Ask HN: What has your career looked like?

[maps7]

Since formally starting the area of work you are in now, what has your career looked like? I'm especially interested in people who have switched tech stacks along their career.

For me:

CS degree

Working in a non-tech company for 9 years. Java and SQL mainly.

Software Eningeer to Senior Software engineer to Architect

[potta_coffee]

- Degree in Visual Art

- Joined the Marines and went to Iraq.

- Worked at a sign company as a graphic designer

- Cabinet making

- Auto rental shop

- Auto sales

- Miscellaneous temp jobs

- Accidentally landed a job in QA, learned Python and began automating things. Learned more about programming / software development and now that's what I do. Did some freelancing, worked some bad jobs, now at a fairly decent company doing cloud related stuff. Python / Go / Javascript / AWS.

[alxmng]

- Dropped out of high school at 15.

- First job working at a blueprint shop for minimum wage, collating paper and running printers.

- Quit and got a job at Fastsigns, a sign shop, for $12/hr doing front desk/customer service.

- Applied for the same role at another sign shop for a few dollars more an hour. Started learning photoshop and illustrator and running a phpBB forum in my spare time.

- Started doing low-paid contract design and web dev jobs I found on Craigslist.

- Quit to work on my own. Failed to pay rent. Needed help from my parents.

- Got a job as an apartment manager, in exchange for free rent in a studio at the apartment complex.

- Continued learning programming and web development, taking odd jobs and barely making enough money to live combined with the free rent from apartment managing.

- Applied for a JS development position at a startup without knowing JS. They hired me after doing some free design work for them, and because I knew one of the devs that worked there. Quit my apartment management job. Continued freelancing on the side.

- That startup failed, but at this point I knew a lot more. Applied for another software engineering startup and got a job working as a full stack engineer.

- Fired from that job for being a dick and not working well with the team. (They went on to get acquired for 600 million and I missed out on probably 1 mil from that).

- Continued freelancing. Started doing contract work for a hedge fund my friend was CTO at.

- My friend left and I was offered VP engineering role there.

- Quit because I hated 9-5. Planned to move to SE Asia to live off savings and start working for myself.

- My friend had started a company and I thought it was cool so I joined as cofounder/CTO. Worked without pay for almost a year.

- We raised $1 million in seed money and continued working on that almost two years.

- I left because we were running out of money, I no longer believed in the vision, and was sick of SV culture.

- I’m 32 now. Moved to SE Asia to Yangon, Myanmar and now working for myself, writing an ebook, and focused on building a company that I care about that sustains me.

Along the way I learned PHP, JS, C, Ruby, Python, Haskell, SQL, *unix, management, marketing.

Lessons I wish I learned sooner: Be nice to everyone, don’t wait for tomorrow to do what’s in your heart or your dreams, exercise and eat right.

[sloaken → alxmng]

Impressive story. I really like you 'Lessons' section.

[stephenr]

Dropped out of high school after grade 10 (ie missed final two years)

Went to a technical college (TAFE), studied “web design” for a year, transferred to a closer campus and changed to do Diploma of Network Engineering. Started making php web apps for family/friends in my own time (~4 years total)

Graduated, got a job working at TAFE in IT department doing support and then got involved in more advanced stuff, Novell eDir, workstation migrations from ~200km away over ISDN, etc (~3-4 years)

Landed a contract gig with Aussie federal government department (moved interstate at ~6 days notice!) doing front end web development with zero commercial experience. (~2 years)

Moved to Melbourne with nothing lined up; accepted a contract at a Telco doing more front end dev on a never-launched gumtree-wannabe. Probably the worst place I’ve ever worked. During this period, I started working on the earliest piece of software that I still maintain today (A php library/framework, that is nearly unrecognisable from the early versions) (~6 months)

A few odd freelance jobs for smaller companies, mostly focusing on php, with some front end still (~12 months)

Started contracting with a full-remote “Agency” type company, mostly doing php and JavaScript, eventually doing some infra/ops. (~4 years)

Went back to freelance work, focussing a lot on infra/ops, dev tooling and dev mentoring/leadership. (~7 years)

Apologies if anything is hard to read or has typos, writing on a phone.

[__d]

Started CS + EE degree; dropped EE (hated the non-digital bits) and escaped with decent CS qualification.

2 years: Worked in a very old-school bank: using mainframe COBOL, part of a team trying to find a migration path to Unix and C (the solution was to have the bank acquired, and toss out their system).

10 years: Worked at university-based research center. Lots of C89, TCL/Tk, Python1, Java2.

10 years: Spin-off company from research center, focus on financial trading. C99, C++03, C#/.NET-3.5, Python2, Linux and Windows.

7 years: contracting, in various trading firms. C++11, Java8, Python3, bits of Javascript. Linux and Windows. All remote.

1 year: back full-time in trading software company. C++17, C#, and Typescript on Windows. Remote.

My "stack" has had various differences over time. C usage has gone down, slowly, but modern C is the least changed of the languages I've used.

C++ usage has gone up slowly (and C++17 is basically a different language to the C++ I learned at university). I've used Python 1, 2, and 3. Java 1 to Java 11. C# from 1 to whatever-it-is-now ... core something?

Linux 0.99 onwards. Windows NT 3.1 onwards.

I haven't yet had a professional Go or Rust project, but they'll come soon enough, I think.

[probinso]

Five years towards a computer science bachelor's degree & student teaching. one company per year starting and security ending in research for 4 years. Followed by a master's degree overlapping FTE, independent research, and internships 3 years. 1 year mobile development. Now back to research.

random teaching opportunities sprinkled through

(in order)

C/C++/sql, Python/sql/scala, Perl/C++, R/Stan/Python/Bash/neo4j, Python/bumpy/pytorch, Java/Nativescript/Angular, Python

usually chasing problem spaces instead of titles or tech.

security->languages->image processing->data pipelines->biostats->audio processing->text processing->citizen science->security

[sethammons]

Let’s see. High School, worked as a photo assistant and graphic designer during summers. University, worked as a graphic designer. Did some work at a start up doing PHP. Became an insurance agent. Became a financial adviser. Worked construction. Became a high school math teacher. Started programming PHP for a start up. Same company still, but I moved to backend server stuff in Perl and Python. Then Go. I have been here nearly a decade and am now a principal engineer. Open to answer any questions. Hard row given that I started by having a kid at 15 and growing up poor. Still with the same woman over 20 years later.

[DarrenDev]

- Degree in medieval history

- 4 years wandering the globe picking fruit and painting walls

- 1 year working in a call centre in London and learning programming in the evenings

- 7 years working as a C++ developer for 2 small software companies in the UK (desktop apps)

- 4 years building my own apps in Ireland (without much success)

- 7 years working as a C# contractor for big corporates and startups (8 companies) in Ireland building web apps

Never stopped building my own apps though. That's a hard habit to kick. Above figures might be out by a year or two - I lose track,

[uvw]

  - Undergrad in civil engineering
  - masters in structural engineering
  - masters in computer science
  - web developer
  - core java developer
  - 4.5 years in fintech
  - 6 months job hopping, 3 different companies
  - 2 years in hedge fund
  - 2 years in fintech again

[rshnotsecure]

- graduate with BA in psych at 21 in 2012 - self study into sysadmin role over summer break - work way up to Engineer and then to Cloud Architect over next decade - am aging in place until of the age when management considered more normal (this seems to start 35+ these days).

[zn44]

- Drop out of cs for an action script game developer role

- another game dev role - remote

- move to London for as3 role, got into to mobile with objective c, still games

- another game business got into c++, c# and java - that’s 8 years mark

- consulting at bank with java

- co-founded startup as cto - python & node

[Antoninus]

- CS Degree

- Enterprise Software - Java

- Startup - Ruby

- Enterprise Software - JS

- Startup - Go/Ts

- 7 years in total

[mattbgates]

Short version:

* Self-taught programmer in VB 3.0

* Computer science degree focused on Adobe Flash, Fireworks, and Java from vocational school in high school

* Worked in security

* Psychology degree

* Teaching English

* Visual Basic 6.0

* Flash and Databases

* HTML/CSS/Javascript/PHP/WordPress/Joomla/Drupal/etc.

Long version:

Self-taught programmer at 12. Mostly personal for AOL making stupid proggies. VB 3.0 was the first thing I ever used. Studied computer science in school where I learned Adobe Flash and Fireworks, and VBScript and Java. I quit programming cold turkey at at 18. I quit gaming cold turkey at 22. Miss it everyday but I develop web apps instead which lets me be as creative as I want.

I went to college for psychology. Worked mostly in security to pay the bills and on company dime after they gave me a penny raise, so I had them pay me to educate myself. But I wanted absolutely nothing to do with computers anymore. I'd only deal with people. Wasn't sure exactly til I realized I definitely loved social psychology and industrial-organizational psychology, so somewhere between career counseling and making companies more pleasant. Graduated with a psych degree.

While in that other country, I was volunteering for an organization and they had a crappy website that they'd been working on for the past two years. Nothing was done to it. I figured I'd try it out. Mind you, I hadn't touched any code since 18. But once I did, I really enjoyed it. They loved their new website and I got my first professional experience.

The program was great, but it was volunteer meaning my room and board and some food was covered, but my bank account was not replenishing, and I just barely had enough to move back home to my mom. With student loans calling... Applying across the boards of Craigslist and a long story short... after a year and a half of fixing bugs and adding new features into a now-obsolete business, I learned everything I could from my tyrant boss, who did pave the way for my understanding how to write applications the proper way in order to start businesses and things like that. Glad I paid attention. Wish he did when I asked for a raise.

I had been applying for months across the board for jobs and applied to this one job that I thought was a scam. "Work from Home" Yeah. Right. They sent a W4 and wanted a social security number. We fell for it. And it was real. At the same time all this was happening, I had gotten an interview for another job at the same time and got that job. Literally, I'm on the phone for one interview to get a job, and the other job calls.

So I hand the phone to my girlfriend who went through the interview process for me, pretending to be me basically... pretty much had the same skillset I had, and she didn't even say who she was... and she got the job. At the end, she told the interviewer her name and that it wasn't me. This was over a decade ago, so I'm pretty sure they verify who you are now. At the time, it was a phone interview.

I was upset and told her to still mention that I was interested in the job which she did. About two weeks later, I get a call saying they had interviewed like 10 people and wanted to interview me, as none of them were meeting qualifications, and I got the job. I worked both jobs for about two years for 16 hour days while freelancing on the side and weekends before getting laid off by the first job, which gave me flash and database experience. My days were pretty much 8 AM to 2 AM and freelance work in between. I'd sleep about 2 or 3 hours and weekends. Paid off $40k student loans in about 2 1/2 years! Uncle Sam, of course... wanted a big piece of the pie, so $5k came due as a reminder that I had just entered the real world of taxes.

Got hired to work for the media doing web design where I still am, working mostly HTML and designing CSS templates, and coding with Javascript at times. I also started my own business but prefer to stick with good ol' fashion PHP and MySQL and Javascript for my web apps. While I know the language demands out there, I just got tired of keeping up with the Kardashians and catering to every company's whim out there. Definitely pays the bills and if I'm desperate, I'll hop to it.

Here's to another 30 years of being in our industry!

[maps7]

That's awesome. Is your wife the girl from Starbucks?