Ask HN: What is the smartest career path to take?
Currently, my job is very easy (mostly spikes and research) and extremely flexible. We basically spend time just researching the latest hypes in the tech industry and seeing if the company can offer products in the space.
As I said, it's easy, but also pointless and kinda boring at times. But I deal with it, nonetheless.
My question is what would the smart thing for me to do next? I'm still in the stage in life where I'm searching for "happiness and fulfillment" and want to try new things but I am also afraid of making dumb career decisions. Just for context, outside of work I mainly focus on my other interests (politics and government, filmmaking and socializing).
Should I:
1. Try to find a higher paying job? Bite the bullet and challenge myself to get a $100k salary job? I guess that if I'm going to be bored at work, I might as well be bored but making more. But I also know this will probably mean I will have to put in more work than I'm accosumted to. Also, I have a great work life balance that I would hate to lose. (I'm stricly 40 hours). But I'm also cautiously thinking how your earning potential lowers as you age.
2. Stay where I'm at and spend that extra time developing in the non-career areas I care about. I.E, getting more involved in my government and filmmaking stuff.
3. Start a business? Something I've spent the last two years researching and wanting to do, but I just don't have any ideas/problems to solve.
4. Something else?
Sorry if this is a dumb question. I wish someone would make a guide for young people titled, "how to suceed at your life."
99 comments
[ 4.1 ms ] story [ 173 ms ] threadYou have to define that metric for yourself. Nobody else can do that for you. That said, I can offer a personal illustration.
I was in an art-oriented career previously. I defined The Good Life back then as achieving prestige in my field of art. Several years in, I came to realize that, for myself, my definition of The Good Life had changed. It now included time to spend hanging out with and helping friends; getting to know my nieces and nephews; having time to pursue art that's meaningful to me without attaching my paycheck to it.
I've been able to make progress towards my personal definition of The Good Life by changing careers into tech where job security is more guaranteed than in the freelance art world, and where the jobs are interesting enough and pretty cushy. That's given me the financial freedom to have that balance in my life with time for friends, family, religious life, art, my spouse, and other things.
What is success to you?
You're bored. I think that means that you're ready for a job that demands more of you than the one you're in. (Plus, that usually means more money.) Looking for a job with more responsibility might be your first move. (That doesn't mean that you necessarily have to switch companies. You can just ask your boss for more or harder work.)
But as you move to harder work, one of the problems is maintaining balance. You want work that demands more of you - but not so much that work becomes your life. That way lies burnout and depression, which are not what you're looking for.
Yes, balance is key. I guess you can't have the best of both worlds?
You might want to read it for inspiration.
Next you need to decide what you want out of life. Do you LOVE development and building software? Or is it something that you do because it pays pretty well? Do you want to travel and see the world? Do you want to work only enough to do the things you love? Do you want to build a company? Do you like managing people? Do you want to still be a developer in 20-30 years?
I don’t think this is a dumb question and I actually think that it’s smart to ask these kinds of questions. Unfortunately I can’t tell you what is best for you with out know more about you. (Even then I can just give advice based on my life experience which may or may not help you) I suggest finding a trusted senior person at your company and see if they will mentor you. If may help to see aspects of the business not related to development as well.
Then help and teach others.
Do something that helps people in a way where you can receive their gratitude.
If you start a business, you might get the opportunity to learn a bunch of things you never would have in a corporate environment, and if the business succeeds, you might have the time and money to do the other things on your list. If it doesn't succeed, you'll certainly have the time when you decide to shut it down.
Another option is to start a side business while working for your current employer, if your contract and legal environment will allow it.
Your mid-twenties are a great time to figure out what you want to be by the end of your thirties.
Completely disagree. there are software developers working so much and making peanuts and there are developers that know how to BS and work may be 1/5th and make thrice or 4 times the pay.
Completely disagree that higher paying jobs demand more.
There may be extenuating circumstances if, say, you work remotely from Nowhere, Alaska, so they can pay you less, or you work in a college lab where programmers-in-training are plentiful. But generally, those forces are pushing to equalize, across programming positions all across the country.
I worked a lower paying job at one point, and the truth is, at lower salaries, "well this is what you're paying me for" was kind of implied. Or maybe it's more accurate to put it in reverse: if your employer jacks up the workload, then employees will think, why don't I just get a 120k job, since it'll be the same amount of work, now? So employers at lower salaries have a strong incentive to be chill, just as employees at that level can have a chill lifestyle, as that's something employers are happy to make happen for lower costs.
They'll pay lip service to mental health and work-life balance, but you'll see the real incentives in who gets bonuses/promotions and who gets "managed out".
Try to have a minor mental health episode in a tech company. Just try. Then tell me how long the line is at the unemployment office.
In tech, often the high pay comes from knowing the latest hottest tech. My devops friend is making 2x the usual devops pay only because he's competent around a combination of latest cloud and big data technologies.
It's not happened to me yet, my earning potential has only increased as I've gained more experience (41 now), especially since I went freelance.
I would say in your 20's is a great time to take risks. Usually doing this will give you great experience you can then apply throughout your life, too. For example:
- Work for a startup. Here you are on Hacker News! The pay won't be as good as a bigger company and equity probably won't ever pay out anything much, but you will learn a LOT if you choose to work for a half decent startup.
- Go freelance. This is how I've learned the majority of the technologies I've worked with. For the first 15 years of my career I mostly stuck to what I knew, after going freelance my skillset grew significantly due to working with various different clients with different requirements. Note that if you go freelance it will be hard to go back to working in permanent positions. The freedom and money is really nice.
Starting a business - (Assuming you mean "build a product") - I personally wouldn't recommend this unless you have a good idea; early paying customers; the ability to commit to it and execute continuously. It's the most difficult career path to take. IMHO it's worth waiting and gaining experience and seeing what else is out there first before diving in. It takes serious drive, tons of effort and some luck to be successful. I've released a few of my own products and nothing has been successful - becoming a successful freelancer was MUCH easier.
Take risks, meet people, learn plenty of new things. If you can combine your interests with your career it can be great but be careful you don't end up burning out on something you privately enjoy because of combining it with work.
Good luck!
1) How did you get started? Is it feasible for more junior engineers to get into it or not so much?
2) How do you find work consistently enough to make a living? What does the work often look like?
I would say it's not so feasable as a junior unless you really can hit the ground running which only comes with experience, at least in ops. Most clients expect me to be productive within about a week of landing if not less, otherwise they would have found a permie. They also expect senior freelance people in such a space to be making or helping to make a lot of decisions for them, which is hard to do until you've made enough mistakes to learn what not to do, instead of just knowing the latest doo-daa or other.
Finding work isn't hard, you register with a few agencies (e.g hays, linuxrecruit, etc etc and then they farm your CV out to their clients, and then you interview and start working.. I've never spent more than a week looking for a new contract)
As for the amount of work -- endless, at least in devops...
Currently I am working as a senior devops/sre for a startup, k8s, cloudy stuff, big springboot stack (50 or so services across 10 instances, etc) -- I do the same work as the full time staff, mgt treats me as slightly more senior/more votes than those because I am really, but you have to walk a bit of a political line sometimes.
Any questions feel free :}
Have you considered relocating to the US?
I'm a devops contractor in the UK and looking at options to maximize income.
Nah, quality of life wouldn't be there for me, personally.
London is still probably highest rates for devops in the EU, Munich/Frankfurt/Amterdam/Paris aren't far behind but the work is more boring, Berlin rates are less but everything is quite cheap..
I'm not a digital nomad, have a house and a child :}
No anxiety really, just keep some money set aside and after some years you sort of know if you'll be able to easily find a job or not.
In the absolute worst case, if I couldn't get another contract, I could always go perm, but I've not had to make such a decision yet.
I got started with a combination of crappy freelance websites (I found some small assignments on elance etc), reddit/r/freelance, and had some small jobs for friends and previous employees. After that I found a great gig on Hacker News's "Seeking Freelancer" forum. Then I moved into longer term onsite contracts, hourly rates are a bit less flexible but you have more security and a more stable turnover.
2) How do you find work consistently enough to make a living? What does the work often look like?
As I said -- longer term contracts give you stability here. Other freelancers go for more lucrative short-term projects. There's lots of combinations. My first project was like 3 weeks, and I've been at my current assignment for almost 3 years now.
I think the OP is referring to the sum earning potential across remaining years. At a certain point job retraining isnt worth it because the low number of remaining years results in a negative EROI vs maintaining the course.
Sure, if you want to work at a startup, I would say early career is the best time to do so. Best case scenario, you learn a lot, your company has a successful exit, and you make some decent cash.
The other side of the coin is that for every well run startup where you can learn a lot, there are a bunch that are terrible, where you won’t learn as much, your stock options won’t ever be worth anything, you’ll be overworked, and you’ll overall end up behind where you would have been starting at a more established company.
My experience has been mostly the latter, so I’m a little biased here, but it seems like the default HN bias leans the other way, so I’m trying to counterbalance that. Yes, I did learn from my couple of startup tours, but I’m not sure if I became a better engineer as a result of working at those places. IMO, my time at larger, public companies has been more valuable to me in career terms.
The other aspect here is a lot of people have a different idea on what joining a startup is. I've heard of people saying, "Oh, I'm joining a startup!" And then it's Uber just before they IPO. Maybe technically Uber was a startup at that point but I've been at a seed stage company - they're not even remotely comparable experiences. I worry people who have only worked at startups with 10+ engineers, super engineering driven culture, and lots of funding are giving the advice of, "work for a startup! It's great!"
Most of the time - it isn't great. It's terrible and not being a founder is the #1 reason I never want to join a startup again. All the risk - none of the reward and none of the power. Fucking sucks.
For an employee, whether they're looking to learn or earn, I think "go work at a startup" as a blanket piece of advice is a bad idea, unless they know how to spot the red flags a bad startup throws up. The earlier stage the company is, the more potential it has for both learning and earning. But, earlier stage bad companies haven't been weeded out as thoroughly as later stage companies. This is just survivorship bias, although, in this case, it works for you rather than against you.
The benefit is that in a small startup you get so much more exposure and are not siloed away.
Counterpoint to “more exposure and not siloed away”: this can easily lead to overwork, either self or externally imposed.
You might learn a lot by jumping into a startup, but your chances of failing are probably higher than if you start one 20 years into your career. The average age of successful startup founders is not in the 20s.
Then they joined a not-gonna-happen startup (to do with optical fibers) as a CEO, investing something like $50k of their own money to get the position, later increasing their stake to $150k. If the startup is about to die this is not very hard. They had a plan to turn things around and in at least one case (out of 4-5 tries) it worked. This guy was then forced out of the CEO job, but he was certainly very well compensated for his efforts (triple digit millions).
Of course he did try that 5 times, and lost everything 4 times out of 5. Including years of work. It's not for the faint of heart.
The other one made out well as well on one of his past efforts that was taken over by a competitor for a very nice price, after which he left. He's now working on a company that I'm not really holding out much hope for.
Why is Alcatell-Lucent kinda pointless?
If you want your entire career to be exactly like, let's say, the first year of your master study at university, with exactly defined problems to be solved, then get a thank you, maybe a nice compliment if you've done exceptionally well, then to see your solution disappear and never even be used anywhere (and certainly not voluntarily by a customer) or if your family has enough money to build a house out of 100 dollar bill bricks, it's the perfect place. A place where people use extreme social pressure, even crimes, to get the slightest of advances within the company, because there is no future there. I would make damn sure all my interests lie outside of work though, even in that case.
I also don't think you should try and exclusively maximize your dollar earnings in your 20's, personally. But it's just an opinion.
Not everyone has to be a world-smashing rock star startup. Hacker News certainly has an exposure bias towards that, but there's absolutely nothing wrong with doing a mundane software job to easily pay the bills, while channeling your passionate focus elsewhere.
It's perfectly fine to have a wall between work and other interests. I rarely get interested in software for its own sake outside of getting paid for it (maybe a small personal project once every couple years), and conversely my other interests need to stay passions rather than trying to be leveraged into monetizing.
Do you think FAANG people have no hobbies?
They are just like you and me.
With that out of the way, "How" to achieve "more" depends a lot on your interests and life goals.
edit: I see that 7 and 10 months ago, you basically posted the same "Ask HN". I think you should change job, there's no reason to keep a job that bores you to death. There's no point in trying to learn to love your job, if you don't enjoy it, you don't enjoy it. Luckily as a software engineer, you're not stuck in there.
Now your problem seems to be that you don't know what to do with your life, and you feel that somehow you need to accept the routine of daily life to find happiness. You mentioned wishing you could be satisfied with the routine like others are. There's no point trying to fit someone else's enjoyment of life, you're not the same person. It's not true that this is the only way to enjoy life.
Again, I don't know your situation/location, so it's hard to put your situation into perspective. I'd just say, on the "how to live a happy life" side of things, that you need to figure out first why you're alive, what makes you wake up in the morning and decide that your life worthy of living. Somehow, by continuing to breathe everyday, you're making the active decision of being alive. Figure out what motivates this decision, and then optimize for it.
Personally, I've always thought that life is pointless, has no intrinsic meaning. It's like a video game, you can play it or not, and it won't change anything whether you do or not. However, there's reasons we play video games: they're enjoyable, something in them makes us feel satisfaction. In my personal life, I enjoy the idea of exploring and furthering humanity in the technological space, and that motivates how I govern my life, or at least which goals I pick for myself. It made me pick hobbies, such as sailing and fabrication/manufacturing, that help me live my goals. I've oriented my career choices in a similar manner too: in particular only working for remote companies. I've not always been happy, in the moment, with the job I was making, but it was usually the right tradeoff overall toward my longer term goals.
Someone asked me what would I regret not doing at the end of my life. When ever that would be. As is common wisdom we regret what we do not do, not what we choose to do.
So I quite my job and road a bicycle up the east coast for 6 weeks. Followed a year later w NZ and Australia. Then the UK ....
It seems like traveling and adventuring has been glamorized by the media and people around me a bit much and I caught the bug.
Looking back, I would have preferred to spend more time at local gardens, participated more in neighborhood events, helped out local community more and got to know my neighbors better. These activities to build a deeper emotional connection with people around me would have helped my mental health tremendously back then.
I'm not saying I regret traveling, I'm saying that the main reason why I took time to explore the world primarily because of the glamor of it and me trying to chase the next crazy adventure, all the while contributing to global warming in my wake. Traveling is not for everyone and I hope fewer people give out a blanket `travel the world` prescription and more people are willing to admit that maybe traveling didn't do shit for their growth.
Do both!
Traveling objectively made me worse off than if I had not done it.
Take concrete steps in a promising direction and judge the results along the way.
For example, if you want to pursue a higher-paying job:
* Do interviews at big tech companies. Talk to the people who work there and really learn what it’s like to work there.
* Visit cities like SF, NYC, and Seattle, meet local people, and see if you would love to move there.
Same goes for the other options. Spend some time working for free with someone who has a startup idea and see if you like it. And so on.
My personal anecdote: I’ve always tried to do interesting things with meaningful impact while staying away from dark pattern systems (ad tech, marketing tech, surveillance tech) as they are detrimental to society at large. This has led me to spend more time on safety critical systems. Also, I prefer to research algorithms, techniques and tools that other engineers can use to deliver products. I try to write code that other engineers will use.
My choices have led me to enjoy high autonomy at the price of salary, which is about adequate at best. That’s the price of the moral high ground.
It may be that what’s bothering you is the lack of impact. It seems that most of your research doesn’t lead to products, and the market share of the products also sounds fairly niche.
Perhaps doing the same role at a large corporation with a large client base will scratch the itch. Govt. is also another choice. Policy impact can be massive. Your research will be more focused on tech that actually has a chance of being useful to the business and some of the code you write will end up in a production system. Now, this will likely still make you less money, sometimes far less, than the folks in operations, basically those in the line of fire responsible for ensuring continuous operation. You could go work for them instead if money is more important.
That’s the fundamental tradeoff: autonomy or money. It’s entirely up to you to decide which is worth more to you.
I won’t jump into opening your own business because that requires a completely different skillset, and frankly it’s very difficult to succeed if you’re not inherently a people person. It would only really work if you have a unique skill catering to a dedicated, pre-made market. Every other type of business seems to require a lot of people-handling, and overall is the least autonomous of the three. The client is always your boss. Ergo if you have many clients, you have many bosses. Of course, giving people exactly what they want can make you a billionaire, so there’s that tradeoff again.
First thing to realize is that you are already very successful in monetary terms. You're in a top percentile of earnings and have options open to you many people would dream of. You've got lucky!
Once you have accepted that, you need to work out what is driving you on because it is likely ego rather interest or passion or desire. It's about how you can demonstrate you are a success to some figure you have chosen to arbitrate your success - be that friends/family/organisation/other.
The smart thing to do is what you want to do and is bringing you closer to fulfilling you current life goals - and these will change.
Luck can turn bad very quick and go well - one career move ended up increasing my income massively - but my latest one due to bad timing with covid has left me unemployed and looking for work!
Well phrased. I agree 100%. I've spend considerable time in the past trying to get into FAANG companies before realizing I was chasing status and money more than I was chasing something I actually wanted to do.
A mental "metaphor" I use to avoid falling into that trap again is thinking about how most people don't really want to be rock stars. They just want to be famous and rich. Most people would hate practicing instruments for hours a day, touring in a bus all summer performing shows every night, dealing with record labels, etc.
B. Work at a FAANG. You'll get serious dollars. Use that to build long runway. Run company later or just FIRE yourself to peace.
Don't waste time on rinky dink stuff right now.
Yes: Do risky things that offer a high reward.
No: Do stable thing that offer good constant pay with sensible career path.
Is more money important to you? It's OK if it is. From your #1, it doesn't seem like it is that important.
Everyone has a different meaning for success and everyone has a different path to it. What makes you happy? What do you wake up excited to do?
You only get one life - if you're not spending it doing what you enjoy or are passionate about, you're wasting it. Decide what you want to do or accomplish with your limited time in this mortal coil, and then make a plan which allows you to meet those goals.
This decision is personal and exists entirely outside of the economy and your role in it. Your career only comes into play when you need to make money to meet your goals, then you have to figure out the balance between working and living and make sure that the work supports the living. The perfect career is one which directly supports your life goals by virtue of being paid to get the most out of life, by making a career out of something you're passionate about. Don't fall for the propeganda that would have you be satisfied with a corporate wage slave life simply because it "feels right". Become a corporate wage slave because it enables you to meet your goals, not because it is a goal in and of itself - but if you can manage it, try to skip or minimize the wage slave step and accomplish your goals directly.
In short, think about your life before you think about your career, and use your conclusions to frame your thinking around your career.