Ask HN: Former software engineers who switched careers, why did you do it? - cesarbs
======
codeonfire
I'm about to do it because I recognized early on that the vast majority of
people in tech don't actually do anything except try to ride the backs of
software engineers and other technical people. There are so many people that
just go to lunches and conferences related to a specific field like network
technology, for instance, but that have never ever worked with network
technology. They are only experts because their friends decided to get
together and call each other experts.

There is no end to the people who think they are going to fake it until they
make it to the point they can hire people beneath them that actually know what
they are doing. Because of how group dynamics and social calculus works, they
are able to ride a business all the way down to bankruptcy and then do the
same thing somewhere else. Why the hell does anyone want to be a software
engineer in an environment like that.

What's worse is these people think that software engineers _must_ work for
them because engineers are desperate, stupid, and inferior while they
themselves are smart and superior for their proclivity to exploit people and
organize.

~~~
littletimmy
Am curious, what career do you have now that is freer of labor exploitation?

~~~
NoCulturalFit
You're confusing internal politics with labour exploration just to create a
straw man for the parent.

~~~
AnimalMuppet
> What's worse is these people think that software engineers _must_ work for
> them because engineers are desperate, stupid, and inferior while they
> themselves are smart and superior for their proclivity to exploit people and
> organize.

What part of that _doesn 't_ sound like labor exploitation to you? (Yeah, it's
not as bad as it gets in some other situations. It's still very much
exploitation of those who do the actual work.)

------
seiji
Why? Programming as a bottom-of-the-org-chart employee is boring and
powerless. Every 5 years you have to re-learn almost everything because the
fads change, but the substance doesn't change.

Today we need a 16 layer deep toolchain to create a HTML page because
everything is javascript and dynamic and slower than generating server-side
HTML, but it's The True Way Forward (ignoring the last 8 True Ways Forward
we've had since 2002).

When you're competing against 22 year olds for job roles that didn't exist 6
months ago, the 22 year old has just has much experience in the new framework
or toolchain or platform as you do at 35. They probably have even more
experience because they have less to "unlearn" and more free time to
understand all the quirks. They are more excited about learning it for the
first time than you are about re-learning it for the 8th time.

Now we're using Go? Except it's no better than what we were using 10 years
ago? But everybody else likes it, so we have to like it to? Great, let's kill
my productivity for 8 months while I re-write all our systems and have them
become less maintainable than they currently are.

I hear gardening is relaxing.

~~~
cesarbs
That's pretty much the reason why I asked the question. I feel the same way as
you. The problem is, I don't know what else I would do. I've been coding since
I was 9 and it's basically my only skill. I love programming and engineering
but I feel more and more like I won't be able to put up with all the crap in
our field.

~~~
seiji
There are options though.

You can move towards a more teaching/"team lead"/"architect" role to get away
from a lot of the day-to-day cycles.

You can move to a company where people actually sick around for 10+ years
(Google, etc) and get very specific domain expertise, but maybe only in one
company's systems.

You can try to start your own projects/companies/platforms, but that is much
more hit-or-miss than lower risk employment. An easy place to start is just
walk around a town, find inefficient processes (lots of manual interventions
or paperwork) and try to help them with computers.

HN has a pretty distorted view of an overall life trajectory anyway. HN
expects you to be come a millionaire by 22-25 and a billionaire by 28-30 or
you're marked a failure. Most people in the real world can't imagine such a
life and really don't care about "success" that much. But, with HN being so
SF-focused, you _need_ to be a millionaire to afford a stable place to
live—and trying to "save up" doesn't work when you're competing against 1,000
new startup millionaires every year for the same limited housing supply.

For the price of a studio condo in SF, you could buy a mansion in another city
and probably reduce stress a lot by not needing to keep up with the social
media jonses.

------
sexbomb
I love both programming and engineering (for those who see a stark contrast
between the two); but at some point, the unadorned "senior software engineer"
role starts to feel rather menial (and if you will, perennially "junior") --
in the sense of always being asked to do work scoped out by others (and
implicitly, not being thought of as capable of thinking about the bigger
picture, technically or business-wise). Age definitely has something to do
with it, also: the role that seems "hot" when you're in your 20s, what you get
looked at as "mature" or "experienced" for in your 30s... but then at a
certain point, there's a certain "you're still doing this?" tinge that sets in
(as in: why haven't you cashed out, or started your own company, etc).

So while I'll (hopefully) always be coding for at least some portion of the
day, for nearly as long as I breathe -- at a certain point I realized there
was both a creative and professional -- not to mention financial -- imperative
to hybridize. (Which can mean different things for different people -- but
basically boils down to adopting some kind of a secondary discipline, either
in terms of domain knowledge; or, yes, managing people; or delving directly
into the business side of things).

------
anseljh
I realized I like writing paragraphs more than code. I'm a decent programmer,
and I still code sometimes, but I didn't want to do it all day every day.
So...I became a lawyer. :-O Now I help start companies and troubleshoot human
problems. It's actually fun, and my technical background is very helpful.

~~~
digitalsushi
How much formal training was there as the delta between your coding
credentials and your lawyer credentials? I.e. is it starting over in school,
or is it more accessible than it seems to me?

~~~
anseljh
Well, you don't just flip a switch. You need to go back to grad school and get
a JD degree, which is 3 years full-time, and then pass a bar exam. Law school
was not especially difficult, but it was a lot of work, which was fine. The
bar exam is brutal.

The bigger point is that I never recommend this to people who aren't sure.
It's really sad when people spend 3 years and accrue a ton of debt and then
realize they hate the job. So I always recommend getting a job in the industry
first and trying it out. I did that, working as a paralegal for a couple years
first. It was time well spent.

------
TuringNYC
I became a quant finance guy on Wall St.

I was a developer and eventually software engineer / architect for 6 years. It
was nice, but did not pay enough to support a family with kids + home. Sure, I
could buy a home in TX or FL or somewhere inexpensive, but then there were not
as many software engineering / architect roles. This was all well in my early
20s but did not cut it when I got married, had kids, etc.

Wall Street paid commensurate wages for living in job-rich areas.
Unfortunately there have been a flood (literally, tens of thousands) of PhDs,
mostly from China, who flooded the field and drove wages down. Average wages
are now about half of what they were 8 years ago, though you will always hear
of outliers.

So I switched, AGAIN after being a quant for 7 years. I'm back to being a
software-engineer outside Wall St, except as an owner. So I call the shots
now, but i'm also exposed to the whims of sales, revenues, profits, and
potential bankruptcy.

------
tixocloud
I did it because I wanted to find a problem to solve. So many solutions used
by businesses out there are terrible and I wanted to get a feel of what the
business side goes through with the hopes of eventually developing my own
solution to bring to market.

~~~
hkhanna
I agree with this sentiment. Finding a problem to solve is part of why I
became a lawyer, and, now that I'm practicing, I am fortunate to be
discovering new challenges every day.

Some of the challenges may be addressable with software (or hardware), and my
past experience as an engineer has helped me conceptualize what a potential
solution could look like.

~~~
tixocloud
Glad to hear I'm not the only one. I thought about becoming a lawyer myself
but I think I'm more drawn to analytics - would love to have a chat to learn
more about your experiences.

More often than not, I've found that software is only a small part of the
solution. Being in a large organization, I've come to realize how much
additional stuff is needed to sell a piece of software.

------
iskander
I haven't left software behind but did pivot toward working in a biomedical
lab and investing a lot of my time and effort in learning biology and
prioritizing science over engineering.

The reason for moving away from software was that it's vanishingly rare to do
important work without expertise away from your laptop. As much as startups
like to say they're "changing the world", I felt that most meaningful changes
are simply leagues beyond the kind of complexity you can solve with coding.

~~~
mkaziz
How did that end up working out for you? I've been thinking about such a
pivot, but am concerned that my lack of domain knowledge would make it not
worthwhile to pursue. Do you have any pros and cons to share?

~~~
iskander
It's great, I'm really happy to be learning so much new and different material
and equally happy I didn't go to Silicon Valley. I think I had previously
carved a little niche for myself where I felt like an expert and didn't even
realize the scope of broader (more important) problems about which I knew very
little.

Pro:

* Learning about genomics, immunology & cancer

* Working on clinical trials (i.e. might help a real person)

* Seeing how science works as an institution (interesting peek inside the sausage factory)

Con:

* Doctors (& some biologists) tend to be more hierarchical than I'm used to from CS. You sometimes need to flash credentials to be treated respectfully (I have a PhD in CS, so that helps).

* Hospitals and their bureaucracies are insane. So, if you want to actually have patient impact you'll have to deal with some really byzantine processes (and the madmen who create them).

* Bioinformatics tools are crappy and their authors have few incentives to learn software carpentry. Related: file formats are designed to solve a specific problem and then get sloppily extended by everyone else.

* Biology accumulates a lot of historical baggage in its naming conventions (i.e. weird names are often explained by "SoAndSo thought it interacted with SomeOtherProtein in 1953"). This makes learning a lot harder than it could be.

------
k__
I almost did it.

I worked as a front-end developer and the people who told me what I had to do,
didn't know much. So I started to get UX-skills. After they hired a dedicated
UX person (a position I wanted to have) who started to tell me what to do, I
quit.

I switched the focus in my post grad studies from software engineering to
usability engineering and started to look for UX jobs.

I had an interview at a company and the hiring manager said, she would take me
as a trainee.

But after I found out that I had to be on-site at big corps (much traveling)
and write specifications all day long (no more coding), I didn't take the job.

I went back to be a front-end dev at a start-up. The pay is good, I can work
from home and they let me do software and usability engineering.

I'm from Germany, where switching jobs is easier if you simply get a degree in
the field. Also the degrees aren't that expensive here.

------
xerophyte12932
I intend to this year. Studying to be an Actuary. Actually, the Actuary thing
was Plan A. but I majored in CS and been doing a software development job for
the past two years so that my software side could be a viable Plan B. I love
programming. Always have, always will. Actuarial science just seems more
challenging at the moment so it attracts me

