Ask HN: Who else is considering switching career from IT? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Who else is considering switching career from IT?

8 pointsgyarados7 comments

With the layoff storm that keeps going, the raise of AIs product, the less money in the field due to high interest rates, and the general sense of negativity that is coming from the computer science field also due to large companies taking all and internet lost of the magic and the freedom of some years ago; are you considering a career switch?

I'm thinking that my role in the next 15 years it will not be granted as today, but I may be only to negative about it. I'm thinking to start looking into plumbing or carpentry.

P.S. I'm 28yo

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You're young, go get a taste of different fields, if only for a couple of weeks or months.

I'm a data engineer/ infra person, self-employed for 6 years.

Ups and downs are natural and my perspective on the current market environment is just that everyone is confused as hell about where the future peak efficiency use of human computer science knowledge will be.

LLMs are nascent, their potential is clearly showing, but nobody really knows what is going to stick.

Everyone - company or programmer - is trying to hedge their bets on the future.

Whatever comes, there will be things humans will need to do.

Your best bet is to stay interested, stay curious and stay flexible.

I tried carpentry two years back, out of the same desire to escape the inesacapable mundaneness of a medium stage programming career.

What I can tell you is that it made me appreciate programming again with a strong verve.

Your margin of error in carpentry is slim to none.

Mess something up, you might need to throw away a ton of material and start from scratch.

Feedback loops are sloooow. Try something for the first time and realize you're missing this super specific tool to get it to work?

Well, shell out some dollars, wait two days for delivery, start again.

While desk work without exercise is unhealthy, it's no comparison to carpentry or other handiwork.

If you're being dizzy and unatentive while planing a piece of wood wor working with a machine saw or using a high powered milling machine, you might injur yourself for life.

Add to that breathing wood dust or getting it into your eyes etc.

My take is that it is currently harder to be optimistic about the future, but if the world is an oyster, it's still a much bigger oyster in the hands of someone who can program than literally any other trade out there.

Thanks for sharing your experience, it made me questioning if switching career it's really what I want.

I was a full time JavaScript developer with 15 years invested in the career. It’s all I knew professionally and was really confident at it in both the browser and Node.

For years I had wanted to step away and do something else. I had grown largely incompatible with the hiring market as I was interested in performance and writing original applications. Most of the hiring market was only interested in putting text on screen with large frameworks for CRUD applications.

Last year I was laid off. For the first time I no longer had maximum career mobility based upon talent and experience. I really had to compete against junior developers for interviews and was no longer interested in doing beginner work.

After several months of unemployment I stopped trying. I made a promise to myself to never go back to any kind of JavaScript work except for personal projects. I stopped my open source contributions, stopped responding to recruiters, and abandoned that career. Fortunately a recruiter for a data science job found me. I easily passed the interview and spent the first couple months at self education until I passed the required certification test. Now I am a data science guy instead of a programmer. All of my peers are former developers.

I was trying/planning to get out right before the market nosedived. I was planning on my previous job being the last job I ever worked in software, at least for the time being.

Of course when I lost my job that all went out the window. Now it just seems infeasible to leave. I’d be fine paycut, hell I already had to take one, but the cost both in time and money to retrain to something else (that I think I wouldn’t enjoy at least) are too high.

I didn’t really want to go into software in the first place, but I was in a position in early adulthood where it looked best option available to me. In retrospect I wish I had done something else, and possibly later moved to into software development, because it seems a hell of a lot easier going that direction.

Absolutely not. I still love the art of programming. The clack of a mechanical keyboard, the satisfaction of using vim keybindings, the emotional feeling of discovering an elegant solution - it’s still all so addicting. I still relive the first moment I got an LED to light up on a breadboard because of some C++ code I wrote.

I got started programming (for real) much later than most software engineers, although I always loved computers. I wrote my first LED program for Arduino when I was 23.

At the time, I had no idea how deep the field of computer science was, nor how intertwined it is with disparate fields like philosophy, psychology, and linguistics.

I strongly resist the demands placed by Agile-shops that we all behave like interchangeable cogs in a gearbox.

Consider IT-adjacent work where your skills will support your tasks. It's a radically different experience from closing Jira tickets all day.

Working as a software developer killed my love for programming, but after moving to something else, it became fun again. Applying my tech skills to supporting immigrants is fun, because it directly supports my goals. It's a lot more fun than supporting abstract business goals.

I also think that small scale software dev is more fun because there's a lot less scaffolding around it. This is why it's so fun to throw things together for a small number of users.

I'm also thinking of looking into plumbing and carpentry specifically.

AI looks to be entirely hype, but the enormous amount of electricity and person-power that tech industries pour into making the world worse is soul-destroying. Carpenters and plumbers are almost by definition providing a useful service. They make something.

Also, less time staring at a screen is a huge improvement.

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