
Ask HN: How does one choose a programming specialization? - nicolashahn
How did you choose how to specialize in frontend&#x2F;backend web development, mobile development, security, ML, etc?<p>How long did it take you from when you started programming, or started your first job?<p>What advice would you give to someone who&#x27;s tried many things but can&#x27;t seem to decide which to commit to?<p>Thank you.<p>-<p>A bit more personal information:<p>I switched from Art to CS at my university halfway through, and thought I was finally specializing and that everything else would fall into place.<p>At the end of college I got an offer to be an Android developer, declined it to work for my university&#x27;s NLP department, then got a job as a platform engineer at a startup in San Francisco, then was offered a 50% raise to become a full-stack but frontend-leaning web developer at another, became unhappy there and started looking for a new job but realizing I didn&#x27;t know what I wanted to do. Now I&#x27;m attending the Recurse Center in a week.<p>This has all happened in the last three years, and now I&#x27;m seriously looking hard at my career because the pattern seems unsustainable, yet none of those roles stands out immediately. I&#x27;ve even considered not being a developer anymore. In college I had done a lot of photo, video, and animation work. I <i>think</i> I&#x27;m over that though, that work is too repetitive and the software pay is too good.<p>To throw another wrench in, I visited Mexico City and was awe-struck at how inexpensive it was to live there, and how people at my hostel lived - remote working a few hours a week and just traveling and enjoying life. I could become a freelancer and have the same. It&#x27;s appealing, but I&#x27;m worried that this is just another shiny new path that&#x27;ll dull quickly, and I&#x27;d still have to decide what type of work to do.<p>I&#x27;ve been trying to talk to as many people as I can about this in order to narrow down my decision space, but it just seems to do the opposite, new options keep appearing.
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oldmancoyote
I didn't even recognize what I specialized in until after I retired and got
retrospective. The word career and careen are so similar for a reason. My
career (and those of others I think) was like a canon ball careen through a
battlefield, moving in one direction, then bouncing off something into another
direction and another direction and on and on. Based on my experience, one
does not really control one's career so much as respond to opportunities.

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godelmachine
When in dilemma, always choose the work which pays the most.

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nicolashahn
That's kind of how I got here, I kept on choosing jobs that were significantly
different from what I was doing before, but were willing to give matching
significant pay increases. That can't last forever though, unless I'm
mistaken.

