
Ask HN: Need career advice on software field to specialize on - throwawaymnbv
I&#x27;m a software developer with about two years of experience, working for one of the big four. I recently joined a team that does some really cool stuffs, but it also made me realize my dispassion for maintaining services and the on-call responsibilities associated with it. These days I&#x27;m feeling a bit down by the fact that virtually all the software jobs out there will have such on-call responsibilities.<p>I also feel like my career has no real direction right now, and I wish to specialize in some technical field or business domain. The things that are important to me are:<p>1. Work-life balance: I would like to work in a field where my only responsibility is at work, 9-to-5.
2. Money: I like the amount I&#x27;m making at my current place at would like to at least maintain my salary.
3. Depth of domain field: I find that I&#x27;m more cheerful on days where I actively learn things and not so cheerful on others.
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mtmail
Other companies split the work between development and operations (devops,
Google calls it Site Reliability Engineer I think). That other team will be
the primary contact if something fails, they follow instructions (your team
wrote) and use tools (your team wrote) to fix errors and only if that fails
they try to contact you. 9-5 is possible if that's a priority for you.

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herbst
A smaller company maybe?

