
Ask HN: Thinking about my career - udkl
This weekend I had a sudden urge to draft a plan outlining an approach towards my future career.<p>I&#x27;m in my late 20&#x27;s and have been a full-stack developer for the most part. I have a masters in computer science. I would have gone on to do a PHD but did not realize my (apparent) affection for research until later.<p>Looking back, I&#x27;ve drifted through jobs that have not been fulfilling enough or complex enough. I spent my time writing SPA web apps (nodejs,ReactJS, good experience and learnings) or writing enterprise software in Java (meh)<p>Looking ahead, I want to take a more determined approach towards what I choose to work on.<p>The criteria I&#x27;ve decided on is : Technology that is mature and will be around for a long time with high probability, solves complex-interesting problems, which currently has and will have good jobs with good pay and a side effect of which will be a gain of transferrable skills.<p>An example project that meets the criteria : Kafka
- Kafka is mature-ish, solves complex &amp; interesting problems (distributed systems), open source (can immediately start working on it), has jobs, decent pay and has transferrable skills relating to Java, distributed systems and data systems.<p>My plan is to dig deep into the technology, understand the domain, start contributing to the codebase and take up a related job.<p>----------------------<p>Any comments on the criteria as well as suggestions for projects would be appreciated.
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troymc
That seems like a reasonable plan to me.

The big question is, would that be "fulfilling enough or complex enough" for
you?

Maybe the answer is yes. I suppose you won't know until you've been doing it
for a while. Even if it doesn't satisfy you, Kafka is still a useful tool for
your toolbelt, so the whole adventure won't be a waste of time.

