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Ask HN: I can't do development any more, what should I transition to?
I've had 7 development jobs and I haven't enjoyed any of them. I'm not that great at it and I can't handle the stress any more.
I need an exit plan but I have no idea where to go. I want a job that's about half as technically demanding as fullstack-wear-every-hat jobs at $70k-80k.
Could I get some ideas?
- gardenfelder 6y agoConsider specializing on some technology (e.g. Javascript) and focus on that.
- muzani 6y agoWhat about the typical career moves - design, product, sales, or management?
- wryoak 6y agoWhy did you get into development anyway? You'll probably find some clues there as to where to go.
- auslegung 6y agoTechnical project manager, product manager, product owner. Engineering manager. Scrum Master. As long as you enjoy leadership any of these options should do quite well. Being technically-savvy is usually an asset in these positions, and you should be able to make good money.
- giantg2 6y agoWhat if you can't tolerate the BS that comes with those positions?
- ilikeatari 6y agoThat is an interesting point of view. What if you choose to be no BS project manager or no BS product manager etc. Unless you mean the BS that comes from dealing day to day with humanity?
- giantg2 6y agoI mean in those positions you deal with BS from both directions - upper management and/or the business as well as the personnel under your command.
- muzani 6y agoI find that BS levels are lowest in high growth companies. The ones that make enough money to pay their bills and not take on BS projects, but also not big and slow enough that it rewards politicking and blame. At that stage it's all about making better products and improving user experience without some clueless person with a MBA trying to adopt tiger teams and functional programming.
- remify 6y agoIn my opinion Product/project manager and product owner are way more stressfull.
- nanonic 6y agoAre you someone that gets energy from working with people or working solo on tasks? I used to have a similar challenge, I stopped enjoying my technically demanding job until I realized that there was just as much value to be had from my time share my experience and skills with other geeks in my field. It made what I do enjoyable again and also got me to accept my value as a story-teller and education when I had convinced myself that I probably would only ever have my technical abilities to lend to my job.
- novask 6y agoWorking solo. If I could maintain some servers or gear in a remote location or something, that would be perfect.
- dave_sid 6y agoThat’s my dream job you’re talking about there
- dave_sid 6y agoWhat about moving into sys admin / devops?
- novask 6y agoAzure would compliment my previous work with MS technologies. I think AWS is more popular though so might be more amenable to a lateral move. But I'm sure Azure has their own path as well?
- hindsightbias 6y agohttps://ghgcorp.applicantpro.com/jobs/ https://ghgcorp.applicantpro.com/jobs/
- matfil 6y agoI'd love to go to Antarctica. However... skimming through some of those, they actually look like pretty typical "work on a team" positions (e.g. "...technical guidance and mentoring of Computer Technicians with focus on accurate completion of work orders and execution of standard operating procedures..."), not "this cupboard has spares, this cupboard has rations, see you in 6 months, good luck!". Any hints for finding something that's closer to the second option?
- giantg2 6y agoI'm in the same position. Management wants a full stack / multiple stack midlevel dev for like $85k per year. I think the expectations are ridiculous, especially since they wont train. I loved the first 3 years of my career, but then the company showed its politics and started to screw me over... and over... I'm upvoting and hoping to see some good responses.
- dglass 6y agoHow about a technical support role? You still get to solve technical problems and you're helping/interacting with customers directly without being responsible for shipping new features or fixing production downtime incidents.
- godelmachine 6y agoI am in tech support and I am expected to fix production downtime incidents.
- sushshshsh 6y agoWhat do you mean you cant "grok" 2000 lines of Spring Boot across 27 files in 1 hour? I feel your pain XD
- cmwelsh 6y agoOnly 2000 lines and 27 files? I wish I worked on a codebase so simple!
- toomuchtodo 6y agoThat’s SRE work with garbage pay. Seek employment elsewhere when able!
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- godelmachine 6y agoWhat makes you think it’s garbage pay?
- toomuchtodo 6y agoIn my experience, there is a large delta in pay between tech support and SRE roles (~$45k-$60k/year). Tech support pay is fine if you're just doing tech support.
- non-entity 6y agoI've wanted to leave the industry for a while for various different reasons and it seems the golden handcuffs are very real. The only realistic options seem to be moving towards adjacent business roles (various management, business, or customer facing roles mostly) as you'll see these are pretty much the majority of suggestions you'll see on these threads. Occasionally you'll see the person who left for a trade or something completely unrelated to tech, but ofc with those you risk starting from the bottom again and not making anywhere near your target salary. IT roles can make around what you want, but i imagine you'd be unable to start in roles paying that without experience. Another option, which may be unpopular is to find a less demanding job. No one wants to hear it, but theres a plenty of development jobs, especially in non-tech companies where you don't have to be that good, you won't do much outside the standard 9-5 hours, pay what you want,and you can coast at for a very long time as long as you aren't a total incompetent. These ofc come with their own issues, but it might be the most realistic option you have, although you haven't gone into much details as to why you want out.
- iKevinShah 6y ago> Another option, which may be unpopular is to find a less demanding job. No one wants to hear it, but theres a plenty of development jobs, especially in non-tech companies where you don't have to be that good, you won't do much outside the standard 9-5 hours, pay what you want,and you can coast at for a very long time as long as you aren't a total incompetent. These ofc come with their own issues, but it might be the most realistic option you have, although you haven't gone into much details as to why you want out. What / Where are these companies and where could one look for such?
- burntoutfire 6y agoGovernment, banks, big non-tech corporations in general. In particular, my observation is that anything "data" related (big data, data warehousing, any kinds of report building) can be technically easy (certainly easier than a CRUD app - also easier to maintain, since it's typically not running 24/7), well paying and populated by not that strong people. These data applications often have a lot of value to the business and hence they're willing to pay for smart people who will swallow their pride, handle the boredom and just get the job done. Bear in mind that by being a borderline slacker you exclude yourself from any promotions and from doing more "interesting" work, but in many places you'll still get paid. Also, tech moves fast and, if you don't learn, you'll have problems 10-20 years down the road.
- b212 6y agoHow about relocating or going fully remote with company from overseas? I feel like US market is 10x more demanding than European.
- collyw 6y agoExpect a big cut in pay
- throw51319 6y agoWhat do you mean by more demanding?
- viburnum 6y agoIt was React/GraphQL/Apollo that broke me. I liked it better when just knowing ruby and sql were good enough. Those jobs are still out there but they’re getting harder to find.
- theonething 6y agoWow, you echoed my sentiments exactly. I just hate frontend development so much for some reason.
- collyw 6y agoMost apps would work just as well with server side rendering and a bit of jQuery. We have a spa at my current place and it doubles the complexity for no real gain. Debugging is painful.
- patatino 6y agoYou can do that too with react. Most of my stuff is asp.net mvc core with normal postbacks and on a couple pages where I „need“ that interactivity I add react
- untog 6y agoThat pushed me away from web dev but not dev in general. Got into native mobile dev, now playing around with Rust. Wondering if I’ll end up full circling back to the web with WASM. Anyway, point is, there’s plenty of variety out there!
- iKevinShah 6y ago> Anyway, point is, there’s plenty of variety out there! Where can we find those? Almost every job posting ever needs 6-7 different technologies with multi-year experience in almost every.
- jamil7 6y agoI did the exact same 2 years ago and haven’t looked back. Development feels fun again.
- BusterStatus 6y agoI work as an application engineer for a SaaS company and I do a lot of troubleshooting up and down the stack, but I do not write code except for some console apps or scripts. I do a lot of DB work, some DevOps stuff like cert renewals, custom reports, write bug tickets, etc. The job is not that stressful and I earn close to what you are looking for in terms of salary. I actually expect the amount to be in that range in the near to mid term after some restructuring of our department and reevaluation of the position. They are actually going to be hiring in Q4 for two similar positions, possibly remote. Please let me know if you have any interest!
- jbpnoy6fifty 6y agoI have a similar job as a technical support engineer, which requires a lot of DB querying as well. I've optimized a lot of my job by investigating the data through jupyter notebook, which is typically a data analyst / data scientist tool, but works really well for troubleshooting impact and behaviors through data. I highly recommend trying it out, it's made my work more seamless. Learned the job twice as fast as anyone of my other my peers; commended by my boss, in how surprised she found learned the material; seems to be a reoccurring event for my last three jobs.
- throooooway1 6y agoField Application Engineer or Solutions Architect are excellent transitional roles to other things. You get to work with customers, a variety of customers. Then you arent stuck being with the one customer (whatever product company you are working for). Variety is good. If you work with a range of external customers, opens more avenues for escape, also. Pure development is pretty tedious, you are treated like a cog. Not enough people talk about how much software engineering actually can suck. I couldn't stand having a "SCRUM MASTER" breathing down my neck, demanding timelines for every bug, dragging and dropping tasks on me.
- iKevinShah 6y agoPlease do not take this the wrong way, I am genuinely curious, apart from constant learning / re-learning, what are the other things which people don't talk about when talking about Software Engineering (developer role). I have worked as a consultant, sysadmin and developer but I was a fresher (when developer) at a $BIG_FIRM and everything had a process (Requirement gathering, analysis, etc. etc.) so it was not that Agile. curious to see how it is right now.
- adventured 6y agoSpecialized consulting, narrow your focus. Take an aspect you enjoy and are decent at, narrow in on that and then work for yourself. It's difficult to get started, highly rewarding as you get rolling, and can eventually pay very well. Part of the point would be to stop wearing every hat, pick the hat/s you want to wear and do those. You don't have to be great/elite at the hat you choose, you just have to be good enough.
- mitchellst 6y agoMy advice would be to think about what you do want out of work. You can straightforwardly make that money as a math teacher, a welder, a healthcare administrator, a banker. All of those are “less technically demanding.” Hell, you can make more than that as a truck driver, if you can handle hazardous materials. Some of those options may be attractive to you, others not. Ask yourself why you feel the way you do about each, and work from there. Another thing, though. Depending on how old you are, 7 dev jobs is a lot of dev jobs. You should consider whether you think the technical demands are really what’s making you unhappy. Because that many changes, depending on career length, suggests maybe you’ve given up too easily on a few. A successful career change requires both optimism and commitment. So keep your chin up, zero in on what you do want, and consider whether leaning into your current career and doubling down on your commitments could get it for you. Otherwise, best of luck. Go pick up a welding torch/green visor/trucker hat.
- ralphc 6y agoLook into Salesforce. You might do well as a Salesforce administrator. You can set up your own small "org" and do their training, Trailhead, try some administrative training and see if it's up your alley.
- collyw 6y agoI had to integrate an companies booking software with Salesforce via API. It's dreadful software from that perspective
- ralphc 6y agoFrom the outside, developing, it can be. But running and configuring the platform from the inside pays well and has several "low-code" way of doing reasonably scoped tasks.
- tomcam 6y agoI wonder if a government job slinging PHP would do the trick? Pension too.
- 1ba9115454 6y agoManagement.
- alexmingoia 6y agoIf the problem is you really dislike it, then I’d start with what you do like and go from there. If the problem is stress, consider discovering the source of that stress and if there’s a solution besides leaving the industry.
- matfil 6y ago(Not the OP, but this question does resonate...) It's a good set of questions to keep in mind, but I'm not sure it always leads to a feasible course of action. What I like is working independently on a gnarly problem for some extended period of time. That explicitly includes spending the odd day "spinning my wheels" without being immediately being pushed to ask others for help -- because bumping my head against stuff while working alone is the way I like to learn stuff. This way of working seems to be under fairly vigorous attack in favour of "everything needs a team", and I'm not quite sure how to work around that. Just pointing out that I'm getting things done does not seem to be sufficient.
- joana035 6y agoTake a look at this video: https://youtu.be/G2SqqjRn_c0 https://youtu.be/G2SqqjRn_c0
- alexfromapex 6y agoProject manager. Lots of companies need a PM that has some of the technical knowledge you do to help make decisions on processes.
- tboyd47 6y agoWhat about it stresses you out? Is there anything about the job that you like?
- aryamaan 6y agoMaybe try PM role? You have been working for long, you might have an idea how things work in shop. Here, the most of cognitive load of will be talking to people, thinking how to design product and getting work done. Okay, this might seem a lot at the moment but this is something to think in your position.