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Ask HN: For those devs that have left the field, what are you doing now?

2 points by snow_mac ↗ HN
Ask HN: For those devs/programmers that have left the field, what are you doing now?

I'm a principal web developer and am thinking about a pivot long term into something more interesting and helpful to the world, something like quantum engineer, quantum computing, AI research or something with a hard science like chemistry.

What are you doing?

7 comments

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ss108
I became a lawyer. Huge mistake, ruined my life, trying to become a dev again.
machineinfinity
I went back to school for structural engineering. Also a big mistake. Would like to be a dev again but there's a lot of make-up studying to do. I have been working on small hobby projects now and then so all of the skill acquired in my past life have not been lost.
snow_mac
Why was it a mistake?
ss108
I dislike it greatly and accumulated 200k+ in extra student debt.

I am trying to switch back to software engineering now.

anyfoo
Before you leave the field entirely, consider that it's bigger than just web development.

A bit over 10 years ago, I took a pivot into web development, since there were a lot of offers in that area. After about 2 years or so, and one too many CRUD web app on top of another ridiculous stack, I went into low level systems programming (something I was interested in and had done in private, but not as an actual job yet). And I don't regret it one bit.

spindle
I had a job in IT at the University of Cambridge. I moved to Sydney for personal reasons and worked in a government policy job for a few months, and then applied for an IT job at the University of Sydney that was similar to the one I'd had at Cambridge. I wasn't even shortlisted. At around the same time, I was offered me a job as what Americas call an adjunct professor in philosophy, despite having no relevant qualifications. I took that, and it was fun, so I became a philosopher. If there's a moral to this story (and there is!) it's that careers are unpredictable.