
Ask HN: Career change at 22 - nativelukas
Hello,
I am currently 22 years old, studying Computer Science. I&#x27;ve been focusing on web development for almost ten years. I&#x27;ve built up a freelance business with active clients and also tried to work as a Front-end developer for a year in small digital agency.<p>After years I am not satisfied with web development and it doesn&#x27;t make me happy. I can see really young, inexperienced people going into this business, things are changing really fast and there&#x27;s no methodology, no &quot;scientific&quot; way to do it. I can say that web development is somehow punk business with many &quot;script kids&quot; involved.<p>The second thing I don&#x27;t like about the job is lack of social contact. You spend big amount of time in front of a computer and when you want to be the best you have to spend even your free time alone. When you look at those best developers, they look kind of awkward, they don&#x27;t have communication skills and I feel like this is not the way I want to go.<p>Also the third thing that bothers me is the fact that developers are becoming new blue-collar workes (see https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.wired.com&#x2F;2017&#x2F;02&#x2F;programming-is-the-new-blue-collar-job&#x2F;) since it&#x27;s kind of easy to learn how to code. You also don&#x27;t need any certification or license. I see that many IT students do have this blue-collar mentality. They dress badly, they swear alot, simply they look like people from lower social classes. This is what bothers me. When I was younger I really appriciated this &quot;punk&quot; side of the IT. Now I hate it.<p>What I am thinkin about is career change to medicine. I am interested in human body and would enjoy studying it. Also medicine as a field seems to be more mature and traditional.<p>Do some of you see it similarly or do you have different opinion? What do you think about it?
======
Bahamut
Just some food for thought - having come from the world of math & physics, I
understand what is at its core an elitest attitude on the purity of a
discipline. However, I don’t think most of those who have that attitude
understand how much of a luxury it is to be able to have that.

After leaving grad school for math after 4 years, I spent a hard 2 1/2 years
looking for work in anything. Money was hard to come by, I lived primarily off
of my Marine reserve pay - I had enlisted in the Marine Corps in hopes it
would help me with direction, financial future, and improve my chances of
attaining any career track job. While I can still appreciate purity to an
extent, it stops there when you don’t have enough money but to eat only
oatmeal for a week.

An aside, judging people for dress/class/language/etc. is pretty shitty - if
you care about ideas, then surely these things are irrelevant, and there is
some irony/contradictory attitutde being displayed by your words?

Lastly, a lot of some of the stated assertions are just flat out not
true/shows immaturity/insecurity/depth on your side. I would spend some time
reflecting on what matters to you as a person, aside from career. There is a
lot of implicit inhumane comments made in the exposition defending your
conclusion, and if you want to be a successful person, at the very least you
should understand your desires/worldview and how your conclusions derive from
them, correcting if there is any incongruity.

Maybe a career switch is indeed ultimately what you want - however, you should
try understanding yourself before throwing away your years of study.

------
d--b
This post is so weird to me I can't even tell if it's serious or not

First you say you're 22 yo and have been working for 10 years? You started
working at 12? Weren't you supposed to go to school?

Second, take it easy on blue collar culture. Web development, however crap you
think it is, is nothing like working on an assembly line, both in terms of pay
and in terms of fun. Plus you seem to equate blue collar culture and bad
manners. This is not great. You will find people with good manners and people
with bad manners at all level of society.

Third, if you want to study medicine go for it... you're only 22. Just know
that the studies are long, the pay is probably not as good as it used to be,
and that a lot of doctors may be replaced by machines in the next 50 years...

~~~
jamy015
> First you say you're 22 yo and have been working for 10 years? You started
> working at 12? Weren't you supposed to go to school?

They say that they've been focusing on web development for 10 years, not
working. It's not so weird for someone to learn HTML at a young age, start
making a website for someone, and eventually get paid gigs and grow their
business.

~~~
busterarm
How I started.

I was getting paid to make websites at 12...there's a huge chasm of difference
between that and the web development I do now though.

------
pixelmonkey
I have been in software longer than you (I am 33) and my wife is a doctor. If
you think being a programmer feels like "blue collar work", wait till you see
what being a medical resident is like. Try getting paid $50k/yr, working
80-100 hours a week, and savoring the rare moment you get to take a coffee
break or eat a lunch that doesn't come out of a vending machine.

Serious "grass is greener" thinking going on in your post.

~~~
anigbrowl
OP's complaining about the lack of skill and scientific rigor rather than the
working conditions, I think.

~~~
busterarm
Shipping On Time > Scientific Rigor

Like everything, you have to strike a balance. If OP wants to be a slave to
methodology, they should stay in academia. Engineering is literally about
managing these trade-offs.

I hope they have a stomach for the politics of it.

------
busterarm
I'm a little over decade older than you but I've been around this business a
long time.

Web development has always had young, inexperienced people going into the
business. Things have always been changing really little care for methodology.

Things are getting better, not worse. The amount of elitism this post drips
with is semi-infuriating.

I come from nothing. A poor kid with a good brain who was lucky enough to
school with the financial elite because of that brain. Shitty, single-parent;
handmedown clothes and shit Christmases. I had to fight my ass off and
struggle to even get this career. I couldn't afford to stay in college and I
didn't have the right attitude to keep my grades up for scholarships. I worked
a decade-plus of shitty, low-paying jobs. I've been working fulltime almost
nonstop since I was 14. I had to pay for my own senior year of a high school I
didn't want to be at. While I've almost always had a career in tech, I started
my development career at 30.

I have a very blue-collar mentality. I dress badly. I swear a lot. I am from
the lower social classes and I'm proud of where I come from and what I've
done. My work differentiates me from my peers. I make great architectural
decisions and I get things done. I'm your peer because of what I can do, not
because of my class.

What have you done to get where you are today?

~~~
ellius
Take some solace in the fact that if he doesn’t grow up a bit, he’s only going
to hurt himself. The blue collar folks of the world will just grab a beer and
talk about what an asshole he is, and he’ll never realize the opportunities
he’s missed or the friends he could have had.

~~~
busterarm
Regretfully, I've interviewed with a lot of young folks with attitudes similar
to this. It's bad for the industry.

------
walshemj
Dont take this the wrong way you need to get over yourself mate quoting stuff
like "people from lower social classes" tells me all I need to know about you.

And BTW my first job was at a word leading RnD organization and the uniform
there was jeans wellies and a lab coat.

Yeh its easy to lean to code I learnt machine code at 14 the hard part is
producing a usable end result.

------
jasode
_> What I am thinkin about is career change to medicine._

If your true passion is health care, all the prelude about programmers
becoming blue-collar or how they look awkward is irrelevant and just muddles
the decision process.

If you want to use forums for feedback on your question, go to the pre-med and
medical school forums. Also ask working doctors if they're happy with their
career decision. Is their motivation and disposition similar to yours? Is
filling out endless insurance paperwork for reimbursements overwhelming their
desire to practice medicine? Is private practice or hospital staff better?
Etc. etc.

------
dktp
How is dressing well, using sophisticated language and acting like higher
class at all relevant to the job? Your description (of everything you hate)
pretty much describes me (24 year old web developer). There's several reasons
to why I'm like that, but mostly it's that I deeply hate pretentiousness. It
doesn't take clothes, sophisticated language and acting like higher class
citizen to be good at your job.

That being said, I might not be the best person to suggest you one way or
another. But if you hate the business, do something about it. If that's
changing your career path, go for it. If you hate these 3 things specifically
I'd assume medicine might be exactly what you're looking for.

Now back to development. Web development is by far the easiest to get into
(think wordpress, frameworks like RoR, Laravel, Django) and chances are that
just changing from web development to some other more challenging field
withing development might work out for you. If you enjoy the problem solving
development offers that is.

For me personally, that's exactly what I love about the IT business. It's
extremely easy to show what you know/what you're good at (unlike for example
most social studies). And the rest doesn't really matter.

------
geofft
Your description of your career sounds very different from my career in
software development - I don't touch the web, things are methodical, I spend
most of my time communicating instead of coding, etc. Why don't you explore
other specialties of your current career first?

------
lisper
What makes you think medicine is not becoming blue-collarized the same way web
development is?

What I would recommend is that you try to grow your business to the point
where you have more work than you can do yourself, then start hiring people.
When people work for you, you can impose standards on them with respect to how
they do their work and how they conduct themselves. If social contact and
elevated behavior are what you really care about (and there's absolutely
nothing wrong with that -- I care about those things myself) then the best way
to advance that agenda is to be the boss, and the best way to get there is to
leverage the skills you already have rather than start over in a totally new
field.

------
jdiez17
I agree with your description of web development work, I would personally find
it very difficult to do that professionally because of the lack of rigor and
blasé attitude to software quality.

However, web development is not the only way you can make money by programming
computers. I encourage you to look into either scientific programming or
embedded software development. Your peers would be much more competent in
their respective areas than you would typically expect working in a webdev
consultancy, and generally you will find a better work-life balance in these
type of companies. They also don't expect you to have a GitHub profile full of
weekend hacks, they are just looking for someone who knows their stuff and can
work within a multidisciplinary team.

If you are in the UK feel free to send me an email (see my profile) and I can
give you some tips for where to start looking for professional work in these
areas.

Good luck!

~~~
emsal
I'm a current CS student who's had a couple of backend internships and am
interested in doing stuff with scientific computing in the future (likely
wanting to go into grad school for this).

In general, where can I find resources about the kinds of career starting
points I can get into as someone with this kind of interest? It seems like the
most popular kind of job with a bit more theoretical rigour than web dev is
being a data scientist/machine learning engineer at a similar webdev sort of
company.

~~~
jdiez17
Here's a list of broad fields within scientific computing that you can dig
into:

* Numerical simulation: writing code to solve physical models (fluid dynamics, material stress, etc), optimizing them for a given goal

* High-performance computing: running those simulations or other compute-intensive task in a supercomputer (aka a bunch of computers networked together), using APIs like OpenMP

* Machine learning: training and using mathematical models to predict things about the world. Seems to be all the rage right now...

* Data visualization: how do we make sense of all of this data!?

To answer your question more directly, if you have a broad familiarity with
some of the topics I listed above (and a natural curiosity and ability to
learn, most importantly), you should be able to land a junior job and go from
there. Think about the types of companies that use these things. E.g.:
biomedical companies need lots of machine learning people, jet engine
manufacturers use lots of numerical simulations.

~~~
emsal
Thanks so much! This cleared up a lot of things for me.

------
asdojasdosadsa
Wow, you seem almost a clone of me. Major reason why I can't change is, that I
didn't study well enough in high school to make it in med school, which
bothers me, and I'm a little older. You're 22, I'd say go for it. What can you
lose? You've already opened a road, and it will stay open even if you choose
to change your mind back

------
aliston
I would suggest trying to course correct within software rather than giving up
entirely.

How many blue collar workers have the job flexibility that you have? How many
blue collar workers are making 200, 300, 400k a year? How many blue collar
workers have built products that are literally used by millions of people
every second?

Take some time off to reevaluate and get some perspective. Our industry has
plenty of flaws, but I don’t think the typical complaints of blue collar
workers are one of them. The sky is the limit in our industry.

------
djohnston
You are comparing web development to medicine which doesn't make much sense. A
more apt comparison would be web development to nursing, as the barrier to
entry is relatively low compared to other sub fields in the encapsulating
industry (say, AI researcher and doctor).

------
suhail
(1) Have you considered looking at it through the lens of "Engineering" vs
"Web development?" I think there's much more of a methodology involved if you
do since the primary difference becomes how would you solve challenging
problems through the use of computers, programming, and math than how do I
master some domain specific technology in order to write JavaScript and CSS to
make a dynamic website.

(2) It's an over-generalization to believe that the best developers are
awkward and socially inept. Do you have enough data points? The best
developers are actually great collaborators who care more about the problem
they're solving and the value it provides to users. Often that makes them
stronger communicators and peers because they're working a team of other
skilled people (designers, product managers, customer facing teams) to find
the best, most impactful solution. I'd rather hire a 10-20% less skilled
developer who has great communication & collaboration skills. Have you
considered working at an organization where you could work with a larger team
in place?

(3) It's becoming easier to learn to write code than ever before but that
doesn't mean that the value of those skills is reaching asymptotic levels. In
fact, I believe the bar is increasing: machine learning/AI, scaling large
distributed systems, re-thinking how we'd build software as hardware improves
and becomes cheaper, etc. Finding great engineering talent is still extremely
scarce. I won't really comment on how you feel about one's appearance (I don't
know why that matters) and communication style (pick a culture you like).

------
cstross
I went in exactly the opposite direction back in 1989, aged 24: had initially
studied for a degree in, then qualified as, a pharmacist, and practiced for a
couple of years. Found it really wasn't for me, so went back to university and
did an accelerated conversion degree in CS.

Thirty years later (and another career shift!) all I can say is, if you're
unhappy in a profession at 22, you will _not_ be happier if you waste even
more years chasing down a blind alley. Worse, the older you get the more your
options narrow — path dependency is a thing for people as well as for
technologies. If you're in a job where you can't imagine being in it five
years hence, or ten years hence, let alone thirty years from now, you should
get out while you're still young enough, and write off the first career as a
learning experience. It's not all bad: whatever you do next, you'll have a
broader context than your peers who went into the medical sciences straight
out of school.

~~~
majewsky
> if you're unhappy in a profession at 22, you will not be happier if you
> waste even more years chasing down a blind alley

Can't agree more. I changed from theoretical physics to CS upon realizing that
a) it's not my true calling and b) I'm not cut out for the highly competitive
research community ("publish or perish " etc.), coincidentally also at age 22.

Found a well-paying developer position within a few weeks, and my employer
allowed me to work part-time and do a CS bachelor in parallel. I just finished
that, and I'm very happy with my choice.

What I'd recommend is that you seek some in-person counselling (unis usually
offer career advice counseling to their students) and talk it through
thoroughly.

------
ldabiralai
> They dress badly, they swear alot, simply they look like people from lower
> social classes

That's a rather sweeping generalisation

~~~
kenoph
Yep, and also literally classist. The fact that those things don't actually
matter is a good thing imho. When programming, a guy from a country you don't
even know can be as good as your "rockstar programmer".

------
wellboy
You seem to not be sayisfied with your work, because it is not challenging.
However, web programming is the most simple/dull use of coding skills/computer
science.

There are so many ways to go deep, which you will see towards the end of your
degree: After completing your degree, you can work in

\- Machine learning

\- A.I.

\- Big data

\- Mathematics

\- Start your own company. This is even more challening than the above,
because besides coding the product. you need to be excellent with people, what
people want, what they say and what they mean, excite people for your product,
figure out how to get 100,000 users with $0 funding.

\- Autonomous driving

\- Work at Google and Facebook to solve all other very challenging computer
science problems.

------
Thriptic
Medicine is definitely more of an established field than web development,
that's true. I would say that if you are going to go into medicine you should
know what you are getting into.

The schooling process is incredibly long and expensive if you want to become
an MD and specialize beyond being a general practitioner, the hours absolutely
suck until you become an attending, and the social capital of physicians is
eroding as they are increasingly viewed more as code monkey service providers
than intelligent domain experts.

Also the change to pay for performance vs pay for service and the introduction
of more PAs and NPs with prescribing power is going to change practice as well
to the detriment of MDs. I would say if you are very interested in helping
patients then a career change into medicine is worth exploring; otherwise it's
not worth it.

If you are more interested in biology vs patient care then perhaps you could
consider translational research. There is HUGE demand for programmers in many
biomedical engineering labs, research institutes, pharma and biotech,
insurance, hospitals etc. I would kill to have an experienced dev to work with
in my lab for example as most of the code I get stuck dealing with is utterly
dog shit. If what you are seeking is social status, professionalism, and an
opportunity to explore biology while making a difference then this might be a
good route for you given your existing skill set.

------
engi_nerd
There's "coding" which is usually used to imply creating business
applications. This you say is blue collar. I wouldn't know because that's not
a world I have much experience with. But the world needs good "coders". And
good blue collar workers.

Many of the problems you discuss are common to much of human experience. Every
generation laments lack of virtue in the young, though most of those doing the
lamenting are usually considerably older than you. You say you are 22. Here's
a thought: has it occurred to you that to people more experienced than you,
you are the "young, inexperienced" kind of person you're lamenting? Maybe
you're a genius and wise beyond your years (but I do not think this is the
case, as Bahamut said...this is a good growth opportunity for you) but you
still have much to learn, and you always will for the rest of your life. So
stay humble.

As an aside, there is a whole world of programming involving the need to
understand mathematics, physics, and engineering at deep levels. If you're
looking for a deeper intellectual challenge, look for areas where computer
programs must interface or simulate complex systems of systems. You may find
ways to scratch your need for maturity and rigor by programming, say, a model
of a real hardware component of an aircraft.

------
whathaschanged
You sound like an elitist asshole. Blue collar workers are people just like
everybody else.

------
ihnorton
> They dress badly, they swear alot, simply they look like people from lower
> social classes.

Doctors swear plenty, but they generally avoid doing so in mixed company. As
for dress, well, they effectively live in scrubs for up to a decade.

But they do indeed end up with much higher social capital than a typical
software developer (even devs making equivalent to board-certified MD
compensation) or skilled tradespeople, which is what I think you are getting
at.

------
kreetx
Hard to tell what you should too. It looks like you just want to try out
different things. And do it relatively quickly (a few years is quick for this
kind of change).

Switching into software development can be quick-ish if you have the mind for
it. Switching into many other vocations OTOH can take a long time, especially
medicine, depending on how far you want to go. So what you should ask yourself
is do you love your current profession or not -- disregarding the current
workplace.

The negative remarks you make about being on the job are all on you to change.
If the current workplace seems bad then get a new one -- there are plenty of
better ones, you just need to find one. If how people code around you looks
hackish then again find a better job. Not socializing enough? Do more of it
deliberately! Almost exclusively staring at a screen from 8-5 is a mistake
quite a few of us (including me) make. If you don't connect with those around
you then you already know what to do :)

On the other hand, if you are adventurous and you really enjoy medicine then
now would be a pretty good age to switch. It's probably not that hard to come
back if you reconsider. You could also find something interdisciplinary if you
like both, and if you're lucky. But remember, luck is achieved by hard work!
No joke.

\--

You know, rereading what you said, you might just be unhappy with your current
job. Start applying to new ones. Interviews are always fun, you get to tell
people about yourself over and over again, and might get a clearer perspective
of yourself. Also, don't just be applying, but use the conversations to ask
for advice. You'll be surprised on what you'll find. You're not alone in
wanting something better.

------
sbinthree
If you are that entitled and lacking in self awareness, you will be unhappy
either way.

------
evanmoran
I'd recommend you find a new company and product to work on. This sounds more
like burnout and less like a problem with software. I've done windows, web,
iOS, and now game programming. They are all different and it's quite fun to
broaden your understanding of computer science. It's also amazing to try to
apply yourself to new problems and new products. In short, there's always
something new to learn, and if you're having trouble believing that, then it's
time to change places!

At the same time I want to specifically react to your two points because I
think your perception isn't accurate:

1) In my opinion, there is nothing easy about programming. If people around
you think it's easy, you should find somewhere harder to work. You aren't
growing anymore!

2) And to second what others in HN have said, doctors have it really hard
right now. The school alone takes 6+ years and saddles you with high financial
debt. Then the work can be pretty rote -- much more than software.

Keep in mind even at a new job it will take 2+ months to stop feeling burnout.
I hope you find what you're looking for!

------
devuo
I think you're a bit too pretentious. Your problem is not such much the field
in itself but of how others look at you and your idea of class.

------
mottomotto
My experience is the opposite. I work on front end but I focus on
applications. There is a lot of change but it's exciting and browser-based
applications are replacing native applications more and more.

I'm getting paid very well to do this work (much more than any blue collar
worker in my area). It is challenging as there are always new things to learn
but some pieces are falling into place and work well (ie React, Redux/well
managed client-side state, etc).

I think this time is more exciting than any other for web application
development. I think comparing software development jobs to blue collar is
somewhat dishonest as it ignores the high compensation aspect -- if you tried
having this discussion with an actual blue collar worker, I 100% expect you
would learn some new things.

You sound burned out. This is what you should do:

* figure out what drew you into this work to begin with -- figure out a path to get back to that and focus on it

* stop paying attention to all the hype and buzz -- focus on what you care about, don't dwell on overly pessimistic articles (they get page clicks and there is always something new that threatens our income)

* focus on getting better at what you do

* make a long term plan to learn more about computer science topics that are useful to your long term goal -- this kind of knowledge doesn't churn as much

* write more code -- instead of reading doom and gloom, go write code

I suspect part of your issue is working for a smaller consultancy. Go work for
someone for whom the web is a core part of their business -- it is best if it
is their business. As in they are 100% reliant on it and you are contributing
to their product which grows their company. Focus on finding a team with
experience that you can learn from rather than a slightly higher salary.

------
qznc
My advice would be to get out of web dev and finish your CS degree. Cobbling
websites together is a nice and easy way to get some money during school and
college, but chasing the latest hype is tiresome. Get a wider perspective of
software development.

Try some systems programming with Rust or C++.

Try embedded/close to hardware stuff. Work with FPGAs, Arduinos, Raspberry
PIs.

Try mind-bending languages like Haskell, Erlang, Smalltalk, Prolog.

If you are strong with theory, try verified software with theorem provers
(Coq, Isabelle). I believe it finally might be the right time to build a
career on this, since first products are available (SeL4, CompCert).

Try to contribute to some mid-size or large Open Source project. Building
software is a team effort.

A goal could be to get into Google/Facebook/Apple/Intel/IBM/Microsoft. If you
do software development there, the work is much more social. If you want
development to be mature and traditional, build software that goes into
planes, cars, dams, space shuttles, factories, banks.

------
viraptor
> They dress badly, they swear alot, simply they look like people from lower
> social classes.

If you go into medicine, guess what kind of patients you have to interact with
daily. And depending on your chosen path, how skewed the ratios are doing to
be due to socio-economic status impacting health.

------
probinso
If you are interested in leveraging your current experience; The medical
industry has lots of space for data management, image processing, community
detection (graph theory), computational statistics, and NLP.

------
karo_ops
Web development may get boring, I admit. That's why people go deeper into
backend, devopsing, etc.

Certifications (and most uni diplomas TBH) in IT are generally bullshit so I'm
happy we're, as an industry, relieved from that.

I have hard time trusting people who care about formal looks. A person with
skills and dedication doesn't need to look like a good pet engineer.

> they swear alot, simply they look like people from lower social classes

The irony of criticising people for "looking like" "lower classes", while
making mistakes like "alot".

Stop stigmatising blue-collar workers.

------
sonium
You might consider a career at some fortune 500 company (do not limit yourself
to software companies here, every one of them has a large software
department). My experience is that it involves a lot more communication and
'people skills'. Also the dresscode is often more 'white colar' due to a 'fake
it till you make it' attitude. It definitly does feel adult.

Also even if you start out in a technical role, there are usually also non-
technical career paths (If you think programming is too blue-colar) which you
can explore from there.

------
nativelukas
EDIT: Talking about "lower class", I didn't mean it in an elitists way, I'm
sorry if it sounded like that. Probably I should use other words than "class".
I wanted to explain that many technical people in IT business (programmers,
engineers...) kind of put themselves down with their soft skills, manners or
the way they behave. Like they are really clever and skilled but the way they
behave make them look somehow "lower" many of them can't ask for the money
they deserve etc...

------
anigbrowl
Well it sounds like you can afford the costs of medical school so just plan
out your pre-med undergraduate requirements and get on it. There's nothing
remarkable about being age 22 and many people have successful career
transitions at far more advanced ages. It sounds like you're fishing for
arguments to justify it to someone else and there's no need for that, if
you're sick of webdev then do something else. It's your life, after all.

------
stantaylor
If you really think medicine is the right career for you, godspeed. If,
however, you want to change careers, as you say, because you don't think
software is the right carer, then I submit that your view of software
development is limited and--shocker--immature. Do something vastly different
in software development before you write it off: work for a large company,
learn back end development, try out product management, etc.

------
nickbauman
If you like deterministic things, you will not like medicine. Perhaps the most
deterministic part of medicine is orthopedic medicine because orthopedic
doctors can treat the structure of the human body in the most (relatively)
mechanistic way, but even that is limited.

Human Machine Interaction is an art (or craft, if you prefer) not a science.
So the size of the code dedicated to the user interface can easily be orders
of magnitude larger than the fundamental business logic they interact with. So
there will likely always be a lot more work there.

Then other areas of computing that are not deterministic yet are very
scientific, like Data Science, which is _probablistic_ as opposed to
deterministic. Which is an almost 180 degree flip in your mental modeling.

The class sensitivity you exhibit is astonishing. Especially for someone your
age. I really think you aught to do some soul searching there. Classism is an
objectively bad thing to indulge in.

As far as the loneliness is concerned, well, deterministic work tends to be
cut and dried and narrowly proscribed. So, say, writing a device driver for an
OS will not require you to interact with people because the work can be
specified exactly. Increasingly deterministic work will be outsourced to
machines too. They're spectacularly bad at interacting with humans (just ask
Alexa ;)

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MikeLovesCandy
Changing to medicine is going to be as tough as staying in Computer Science.
Also, since you are 22, if you change to medicine it takes close to 7 years to
complete, not mentioning whatever mastery you want to do. (At least around it
it takes close to 7 years, don't know how long it takes in your country.)

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culturalzero
Definitely don't come to the West and try to talk with the upper classes with
your current English level.

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vletrmx
When you say thinking of a career change. Do you mean quitting the course of
study you are currently on? If so can I suggest sticking with it till you
graduate, then if you still want to pursue medicine the door is still open to
you, but you haven't lost your current qualification for nothing.

Edit: grammar

~~~
majewsky
Depends on how long he's been studying. If he's in his first or second
semester, I'd suggest to change majors. If he's already writing the final
thesis, I'd follow your suggestion.

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drenvuk
How was this voted up?

>developers becoming blue collar workers

This is possible only in the lowest most commodified positions. There will
always be specialists, regardless of the number of libraries, frameworks or
SAAS that exist. You most likely have not looked at the edges of what's being
developed by those doing the real science and writing papers on their progress
and experiments.

>web development with inexperienced people

You are a freelancer. Everyone can call themselves a freelancer and throw
together a quick site to say what they can do. You've stated your specialty is
being a generalist. This puts you at the easiest tier because "jack of all
trades master of none" typically means you just glue libraries together that
have been made specifically to cater to people who don't have the special
knowledge required to make those libraries. This is not an infrastructure
engineer. This is not a WebGL expert, this is not a computer vision
specialist, this a not machine learning engineer, nor a data scientist, nor
statistician. Your stuff has been generalized and simplified from the esoteric
skill, knowledge and techniques of specialists that came before you. You have
been standing solely on the shoulders of giants that hunched in front of
computers before you and I were born.

>spending time in front of a computer

Congrats, you finally noticed. Here's another thing that a lot of people don't
seem to notice until it's too late: The ones that get paid the most are the
salesmen. They're the ones that can prove that they made the company money.
When they bring a check through the door it hits the bottom line, they prove
their worth that way. As such, the people who live in the nicest places in SF?
The $MM condos closer to Pacific heights or the apartments near the ports?
Executives or Sales. People people. The engineers working for relative peanuts
are living 5 to an apartment. Sales eats what they kill, Executives are
similar in that they bring people in who provide the meat. The two ways around
are that your startup lottery ticket pays off for FU money (highly unlikely
unless you spot winners better than VCs) or to work at a BigCo[1] and rise
through the ranks as an engineer (likely if you get in and contribute hard).

>medicine

You're looking at credentialed blue collar workers. It's a step up, you have
more specialized knowledge but unless you handle it correctly you may still be
under the sway of the hospital you work for, not to mention the cost of
becoming one. You would be a doctor. Respectable but given your disdain for
your current situation you may become just as jaded with it in 15 years time.

I'm not sure why I wrote all of this.

[1] [http://danluu.com/startup-tradeoffs/](http://danluu.com/startup-
tradeoffs/)

~~~
nativelukas
Thank you, your reply kind of clarified my mind.

------
ttoinou
I think pivoting could be a great idea if you plan on combining your future
skills with your current skills (for example knowing how to code to be more
efficient OR starting a new business). I don't know if that's feasible with
the medicine area though.

Good luck !

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RickJWag
Make the change. I'm a career programmer and am happy with it. I had a friend
who quit in his mid-20s to go to med school, that was a smart decision for
him.

If you don't love what you're doing, change now. You have plenty of time at
22.

------
jacknews
So this seems to be more about prestige than actual job satisfaction?

I suspect medicine involves a long period of training and menial toil before
you get prestigious roles.

Finance is the obvious choice for people who can feel important because money.

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dsacco
This is going to sound very harsh, but I think you need to hear it.

What you’re saying here comes across as extremely immature (even for someone
who is 22). I don’t believe your perspective is beneficial for your own
personal development, happiness or long term career sustainability. I also
disagree with your characterization of both the industry and the people who
work in it. To be blunt, it’s laughable to me that you, at your age and level
of experience, can dismiss an entire industry as a “punk business” just
because you personally don’t like it and disagree with how many people in it
choose to work. And to be clear, rhis isn’t personal for me; I don’t work in
web development and I have my own reservations about the long term outlook of
various subfields in tech. But the way that you’re speaking about it, in both
your tone and contempt, belies a hubris that is honestly mind boggling to me.

Yes, you’re technically right when you say that web development is inherently
an “unscientific” field - but it’s not clear to me why this means that the
field itself constitutes a “punk business”, or why its practitioners are
“script kids”. Web development (and software development in general) exist in
a continuum of engineering rigor. If you stepped outside your bubble, you’d
see that there is a significant amount of 1) value contributed by the web
development industry, 2) qualified practitioners who cannot be accurately
described as “script kids”, 3) serious care in engineering excellent frontend
interfaces, both in user experience and functional stability at scale. But the
fact that you can’t see any of that indicates to me that you’ve either not
spent a significant amount of time in the industry, not met people who take
the craft very seriously, and essentially parrot the same criticisms everyone
else has.

This is before I even get to your vapid, classist perspective on the
incumbents of the tech industry. It sounds like you don’t have any passion for
web development or medicine; what I’m inferring from the way you’re talking
about the industry and the people in it is that you’re far more concerned with
how difficult your work is _perceived_ to be than how excellent and useful
your work actually _is_. If you have a problem with people who have “blue-
collar” mannerisms, you’re going to have serious difficulty interacting with a
significant number of human beings who can’t simply be ignored. People are
different, have different idiosyncrasies and generally enjoy different things.
The way that you speak about them and their work is polarizing and will likely
offend them if you’re as honest about your feelings as you are here.

In my opinion, you need to take a serious look at who you are as a person, who
you want to be and what will make you happy. I suggest internalizing Bahamut’s
comment in this thread as well. You’re espousing a very hypocritical worldview
if it’s more important to you that a person dresses and speaks a certain way
so as not to offend your civil sensibilities than that they are qualified and
can produce excellent work in their field.

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werber
There are more class barriers (and then, just the hard for any living human
being ones) to becoming a doctor, it sounds like it would be a better fit if
that is what your concern is.

