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Ask HN: Advice for a person in their late-20s switching careers into tech

2 points by MLH6ft1 ↗ HN
Hi all, its 2023 and AI is going to take over a lot of jobs. So what advice would you give, to someone who is in their late 20s, for switching from a non-tech related career to tech?

Alternatively if you are a person in this field and would have to do things again from start then what/how would you do things differently given that its 2023?

3 comments

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MilnerRoute
If you're worried about AI, you could read up on AI and try to get involved in the field yourself. Or research big data in general -- that's the new tech field that seems to be taking over the world. (There's online resources where you can play around with big data, just to get a feel for it.)

I personally think there will be legacy code to maintain and smaller businesses that need good old-fashioned programming.

Don't take Hacker News comments as your sole window on the world -- this tends to be a subset of the tech sector with its own bias towards the more trendy new tech. Some more general advice: go to Meetups. You learn a lot about new tech, but it's also a good way to network. And don't be afraid to change jobs -- that's how you increase your salary. (Along the same lines, it's helpful to "always be looking.")

MLH6ft1
Thanks for the advice! What language would you recommend for someone like me who is completely new to CS?
MilnerRoute
A lot of people start with Python. It's easy to start with, and also one of the more popular languages. (It's also used widely in Big Data, which is one of the new fields that's well paid and in demand.)

The advice I got when starting out was to learn one language really well -- all the features and major libraries -- and then dabble in some other languages. Harvard's free online course CS50 was a great way to get exposed to a lot of languages and concepts quickly.

A real career-booster: get a junior entry-level position doing actual programming. Besides beefing up your resume, it gives you truly useful real-world experience. To that end, create a GitHub account early on, and then upload code that you're proud of there so potential employers can eventually see it. If you can't get paid work, volunteer -- find an open source project, review its code, find one where you can dive in. (If you don't feel comfortable writing code, you can write documentation.)