
Ask HN: If you only do programming at work, how do you manage your career? - amazonavocado
People who say they don&#x27;t do programming outside of work hours, I&#x27;m kind of surprised at them. I was thinking that I needed to in order to stay on top with marketable skills. But if you don&#x27;t make software on the side outside of work hours, how do you manage your career in programming so you don&#x27;t fall off the rails?<p>Were you just lucky enough to get into the right jobs that keep you doing work that is highly in demand for the moment? Looking back, I kinda wish I started my career with a slow-moving Java or .NET enterprise work because, although not being very sexy, it is comparatively stable to front end web development.
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scarface74
You kind of hit the nail on the head. If you don’t want to constantly be on
the treadmill, don’t focus on the front end. The further down the stack you
go, the slower technology moves and the easier it is to stay relevant.

Besides, just from looking around, front end pays less and it’s easy for most
companies to find cheap “good enough” front end developers.

As far as being “lucky”, it’s not luck. If I see my employer’s stack falling
behind the market, it’s time to jump ship. Why would I work at a company all
day and then come home at night trying to keep myself marketable instead of
just changing jobs?

There is usually a job out there where the “must haves” are $old_tech and the
“nice to haves” are $new_tech, rinse and repeat.

You could always take the r/cscareerquestions tact and “learn leetCode and
work for a FAANG” (note sarcasm).

~~~
linguae
As a counterargument (or perhaps as a corollary), backend programming is also
a treadmill these days. It may not have the churn of the world of front-end
Web programming, but the world of backend programming in 2020 is quite
different from that of 2010. As someone who does mostly backend work, within
the past decade I've seen the rise of cloud services, non-relational
databases, the Hadoop ecosystem, distributed storage systems, containers, the
increased use of languages outside of C/C++/Java for systems programming
(e.g., Python, Go, Rust, Clojure, Scala), machine learning, and CUDA, among
many other technologies that were either nonexistent or were in their infancy
in 2010. A person who stayed stuck in the world of 2010 might be overwhelmed
by how much has changed in the past decade. Heck, even C++ has changed
dramatically over the past decade; someone coding in C++98 would need to get
up to speed with C++11's fundamental changes as well as changes added in later
versions.

Now, there are some levels that haven't changed as much in the past decade.
The kernels of today's most widely used operating systems are still written in
C, and x86-64 still remains the dominant instruction set despite an increased
challenge by ARM64 and the possibility of RISC-V. Someone writing kernel-level
code in 2010 would feel at home today in 2020, notwithstanding the natural
kernel code changes that have always happened. However, the job markets for
kernel developers, compiler developers, and those writing low-level system
software are much smaller than the job market for backend programmers overall,
and it's possible that a laid-off low-level systems software engineer would
have to get up to speed in all of the advances that happened in higher levels
of the stack in order to more easily find another job.

~~~
badpun
> As someone who does mostly backend work, within the past decade I've seen
> the rise of cloud services, non-relational databases, the Hadoop ecosystem,
> distributed storage systems, containers, the increased use of languages
> outside of C/C++/Java for systems programming (e.g., Python, Go, Rust,
> Clojure, Scala), machine learning, and CUDA, among many other technologies
> that were either nonexistent or were in their infancy in 2010.

You've missed what is maybe the worst offender - kubernetes and microservices.

~~~
scarface74
Kubernetes is not as big as the hype makes it out to be.

Microservices have been around for over a decade. They were called service
oriented architecture and instead of REST with JSON they sending XML.

~~~
burntoutfire
I've got a feeling that in the SOA days the services were just "services", not
microservices. I.e. people were not pushing for 200 lines of code
microservices, like they do now. For example, I have a team of three devs at
work who wrote a backend of around 10 microservices... Total cargo cult.

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a-saleh
You don't manage your career by programming.

You manage your career by being able to deliver projects or at least
participate in meaningful manner and then building meaningful work-
relationships.

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non-entity
Many people I know like this found a stable job in government or a large
corporation and for the most part states put there. The may have had a few
other jobs, but like you mention it's all enterprise stuff which moves slow
enough.

They also have tend to have different motivations, whether that be a family or
unrelated hobbies.

Tbh sometimes I envy people like this and sometimes I dont.

~~~
indemnity
I’m kind of like this... been at current employer around 8 years.

Motivation: very strictly 9-5 which is great for my toddler kids and personal
side interests and being able to keep current even if employer is boring tech.
Healthy compensation means I will be mortgage free in 2 years.

Profitable large company that will easily weather the coming storms (have
always been tight with budgets), and not worried about layoffs since in
growing + future investment part of company.

If it all goes to shit, once I own my house outright I don’t care, since wife
owns a recession proof revenue producing business on which we can survive if I
need to retool (can’t survive on only that while we have a mortgage payment on
solely that income tho).

Many reasons for something like this.

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wreath
I don't want to spend all my time honing one skill (programming). So I chose a
job that is constantly challenging to keep me stimulated intellectually, and
moved from frontend to backend/infra (took 18 months). Learning how to get up
to speed with whatever technology being thrown at you is the skill one should
develop, and not focus on specific framework or programming language per se,
because they come.

Also, programming is not the only skill that will help you in your career as
an engineer.

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ThrowawayR2
> " _I was thinking that I needed to in order to stay on top with marketable
> skills._ "

These people are fine not being on top and are consciously or unconsciously
accepting the risk of falling off the rails. The risks have been fairly low
for the past decade or so since software's role has just kept growing and
growing in society and, at least for the foreseeable future, that growth
doesn't seem likely to slow significantly.

Not a strategy I'd pursue but it doesn't seem like an unreasonable bet.

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wmichelin
You can take risks on the job and learn as you go. If you have a good manager
they will take your career goals into mind when deciding what you are doing on
a per-sprint basis.

A great manager will allocate sprint points to you exploring a new area of
technology as long as you can somehow realize value for the business as a
result of that exploration.

~~~
throwavay
A fantastic manager doesn't make you assign points to your work to fit inside
an arbitrary time box.

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_davebennett
I work on side projects if it's something that interests me. Otherwise, I try
not to make programming my life. I have other interests in politics, film,
etc. that I would also prefer to pursue.

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2rsf
At least for me "programming" is never 100% of my day to day work.

There always research tasks and proof of concepts that allows you to learn and
try out new things.

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draw_down
Well, the tools I learned to use are not just evaporating. They are still in
use at many places and will be for the near term future. New things I tend to
learn on the job. (Some examples: react hooks, webpack & build tooling,
graphql)

I guess we are now entering into a new world, so we will see. But beside that,
there is so much demand and opportunity, I don’t see why I should fear for my
career. What are “the rails” and what does falling off them look like?

The other thing is, new stuff tends to just be repackaging of old stuff. Once
you’ve seen a couple cycles of this you stop worrying about it.

