best you have to spend even your free time alone. When you look at those best developers, they look kind of awkward, they don't have communication skills and I feel like this is not the way I want to go.
Also the third thing that bothers me is the fact that developers are becoming new blue-collar workes (see https://www.wired.com/2017/02/programming-is-the-new-blue-collar-job/) since it's kind of easy to learn how to code. You also don't need any certification or license. I see that many IT students do have this blue-collar mentality. They dress badly, they swear alot, simply they look like people from lower social classes. This is what bothers me. When I was younger I really appriciated this "punk" side of the IT. Now I hate it.
What I am thinkin about is career change to medicine. I am interested in human body and would enjoy studying it. Also medicine as a field seems to be more mature and traditional.
Do some of you see it similarly or do you have different opinion? What do you think about it?
65 comments
[ 5.8 ms ] story [ 16.3 ms ] threadIf your true passion is health care, all the prelude about programmers becoming blue-collar or how they look awkward is irrelevant and just muddles the decision process.
If you want to use forums for feedback on your question, go to the pre-med and medical school forums. Also ask working doctors if they're happy with their career decision. Is their motivation and disposition similar to yours? Is filling out endless insurance paperwork for reimbursements overwhelming their desire to practice medicine? Is private practice or hospital staff better? Etc. etc.
Edit: grammar
I'm getting paid very well to do this work (much more than any blue collar worker in my area). It is challenging as there are always new things to learn but some pieces are falling into place and work well (ie React, Redux/well managed client-side state, etc).
I think this time is more exciting than any other for web application development. I think comparing software development jobs to blue collar is somewhat dishonest as it ignores the high compensation aspect -- if you tried having this discussion with an actual blue collar worker, I 100% expect you would learn some new things.
You sound burned out. This is what you should do:
* figure out what drew you into this work to begin with -- figure out a path to get back to that and focus on it
* stop paying attention to all the hype and buzz -- focus on what you care about, don't dwell on overly pessimistic articles (they get page clicks and there is always something new that threatens our income)
* focus on getting better at what you do
* make a long term plan to learn more about computer science topics that are useful to your long term goal -- this kind of knowledge doesn't churn as much
* write more code -- instead of reading doom and gloom, go write code
I suspect part of your issue is working for a smaller consultancy. Go work for someone for whom the web is a core part of their business -- it is best if it is their business. As in they are 100% reliant on it and you are contributing to their product which grows their company. Focus on finding a team with experience that you can learn from rather than a slightly higher salary.
That's a rather sweeping generalisation
Thirty years later (and another career shift!) all I can say is, if you're unhappy in a profession at 22, you will not be happier if you waste even more years chasing down a blind alley. Worse, the older you get the more your options narrow — path dependency is a thing for people as well as for technologies. If you're in a job where you can't imagine being in it five years hence, or ten years hence, let alone thirty years from now, you should get out while you're still young enough, and write off the first career as a learning experience. It's not all bad: whatever you do next, you'll have a broader context than your peers who went into the medical sciences straight out of school.
Can't agree more. I changed from theoretical physics to CS upon realizing that a) it's not my true calling and b) I'm not cut out for the highly competitive research community ("publish or perish " etc.), coincidentally also at age 22.
Found a well-paying developer position within a few weeks, and my employer allowed me to work part-time and do a CS bachelor in parallel. I just finished that, and I'm very happy with my choice.
What I'd recommend is that you seek some in-person counselling (unis usually offer career advice counseling to their students) and talk it through thoroughly.
Serious "grass is greener" thinking going on in your post.
Like everything, you have to strike a balance. If OP wants to be a slave to methodology, they should stay in academia. Engineering is literally about managing these trade-offs.
I hope they have a stomach for the politics of it.
After leaving grad school for math after 4 years, I spent a hard 2 1/2 years looking for work in anything. Money was hard to come by, I lived primarily off of my Marine reserve pay - I had enlisted in the Marine Corps in hopes it would help me with direction, financial future, and improve my chances of attaining any career track job. While I can still appreciate purity to an extent, it stops there when you don’t have enough money but to eat only oatmeal for a week.
An aside, judging people for dress/class/language/etc. is pretty shitty - if you care about ideas, then surely these things are irrelevant, and there is some irony/contradictory attitutde being displayed by your words?
Lastly, a lot of some of the stated assertions are just flat out not true/shows immaturity/insecurity/depth on your side. I would spend some time reflecting on what matters to you as a person, aside from career. There is a lot of implicit inhumane comments made in the exposition defending your conclusion, and if you want to be a successful person, at the very least you should understand your desires/worldview and how your conclusions derive from them, correcting if there is any incongruity.
Maybe a career switch is indeed ultimately what you want - however, you should try understanding yourself before throwing away your years of study.
The schooling process is incredibly long and expensive if you want to become an MD and specialize beyond being a general practitioner, the hours absolutely suck until you become an attending, and the social capital of physicians is eroding as they are increasingly viewed more as code monkey service providers than intelligent domain experts.
Also the change to pay for performance vs pay for service and the introduction of more PAs and NPs with prescribing power is going to change practice as well to the detriment of MDs. I would say if you are very interested in helping patients then a career change into medicine is worth exploring; otherwise it's not worth it.
If you are more interested in biology vs patient care then perhaps you could consider translational research. There is HUGE demand for programmers in many biomedical engineering labs, research institutes, pharma and biotech, insurance, hospitals etc. I would kill to have an experienced dev to work with in my lab for example as most of the code I get stuck dealing with is utterly dog shit. If what you are seeking is social status, professionalism, and an opportunity to explore biology while making a difference then this might be a good route for you given your existing skill set.
Also even if you start out in a technical role, there are usually also non-technical career paths (If you think programming is too blue-colar) which you can explore from there.
(2) It's an over-generalization to believe that the best developers are awkward and socially inept. Do you have enough data points? The best developers are actually great collaborators who care more about the problem they're solving and the value it provides to users. Often that makes them stronger communicators and peers because they're working a team of other skilled people (designers, product managers, customer facing teams) to find the best, most impactful solution. I'd rather hire a 10-20% less skilled developer who has great communication & collaboration skills. Have you considered working at an organization where you could work with a larger team in place?
(3) It's becoming easier to learn to write code than ever before but that doesn't mean that the value of those skills is reaching asymptotic levels. In fact, I believe the bar is increasing: machine learning/AI, scaling large distributed systems, re-thinking how we'd build software as hardware improves and becomes cheaper, etc. Finding great engineering talent is still extremely scarce. I won't really comment on how you feel about one's appearance (I don't know why that matters) and communication style (pick a culture you like).
Human Machine Interaction is an art (or craft, if you prefer) not a science. So the size of the code dedicated to the user interface can easily be orders of magnitude larger than the fundamental business logic they interact with. So there will likely always be a lot more work there.
Then other areas of computing that are not deterministic yet are very scientific, like Data Science, which is probablistic as opposed to deterministic. Which is an almost 180 degree flip in your mental modeling.
The class sensitivity you exhibit is astonishing. Especially for someone your age. I really think you aught to do some soul searching there. Classism is an objectively bad thing to indulge in.
As far as the loneliness is concerned, well, deterministic work tends to be cut and dried and narrowly proscribed. So, say, writing a device driver for an OS will not require you to interact with people because the work can be specified exactly. Increasingly deterministic work will be outsourced to machines too. They're spectacularly bad at interacting with humans (just ask Alexa ;)
First you say you're 22 yo and have been working for 10 years? You started working at 12? Weren't you supposed to go to school?
Second, take it easy on blue collar culture. Web development, however crap you think it is, is nothing like working on an assembly line, both in terms of pay and in terms of fun. Plus you seem to equate blue collar culture and bad manners. This is not great. You will find people with good manners and people with bad manners at all level of society.
Third, if you want to study medicine go for it... you're only 22. Just know that the studies are long, the pay is probably not as good as it used to be, and that a lot of doctors may be replaced by machines in the next 50 years...
They say that they've been focusing on web development for 10 years, not working. It's not so weird for someone to learn HTML at a young age, start making a website for someone, and eventually get paid gigs and grow their business.
I was getting paid to make websites at 12...there's a huge chasm of difference between that and the web development I do now though.
That being said, I might not be the best person to suggest you one way or another. But if you hate the business, do something about it. If that's changing your career path, go for it. If you hate these 3 things specifically I'd assume medicine might be exactly what you're looking for.
Now back to development. Web development is by far the easiest to get into (think wordpress, frameworks like RoR, Laravel, Django) and chances are that just changing from web development to some other more challenging field withing development might work out for you. If you enjoy the problem solving development offers that is.
For me personally, that's exactly what I love about the IT business. It's extremely easy to show what you know/what you're good at (unlike for example most social studies). And the rest doesn't really matter.
How many blue collar workers have the job flexibility that you have? How many blue collar workers are making 200, 300, 400k a year? How many blue collar workers have built products that are literally used by millions of people every second?
Take some time off to reevaluate and get some perspective. Our industry has plenty of flaws, but I don’t think the typical complaints of blue collar workers are one of them. The sky is the limit in our industry.
And BTW my first job was at a word leading RnD organization and the uniform there was jeans wellies and a lab coat.
Yeh its easy to lean to code I learnt machine code at 14 the hard part is producing a usable end result.
There are so many ways to go deep, which you will see towards the end of your degree: After completing your degree, you can work in
- Machine learning
- A.I.
- Big data
- Mathematics
- Start your own company. This is even more challening than the above, because besides coding the product. you need to be excellent with people, what people want, what they say and what they mean, excite people for your product, figure out how to get 100,000 users with $0 funding.
- Autonomous driving
- Work at Google and Facebook to solve all other very challenging computer science problems.
Good luck !