Hacker News Reader

Comment by claudiulodro | Hacker News Reader

It seems like companies are really tightening the screws further this year. When I got into this industry I figured the good times would roll for about 10 years, and then it would be about time for another career change. "Make hay while the sun is shining", as they say. I'm right around that 10th year, and I think that prediction was accurate.

View on HN

Do you think there is a career out there better than (I assume) software development?

My view is that we are still in pretty good times. Maybe not great, but everyone who kept their jobs is still earning a big salary.

And everything else other than software development is worse (specifically if you bundle things like ML into “software development“).

I am curious. What career would you change to?

Self-employed tradesman pays as much on a per-hour basis as contract dev work and doesn't have to compete with a million people in developing countries willing to work for $20/hr. The project management parts from software development aren't too different either -- it's all tasks, coordinating stakeholders, etc.

That's my angle, but there are plenty of other fields too: healthcare (nurses make as much as most SWEs and can live anywhere in the country), government, certain employee tradesmen (electrician, etc.), basically anything that requires some sort of license or training. Life is long, spending a couple years to get 10+ years of good returns is a wise investment.

I've never been to the Bay Area, so what I'm about to say may not apply, but look in any middle-class neighborhood: maybe 5% of the people are in tech -- what is everyone else doing? The above is a sampling of careers that have provided people in my neighborhood a comfortable American Dream style of life.

I want to call this out because I see this advice a lot (and it's also my backup plan).

Trade work can be a fantastic way to earn a living, but it is HARD work. It will break your body if you do it for your whole life. There is a reason plenty of people jumped to office work the first chance they got.

Don't go into the trades blind, take care of your body, or you'll be like my grandpa and need help uncurling your fingers if you fall asleep making a fist.

You want a specialized trade. HV Electrician at a utility or something like that.

An off the shelf commercial or residential trade sounds like a nightmare, especially in an area with bad weather part of the year.

That said, if you can deal with employees of that type as a business owner, you can clean up.

> but look in any middle-class neighborhood: maybe 5% of the people are in tech -- what is everyone else doing?

This comment is why I love HN. Once you sort through all the kiddos who don't know anything about anything, you get golden nuggets like this.

In my middle (almost upper-middle) class neighborhood we have a bunch of doctors and psychologists, a bunch of lawyers, a few retired professionals, a couple professors and.... me in tech.

Are the doctors and lawyers your age or older?

Some older, some younger, some the same age.

>I've never been to the Bay Area, so what I'm about to say may not apply,

This is honestly where it is hitting. When I moved to the bay area ~10years ago I asked myself 'why are they paying me usd500k to move here when I could just work from my home country for a fraction of that'.

Meanwhile in my home country there's a tech boom. In fact my current big faang company is hiring there and closing jobs here.

Can't say I'm surprised except that it took this long for the realization that you don't need to have your staff move to the bay area and thus you don't need to pay bay area wages.

That’s the reality in the US I think, then. Still, I am not convinced those jobs can make you earn reliably more than a software developer. Maybe equally well, but more? And that’s already discounting jobs at FAANG and Brex, that much more than the rest.

I live in the Brazil, currently earning ~USD50/hour (at a US company) as a web developer. Not as a contract dev though, I prefer to be employed by a company.

Here, neither nurse nor tradesman are well paid jobs, quite the contrary.

Rich neighborhoods here have: doctors, lawyers, medium company owners, big company executives.

None of them is possible to get to that level of paying within 10 years (medicine is 8 years at least only to have a specialization). An exception might be entrepreneurs, but there is a lot of luck involved.

This chain and this comment is one of the best things I've read on here in years. It reminded me that a lot of community colleges have workforce programs that I need to look into: https://www.nvcc.edu/academics/programs/index.html

Attorney. Build a system, work from anywhere, make your own schedule. Hard to outsource.

Really? I would have assumed that attorney is one of those jobs that is going to be hugely disrupted by AI. Should people new to the field bother if they aren't going to be top X% (5? 10?)?

There's way more to legal work than filling out forms. The AI is going to replace legal assistants, not the attorneys themselves.

Actual legal work, as opposed to legal-adjacent tasks, will be the last to be disrupted by AI, at least so long as AI means LLM. Law is simply too complicated to rely on something that doesn't have the ability to understand.

Doc review staff will be effectively eliminated...but they're already being eliminated by non-AI technology, so AI will just be the last straw.

It’s not even the complicated part, these are fields where people still use fax machines and wouldn’t use teleconferencing until they were dragged kicking and screaming through COVID (And even then, lots of courts were like, nah, we’ll just close court for a year, too bad for you)

Free market dynamics don’t apply. Healthcare is the same way because it’s controlled by an old guard backed up by the force of law. There is no way to disrupt because the system is rigged.

I watched a tech demo of an LLM writing code to make a neat little user interface. I would have thought that utterly impossible a couple years ago.

I don’t think this would be a good time to start a career drafting contracts.

For people without the resources, yes. For people that have a problem and resources, no. They pay for the best and want to be sure it‘s watertight.

Just get into and through Harvard Law, easy peasy...

The best programmers make good money too.

Quality is determined by a combination of network, reputation, and results, not your Alma mater. Search for a securities or criminal defense attorney, ask around, see if where they got their diploma plays into the referrals you get.

Here I am the one to bring up AI, ugh. I get a sense that, of all things, LLM's actually encroach on legal professions the most (aside from copywriters). But this is from an outside perspective. Any insights?

If blockchain didn’t replace the law, neither is a hallucinating robot in the near term. Has to pass legal muster, not techbro bar. I say this as someone deeply involved in GRC in finance where a component of my work is working on improving LLM guardrails for knowledge management.

What does build a system mean?

Focus on a niche, create a funnel, be very good at that niche, scale horizontally.

EDIT: Picked attorney because you have to be licensed to practice law, creating a barrier to the equivalent of code bootcamps. My apologies if the model around the idea wasn't clear, I will do better!

Why is this seemingly general rule so specific to law (being an attorney)?

The license is the key, as a barrier to entry. Medicine is very high and takes a lot of time but pretty impenetrable. Law is cheaper for the time and money. What else would have this property?

Curious to the answers here, leaving a breadcrumb for later.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com