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Ask HN: Is it time for a career change?

11 points by eecsninja ↗ HN
I've been a software engineer for over six years. In that time, I've been at three large tech companies. I've been at my current company for three years. However, during my career I haven't actually been promoted, nor have I gotten a substantial raise. This is not because of my inability to play politics, but due to my inability to work at a higher level.

Having observed myself at work for six years, I noticed that I enjoy the problem solving and implementation aspects of being a SWE: debugging, writing new code, etc. However, I haven't been very interested in the higher level stuff at work: design reviews, architectural decisions, etc.

I also don't have any particular direction I'd like to move into. For the past few years, I've been working on Linux kernel, but only because it was for my job. I am not interested in Linux kernel work for its own sake.

At work, if I say I'm bored with the work, people would just suggest that I find a different project. The projects may be technologically interesting/important... But it seems like none of the work really creates anything of value. Everything seems like an incremental tweak, but there wasn't much wrong with the existing products.

However, I've been working on a personal hardware project for the past few months. I've been performing at a level far higher than what I've been capable of at work. I've been surprised by my own level of accomplishment on this project and it shows that I'm neither lazy nor incompetent. Yet I can't seem to consistently muster that work drive for projects at work.

I don't think the issue here is software vs hardware, or finding the right project. I suspect it's either a matter of working on my own thing vs working for others, or working on things that people pay for. Maybe both. I'm thinking I will become either an entrepreneur (sell my project) or a freelancer.

5 comments

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slajax
6 years at a specific career is the new midlife crisis. A career change sounds drastic. I'd give some deep thought to what you actually enjoy about your profession and go after it. I went through the same thing a few years back and decided I absolutely cannot do onsite permanent full time jobs anymore. I absolutely die. I thought about a career change but ended up just quitting my FT gig, starting a couple small businesses and making a go of it on my own. I've never felt more fulfilled. I love programming more then I ever have and I don't see this burning out anytime soon, however if it does. I can always go back.
rvijapurapu
Not that long ago, I found myself in a similar situation as you are. Though I was running my consulting company - I hit the bottom and needed to change, change I did.

Few things I do differently now and has helped me a lot: 1. I focussed on side projects as a way to blow-off steam - this helped me a lot. (Looks like you are already doing it) 2. Spice up your work environment - good audiobooks always help me stay sane on those long coding days. I usually choose some good light-hearted reading rather than the intense novels. 3. I allocated days to work on my side projects during the work-week. ThIs meant I had to get creative around how I schedule my work-work. Eg: Sometimes I had to work long hours (10+) to finish up with my work schedule. 4. Switch off day - usually on Sunday I tend not to do anything work related.

cik
I had a similar problem - though it was after a decade of work. At the end of the day, I'd come to hate technology, writing software, engineering management (especially), and pretty much the entire industry. And, in the interest of full disclosure - I had some pretty good management.

But I was burning out. I changed careers (within tech) and became a Scrum Master, only to find that I started to miss coding and problem solving, since those skills were rarely in use.

Then, I moved into consulting. I've never looked back. I try to balance multiple clients at the same time, because love having the different challenges these clients require. All of a sudden I'm focusing on a core competency (DevOps in my case), but I get to see the world from Python, C#, Java, and even Physical Hardware scenarios. But that generalist approach doesn't work for everyone.

Try different things. See if you can take a couple of hours a week to poke around with new technologies, or industries. Trying to take the bull by its horns is the key.

eecsninja
Thanks for the responses. It's good to hear that others have been in the same place as me. Sometimes it feels like I'm the only one when everyone else at work seems to be doing just fine in their jobs.

I should add that my educational background is actually in electrical engineering, not CS or software engineering. So it wouldn't be a super drastic change of career fields.

I've also wanted to become more independent of full time employment for a while. Ever since I graduated college actually. But it took me a long time to actually figure out how. I wonder if suppressing that desire has resulted in me ending up as a lousy employee.