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Ask HN: Midlife crisis, which direction to go with?
44 points by tuyguntn 6 months ago | hide | past | favorite | 54 comments
I am in my late 30s, European, with kids, can't say I am a successful engineer at this age. Most of my life I did CRUD/backend services initially Python, later Go.

As I get older, I feel urgency to be an expert in area and go deeper, but I am still storing/pulling data from DB, transforming and presenting through REST/gRPC APIs.

Ideally, I would love to have a single area to which I can dedicate rest of my professional career, be it ML, ML Ops, Data engineering, Infra guy (AWS, Azure or GCP), maybe a security?

Any recommendations?

UPDATE: Thanks everyone, so many valuable insights are shared.




You took a low-reward, low-risk path. There will always be a need for web application plumbers, and the work will never be glamorous. But it will be there.

The flip side to a high-reward path is high risk. ML Ops is cool now, but ten years ago blockchain was cool. That hasn't really played out the way a lot of people thought it would, and those who went all-in may have wasted their time.

Then there are passion areas that are intrinsically cool, and the number of people willing to do this work will always exceed the number of jobs. Think video games.

You say you have kids, and in that case a low-reward, low-risk career was probably the prudent path to take. When people depend on you, the risk of failure is magnified, a lot.

The "correct" reaction to a midlife crisis is almost a trope now: you have it pretty good, don't rock the boat, don't screw things up.

If you have free time (I don't know how old your kids are) you can use that to explore new areas of technology. Just remember the grass is only greener when it's fertilized with BS, every passion eventually becomes just a job, and work does not define you.


> The "correct" reaction to a midlife crisis is almost a trope now: you have it pretty good, don't rock the boat, don't screw things up.

My advice: follow this "trope" at your own peril. When your soul isn't satisfied with the direction your life is going, shut up and pay attention. Sweeping it under the rug is the best way to face this demon, stronger and scarier, 25 years later, when it's too late to do something about it.

Source: another mid 30 person a few years deep into their midlife crisis, so feel free to disregard my advice.


I'm not even trying to say you're wrong, but how can you be your own source about what will happen 25 years later in your mid 30s? Did you first start doubting your career choices when you were 10?


By speaking with someone older than me, and by working through it with a therapist. Is this valid enough an answer? I offered a counter-argument to GP, but neither I nor GP have the "correct" solution to your particular crisis.


Your experience is unique to you and your answer cannot be incorrect -- it may be valuable to others. Thank you for sharing.


I thought that midlife crisis is at 47 1/3 (there was a study about average age when midlife crisis appears).


> If you have free time (I don't know how old your kids are) you can use that to explore new areas of technology.

To add further, once your kids are grown you will have time, savings, and a deeper experience to explore expertise. Keep on the path and build toward that future.

That said, if there was one thing I would become an expert in are soft skills and people/project management. That experience never goes out of date.


I have a feeling you are a Young Person™.

Low-risk can still be high-reward. The trade-off is time.

Cut burn, put money into index funds (or real estate if you can stomach the interpersonal aspect) and you will get there simply by virtue of betting on your society.


I disagree that it's the low risk, low reward path. The risk and reward isn't in the type of work but in the companies you choose. You can do boring low risk backend work, but at a startup with the opportunity to 100x your RSU's or lose your job.


"Do you want to wreck your home because you hate its contents or because you hate that it has walls?"

I've heard that in the context of other midlife crisis decisions, but it applies well enough here too.


Spend time with your kids. Spend time with your kids. Spend time with your kids.

Take them to do stuff they're interested in. Take them to do stuff you're interested in. Talk to them about school and what they want to do in life.

You're not going to die wishing you had worked harder for someone else.


Well said.

Covid and lockdowns caused many issues but something I am going to be forever thankful for - the push to work from home. It meant I could spend lots of time with my son. Precovid, I would leave before he got up and then have half an hour or an hour before bed time (if that). Even now, I am only in the office once every two week - I see him in the mornings (and take him to school), I pick him up in the evenings and take him to martial arts a few times a week.

Something my dad never was able to do as he worked away from home a lot. My relationship with my son is fantastic, as is my relationship with my wife.

Ok, so the job is a bit boring at times, but I now have many passions outside of work.


Can't vote this high enough.

Nothing in this life compares to helping young souls grow into their best self.


Spot on. You don't have much time with them before they grow up and move out.


I bet that many people having both crisis and kids don't particularly enjoy spending a lot of time around their kids. They can drag through for a while but their hearts suffer too much in the long term.


'Midlife crisis' is just a term, coined by who knows who because who knows why.

It's only a 'crisis' if you do stupid things with the greater income/experience that you have now.

Don't.

Your age means you've grown up and it can be the greatest period of your life.

Also, instead of thinking that you're getting 'older', notice that today you're also the youngest you'll ever be in your life.

Try not to waste your energy regretting the time that has gone by, instead focus on how much more you could do with the time you still have.

Work and tech is just a small part of life. Surely you dreamed to do or get things but couldn't when you were younger. Now is the time to do that!

First and foremost, focus on your health, get fit. Make it a hobby. This will give you the positive energy you need to pursue whatever dreams you've had.

Now on the tech side of things, just a few thoughts:

Storing/pulling from DB, transforming and presenting is pretty much what we all do. The difference is the db and type of transformation and presentation.

So your experience is great and you can learn anything new that inspires you plus apply your skills to that!

Pick a subject and read about it every day, work through the tutorials, start small projects, until you can walk on your own. Technology changes fast and now with the emergence of AI it's hard to tell what will stick or if any of the skills we've learned for decades will still be useful in 5 years.

Fundamentals usually stick, refresh/get deeper into them, grokk the common algorithms, system design, architecture, design patterns.

As you get older, younger people will start to look up to you for guidance. Try softening your skills.

Software development is not just about technology, it's also about communication, intuition, knowing who to engage with, when to take up stand, when to back down, etc.

Those things come to us as we get older, so try to include them in your thought processes.


At 41, I've been wondering the same thing except that I'm basically a C++ generalist. I'm finding it hard to find a new job because well paying companies want specialists with experience in domains like graphics, HPC, embedded, or finance. I'm undecided where to invest my time in order to become more valuable than a simple C++ generalist.

  - Graphics: I'm interested in graphics (I learned some OpenGL years ago) but the amount of material is vast and it appears that there are many sub-domains to specialize in.
  - HPC: With zero experience, I'm unsure if hobby projects would be enough to get a HPC role.
  - Embedded: I've heard embedded doesn't pay great. Also, different people have different definitions of what qualifies as embedded. I've worked on car software but it was basically just a headless POSIX app.
  - Finance: No real interest. Looks stressful.


Random comments: I’m the same age and I was a generalist too. You become a specialist by surrounding yourself with specialists, you work on the same tasks and this allows you to learn specific topics. Finding a job is one way of finding those people. No one is born a C++ master except a few crazy guys who got lucky at birth, I know that because I worked with a few of them, at most 4 people in 20 years.

You talk about money but that’s not what I want first. It’s better to work with good people around you in a respectful environment. And anyway, C++ jobs always have a better salary than other jobs.

If you want to be better on your own, read and use good code in C++20: cppreference, the core guidelines, GSL, etc. Do all the exercises and understand what you do. Add some CMake and Conan and you’ll be able to work everywhere. The only common thing with experts is that they know most of the C++ and the STL, there is no additional secret.

If you want to learn graphics, do a bit of everything to get a feeling of how that works. Use OpenGL, Vulkan, and VTK. Not all at the same time of course.

I worked for awful companies who had great projects (or at least they lied about it). Finance is not always stressful and can actually be fun. Games can be awful. Medical software is very fun in my experience. I helped a team switch an embedded piece of old crap to C++20. Good projects are actually random and may not be where you expect them.

I talk about medical software and devices because I actually love it. I hate the human body and its flaws, but I accidentally found a job working on some robot and it was very fun. I knew nothing about that field but I learned in this job and it’s great. Specifications are mandatory and you always know what you do. Also it’s not gloomy and filled with sick people and diseases, no one thinks about that part. We want to have fun while writing good software. You may want to try that.

That’s all for now I guess.


If you're comfortable financially where you are, go with the flow, relax, buy a Miata, do what is interesting for you. Maybe think about some larger impact you can have in the world other than work that will be discarded in 12 months or less.

I did the "hyper-focus-on-one-tech" thing for ~15 years. Talk about burn out.


Thanks for sharing your thoughts.

Reason I started worrying is because market for Golang CRUD/API engineers seems to be down a lot, not many opportunities, if I lose this job need quite some time to pivot to another stack or start as a middle engineer again (currently, staff engineer)


> Reason I started worrying…

“I've lived through some terrible things in my life, some of which actually happened.”

- Mark Twain


Many of us are worried. Hell, I was publicly recognized for the depth I went into around the product you likely know and may even hate. I wrote books on it. I dove into and debugged it's closed source code. Etc.

I don't want to touch it again. In fact, I'd rather go into environmental science so I can contribute something to the greater world. But that would require schooling and that doesn't seem to be desirable in your 40s. Not that it can't be done, but it would be an enormous pay cut plus student loans.

Anyway, find something that makes you happy. Don't chase the tech. Like other's have said, blockchain was "hot", crypto was "hot", data science may be reaching the tail end of it's "hotness". I expect AI in today's form to fizzle out, as well (can't speak for it's future states).

CEOs/CIOs/CTOs rah-rah this shit and time and time again we're back to doing generalists work - Azure/AWS/GCP web services, some API middle layer, some database layer. And that's okay!


Sorry if it sounds a bit harsh, but saying that changing stack would lower you from staff to middle engineer is idiotic.

A staff engineer is meant to be more removed from the code than an intermediate engineer, they're supposed to bring massive multiplier effect instead of cranking code all day. I don't think you should focus so much on the stack.


You're absolutely right in terms of what is expected from Staff eng, but try to get a job in companies with primarily Java or .NET stack (I am talking mostly about Western Europe).

First barrier is an interview, from my experience people expect you to know nitty-gritty details of their stack if you want to lead other engineers and be a force multiplier. How do you even do a code review without properly understanding the trade-offs in that stack or widely accepted best practices in the community, which you accumulate over a long period of time.

You can of course fallback to another archetype of staff eng, and become a voice of leadership to translate high level business objectives to technical solutions, but companies I know still expect you to write a lot of code


If you are interested in developing your career in that direction, would it have a higher reward in terms of job security and compensation to focus on your soft skills instead of hard skills?

If you're already a staff engineer, your leadership skills could be more important to your future than becoming fluent in Java or .NET. Aim for getting promoted, not for avoiding getting demoted?


Can confirm. 35 year old engineer with a Miata (and another car). Excellent recommendation. Don’t believe the NC hate, a PRHT NC Miata is an incredible cruising car. The ND is a retractable fastback and doesn’t fully go down (aka not a real convertible) and NCs are super cheap. If you must go with a new car, NDs are fine too, just don’t discount the NC!


Ugh, not OP but I'm kinda in a similar position as him/her. I want a Miata too.


That’s what they always say

Miata Is Always The Answer

Though, if I could afford an old air cooled 911, that’s what I’d do.


Old guy 911's, gotta love it.

61 here.

Had a Miata myself, have shifted to SLK's same fun, slightly bigger, some with very large horsepower.


2 cents from personal experience in life, crisis and industry:

1. Nothing wrong with shuffling jsons around or developing yet another REST API.

Domain expertise often matters and pays more. There are only so many DB developers, but experts in gRPC APIs for insurance (put here your industry) are always useful for all insurance companies.

2. Your feelings and attitudes ("can't say I am a successful engineer") is likely not related to your professional life per se. Low level CUDA experts have same issues around same age. They can push you to grow your career and can be a valuable resource, but don't expect it to fix a root cause.


Nice to see someone else mention domain knowledge. I know just enough about software/data engineering to be effective, but I have seen the greatest career growth by doubling down on my domain (generally finance).


Many developers lead a double life. They have a job that pays the bills but is not their ideal kind of work. It can be boring at times and places constraints on your ability to choose which direction to take it.

At the same time, they have a side project that feeds their passions. It rarely pays well, if anything; but leaves the developer in complete control of what to do next and how long to do it.


This. Every society in every era has a large amount of necessary work and some amount of interesting work and a minuscule amount of glamorous work.

The fact that those categories happen to overlap for a lucky few makes for a great commencement speech, but IME it's the extreme exception.

The good news is that there's really never been a better time to be a dabbler. Lots of tech things that used to have a huge barrier to entry are accessible at a hobbyist level now.


Adding on to this thread, because there are definitely more than "dozens of us"!

IME, it's been a way to get the best of both worlds:

* job pays the bills by leveraging some of my technical background

* hobbies replenish my emotional well-being and offer creative freedom (and are funded by the aforementioned 9-5).

P.S. Appreciate the parent explicitly noting the rarity of the "commencement speech" scenario.


>I would love to have a single area to which I can dedicate rest of my professional career, be it ML, ML Ops, Data engineering, Infra guy (AWS, Azure or GCP), maybe a security?

Assuming you have another 20-25 years left in your career, the "tech stack" in each of those areas you listed will change multiple times before the end of your career.


Yes.. And to boot, a language survival estimate should maybe be more than half as long as its predecessor about half the time. Someone writing infra go code may throw out everything but the go within any 10 year period.


ML is swarmed with people and security mostly doesn’t pay

Here’s an alternate piece of advice: find a new job and take the job that pays the most money. Repeat.

True joy is getting to where you don’t need to work. The moment you are there your entire outlook changes.


You have a family, kids and a relatively successful career.

Please understand how lucky you are, and that what you have is a dream for millions, if not billions of people around the globe.

Maybe there's no need to change anything? Do you not feel content with your achievements?


I'm 49. On my second time living abroad. On my fourth time starting all over again. Have been looking at code to answer some long quests I have in Photography but have been all over the place during these last 33 productive years. What I can say is that there are some great advise here, indeed. "The "correct" reaction to a midlife crisis is almost a trope now: you have it pretty good, don't rock the boat, don't screw things up." 10 out of 10 "Your age means you've grown up and it can be the greatest period of your life." this is great - I'm trying to believe it myself. "...work does not define you" - this one is the most important one. Recently lost my job along many other people in a large lay off. I witnessed people crying like their whole identity was being stripped from them. That was sad to see, it made no sense.

My take on it? If you have the time, find a place to volunteer. EU has plans to cut digital exclusion heavily by 2030 and there is probably some social program in your area to deal with that. If you could share a very tiny bit of your Go knowledge with a few fellow citizens there is a chance you will feel better than buying a Miata.


I went for a PhD at the age of 37, learned quite a lot. Raw science is something that AI still struggles with, and expected to do so for some time.


What did you get your PhD in? What were doing before?


I was working as a software engineer in finance (high-frequency trading, etc).

When COVID started, I wanted to do something about it, so I joined a PhD program in medicine. Now I work as a HPC software engineer in neuroscience.


Haha running into this at 30 and it seems like I should just jump to something other than tech.

I'm unsure if the employment number for aggregate total SWE headcount is accurate (the one pointing to less engineers being employed now than in 2018) but it seems like unless you're in the top 1-3% of talent now - it's going to be slow going or just time to exit.


Save up and invest. Become independently rich. Doing boring, pointless, mind-numbing projects like those you described, is the best way to do it because you can charge top dollar, as most smart guys won't do it, they want to do sexy things, so your average competition is quite dumb, and those projects make clients a lot so they are willing to pay for not-quite-dumb developers. And you can do many of them because they aren't too tiring. Then even if you never achieve professional self-fulfilment, your kids will never need to work and that alone can give a whole damn lot of self-fulfilment to you.


Take a sabbatical, move to a new country, buy a motorbike, learn BJJ, do tech stuff if you want.

I’m the same age with kids and have done all of the above. Work is just work. Live your life around it.


What are you going to do when ageism catches up with your technical ability? I made it to retirement at 65 as a technical individual contributor but the last 10 years were a struggle trying to learn a new framework every 2 years. What does your retirement runway look like? A boring job that pays the bills and helps with the runway is not so bad. As others have said live for the kids and or your hobbies.


> I feel urgency to be an expert in area and go deeper

I'd take a couple of weeks to dig into that, why do you feel that way, what influences you to think that way, is it really what you want or what your area of work expects from you, &c. The grass is always greener...


I have looked at some Apache projects to see if I can contribute, couldn't find any where I can add any value.

Most data related projects require expertise on vectorized executions, CUDA optimizations, or memory layouts + OS scheduling/storage to optimize their solutions


If your country and company allows you to request flexible working, you can try going part time to enable you to learn something new.


You could consider going into sales engineering if you are inclined to talking and mentoring customers on technical problems.


Investments, business & income generation outside of your salary


You can’t call yourself a successful engineer, so what?(join the club), why does that matter to you?

Why do you romanticize the more specialist roles, what do you expect from them?

Is this ‘midlife crisis’ really about your work?


> Is this ‘midlife crisis’ really about your work?

This. I have a friend who kept complaining about his job, but I feel like he actually has a dissatisfaction with another aspect of his life, and just uses his job as a mental scapegoat of what's "wrong" in his life.


Honestly, I have not once regretted taking time off and not maximizing for career/income for awhile. I got to raise my kids while they were young and I focused on healing my codependency which had been holding me back in many ways (relationships, work).

“20 years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.” —Mark Twain




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