
Ask HN: Best career options for more individual programming-related work - teamfatigue
For over a decade, I worked in a career that allowed me to work&#x2F;collaborate with colleagues, but I was the only member of the team responsible for doing the work I was doing.  I liked working on this type of multidisciplinary team, but the field was a dead-end in terms of salary and raising a family.<p>As a result, about 5 years ago, I switched to doing software development (I had programmed some in my prior career).  Now, I work on teams where everyone else is doing the exact same kind of work (frontend software development).  I now realize that I much prefer to work in an individual-oriented role within a multidisciplinary team, and struggle to find meaning in work that everyone around me can do more or less equally well.  I also can&#x27;t stand open work spaces and greatly miss my old office.  In addition, I&#x27;m usually the oldest one on the team (even though I&#x27;m only in my mid-40s) and younger co-workers with no family, etc. struggle to relate to me.<p>Bearing this in mind, what would be the best area for me to move toward at this time?  Data science and&#x2F;or machine learning?  Or security engineering or pentesting?  My guess is that data scientists tend to work more frequently on multidisciplinary teams (also, I have a master&#x27;s in biostatistics from long ago, and have learned R fairly well, so that will help with the transition I&#x27;m sure).<p>Do any of these career options feature a wider age range and more gender balance (I miss working with women and &quot;older&quot; colleagues, who often bring different points of view to work situations)?<p>I want to try to take into consideration the whole work environment before I make a career move, and not make the same mistake I made last time before starting software engineering.  I do love programming and do it even in my free time, I just struggle with the social aspects of it.
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itamarst
Some other options:

1\. Possibly web development agencies? Seem to often have cross-disciplinary
teams (designer + programmer + UX specialist). Some of them are terrible, I
hear, but some of them sound like nice places to work.

2\. I've occasionally seem job postings for programmer jobs at a university,
where you're helping scientists out.

3\. Python has a _very_ diverse set of use cases. E.g. PyCon has talks on
everything from web development to distributed systems to data science to
biology to graphics to education. And much higher percentage of women speakers
and attendees than many (most?) software conferences.

