Ask HN: Career change at 22

Just some food for thought - having come from the world of math & physics, I understand what is at its core an elitest attitude on the purity of a discipline. However, I don’t think most of those who have that attitude understand how much of a luxury it is to be able to have that.

After leaving grad school for math after 4 years, I spent a hard 2 1/2 years looking for work in anything. Money was hard to come by, I lived primarily off of my Marine reserve pay - I had enlisted in the Marine Corps in hopes it would help me with direction, financial future, and improve my chances of attaining any career track job. While I can still appreciate purity to an extent, it stops there when you don’t have enough money but to eat only oatmeal for a week.

An aside, judging people for dress/class/language/etc. is pretty shitty - if you care about ideas, then surely these things are irrelevant, and there is some irony/contradictory attitutde being displayed by your words?

Lastly, a lot of some of the stated assertions are just flat out not true/shows immaturity/insecurity/depth on your side. I would spend some time reflecting on what matters to you as a person, aside from career. There is a lot of implicit inhumane comments made in the exposition defending your conclusion, and if you want to be a successful person, at the very least you should understand your desires/worldview and how your conclusions derive from them, correcting if there is any incongruity.

Maybe a career switch is indeed ultimately what you want - however, you should try understanding yourself before throwing away your years of study.

This post is so weird to me I can't even tell if it's serious or not

First you say you're 22 yo and have been working for 10 years? You started working at 12? Weren't you supposed to go to school?

Second, take it easy on blue collar culture. Web development, however crap you think it is, is nothing like working on an assembly line, both in terms of pay and in terms of fun. Plus you seem to equate blue collar culture and bad manners. This is not great. You will find people with good manners and people with bad manners at all level of society.

Third, if you want to study medicine go for it... you're only 22. Just know that the studies are long, the pay is probably not as good as it used to be, and that a lot of doctors may be replaced by machines in the next 50 years...

I have been in software longer than you (I am 33) and my wife is a doctor. If you think being a programmer feels like "blue collar work", wait till you see what being a medical resident is like. Try getting paid $50k/yr, working 80-100 hours a week, and savoring the rare moment you get to take a coffee break or eat a lunch that doesn't come out of a vending machine.

Serious "grass is greener" thinking going on in your post.

I'm a little over decade older than you but I've been around this business a long time.

Web development has always had young, inexperienced people going into the business. Things have always been changing really little care for methodology.

Things are getting better, not worse. The amount of elitism this post drips with is semi-infuriating.

I come from nothing. A poor kid with a good brain who was lucky enough to school with the financial elite because of that brain. Shitty, single-parent; handmedown clothes and shit Christmases. I had to fight my ass off and struggle to even get this career. I couldn't afford to stay in college and I didn't have the right attitude to keep my grades up for scholarships. I worked a decade-plus of shitty, low-paying jobs. I've been working fulltime almost nonstop since I was 14. I had to pay for my own senior year of a high school I didn't want to be at. While I've almost always had a career in tech, I started my development career at 30.

I have a very blue-collar mentality. I dress badly. I swear a lot. I am from the lower social classes and I'm proud of where I come from and what I've done. My work differentiates me from my peers. I make great architectural decisions and I get things done. I'm your peer because of what I can do, not because of my class.

What have you done to get where you are today?

Dont take this the wrong way you need to get over yourself mate quoting stuff like "people from lower social classes" tells me all I need to know about you.

And BTW my first job was at a word leading RnD organization and the uniform there was jeans wellies and a lab coat.

Yeh its easy to lean to code I learnt machine code at 14 the hard part is producing a usable end result.

>What I am thinkin about is career change to medicine.

If your true passion is health care, all the prelude about programmers becoming blue-collar or how they look awkward is irrelevant and just muddles the decision process.

If you want to use forums for feedback on your question, go to the pre-med and medical school forums. Also ask working doctors if they're happy with their career decision. Is their motivation and disposition similar to yours? Is filling out endless insurance paperwork for reimbursements overwhelming their desire to practice medicine? Is private practice or hospital staff better? Etc. etc.

How is dressing well, using sophisticated language and acting like higher class at all relevant to the job? Your description (of everything you hate) pretty much describes me (24 year old web developer). There's several reasons to why I'm like that, but mostly it's that I deeply hate pretentiousness. It doesn't take clothes, sophisticated language and acting like higher class citizen to be good at your job.

That being said, I might not be the best person to suggest you one way or another. But if you hate the business, do something about it. If that's changing your career path, go for it. If you hate these 3 things specifically I'd assume medicine might be exactly what you're looking for.

Now back to development. Web development is by far the easiest to get into (think wordpress, frameworks like RoR, Laravel, Django) and chances are that just changing from web development to some other more challenging field withing development might work out for you. If you enjoy the problem solving development offers that is.

For me personally, that's exactly what I love about the IT business. It's extremely easy to show what you know/what you're good at (unlike for example most social studies). And the rest doesn't really matter.

Your description of your career sounds very different from my career in software development - I don't touch the web, things are methodical, I spend most of my time communicating instead of coding, etc. Why don't you explore other specialties of your current career first?

What makes you think medicine is not becoming blue-collarized the same way web development is?

What I would recommend is that you try to grow your business to the point where you have more work than you can do yourself, then start hiring people. When people work for you, you can impose standards on them with respect to how they do their work and how they conduct themselves. If social contact and elevated behavior are what you really care about (and there's absolutely nothing wrong with that -- I care about those things myself) then the best way to advance that agenda is to be the boss, and the best way to get there is to leverage the skills you already have rather than start over in a totally new field.

I agree with your description of web development work, I would personally find it very difficult to do that professionally because of the lack of rigor and blasé attitude to software quality.

However, web development is not the only way you can make money by programming computers. I encourage you to look into either scientific programming or embedded software development. Your peers would be much more competent in their respective areas than you would typically expect working in a webdev consultancy, and generally you will find a better work-life balance in these type of companies. They also don't expect you to have a GitHub profile full of weekend hacks, they are just looking for someone who knows their stuff and can work within a multidisciplinary team.

If you are in the UK feel free to send me an email (see my profile) and I can give you some tips for where to start looking for professional work in these areas.

Good luck!

Wow, you seem almost a clone of me. Major reason why I can't change is, that I didn't study well enough in high school to make it in med school, which bothers me, and I'm a little older. You're 22, I'd say go for it. What can you lose? You've already opened a road, and it will stay open even if you choose to change your mind back

I would suggest trying to course correct within software rather than giving up entirely.

How many blue collar workers have the job flexibility that you have? How many blue collar workers are making 200, 300, 400k a year? How many blue collar workers have built products that are literally used by millions of people every second?

Take some time off to reevaluate and get some perspective. Our industry has plenty of flaws, but I don’t think the typical complaints of blue collar workers are one of them. The sky is the limit in our industry.

You are comparing web development to medicine which doesn't make much sense. A more apt comparison would be web development to nursing, as the barrier to entry is relatively low compared to other sub fields in the encapsulating industry (say, AI researcher and doctor).

(1) Have you considered looking at it through the lens of "Engineering" vs "Web development?" I think there's much more of a methodology involved if you do since the primary difference becomes how would you solve challenging problems through the use of computers, programming, and math than how do I master some domain specific technology in order to write JavaScript and CSS to make a dynamic website.

(2) It's an over-generalization to believe that the best developers are awkward and socially inept. Do you have enough data points? The best developers are actually great collaborators who care more about the problem they're solving and the value it provides to users. Often that makes them stronger communicators and peers because they're working a team of other skilled people (designers, product managers, customer facing teams) to find the best, most impactful solution. I'd rather hire a 10-20% less skilled developer who has great communication & collaboration skills. Have you considered working at an organization where you could work with a larger team in place?

(3) It's becoming easier to learn to write code than ever before but that doesn't mean that the value of those skills is reaching asymptotic levels. In fact, I believe the bar is increasing: machine learning/AI, scaling large distributed systems, re-thinking how we'd build software as hardware improves and becomes cheaper, etc. Finding great engineering talent is still extremely scarce. I won't really comment on how you feel about one's appearance (I don't know why that matters) and communication style (pick a culture you like).

I went in exactly the opposite direction back in 1989, aged 24: had initially studied for a degree in, then qualified as, a pharmacist, and practiced for a couple of years. Found it really wasn't for me, so went back to university and did an accelerated conversion degree in CS.

Thirty years later (and another career shift!) all I can say is, if you're unhappy in a profession at 22, you will not be happier if you waste even more years chasing down a blind alley. Worse, the older you get the more your options narrow — path dependency is a thing for people as well as for technologies. If you're in a job where you can't imagine being in it five years hence, or ten years hence, let alone thirty years from now, you should get out while you're still young enough, and write off the first career as a learning experience. It's not all bad: whatever you do next, you'll have a broader context than your peers who went into the medical sciences straight out of school.

> They dress badly, they swear alot, simply they look like people from lower social classes

That's a rather sweeping generalisation

You seem to not be sayisfied with your work, because it is not challenging. However, web programming is the most simple/dull use of coding skills/computer science.

There are so many ways to go deep, which you will see towards the end of your degree: After completing your degree, you can work in

- Machine learning

- A.I.

- Big data

- Mathematics

- Start your own company. This is even more challening than the above, because besides coding the product. you need to be excellent with people, what people want, what they say and what they mean, excite people for your product, figure out how to get 100,000 users with $0 funding.

- Autonomous driving

- Work at Google and Facebook to solve all other very challenging computer science problems.

Medicine is definitely more of an established field than web development, that's true. I would say that if you are going to go into medicine you should know what you are getting into.

The schooling process is incredibly long and expensive if you want to become an MD and specialize beyond being a general practitioner, the hours absolutely suck until you become an attending, and the social capital of physicians is eroding as they are increasingly viewed more as code monkey service providers than intelligent domain experts.

Also the change to pay for performance vs pay for service and the introduction of more PAs and NPs with prescribing power is going to change practice as well to the detriment of MDs. I would say if you are very interested in helping patients then a career change into medicine is worth exploring; otherwise it's not worth it.

If you are more interested in biology vs patient care then perhaps you could consider translational research. There is HUGE demand for programmers in many biomedical engineering labs, research institutes, pharma and biotech, insurance, hospitals etc. I would kill to have an experienced dev to work with in my lab for example as most of the code I get stuck dealing with is utterly dog shit. If what you are seeking is social status, professionalism, and an opportunity to explore biology while making a difference then this might be a good route for you given your existing skill set.

There's "coding" which is usually used to imply creating business applications. This you say is blue collar. I wouldn't know because that's not a world I have much experience with. But the world needs good "coders". And good blue collar workers.

Many of the problems you discuss are common to much of human experience. Every generation laments lack of virtue in the young, though most of those doing the lamenting are usually considerably older than you. You say you are 22. Here's a thought: has it occurred to you that to people more experienced than you, you are the "young, inexperienced" kind of person you're lamenting? Maybe you're a genius and wise beyond your years (but I do not think this is the case, as Bahamut said...this is a good growth opportunity for you) but you still have much to learn, and you always will for the rest of your life. So stay humble.

As an aside, there is a whole world of programming involving the need to understand mathematics, physics, and engineering at deep levels. If you're looking for a deeper intellectual challenge, look for areas where computer programs must interface or simulate complex systems of systems. You may find ways to scratch your need for maturity and rigor by programming, say, a model of a real hardware component of an aircraft.

You sound like an elitist asshole. Blue collar workers are people just like everybody else.

> They dress badly, they swear alot, simply they look like people from lower social classes.

Doctors swear plenty, but they generally avoid doing so in mixed company. As for dress, well, they effectively live in scrubs for up to a decade.

But they do indeed end up with much higher social capital than a typical software developer (even devs making equivalent to board-certified MD compensation) or skilled tradespeople, which is what I think you are getting at.

Hard to tell what you should too. It looks like you just want to try out different things. And do it relatively quickly (a few years is quick for this kind of change).

Switching into software development can be quick-ish if you have the mind for it. Switching into many other vocations OTOH can take a long time, especially medicine, depending on how far you want to go. So what you should ask yourself is do you love your current profession or not -- disregarding the current workplace.

The negative remarks you make about being on the job are all on you to change. If the current workplace seems bad then get a new one -- there are plenty of better ones, you just need to find one. If how people code around you looks hackish then again find a better job. Not socializing enough? Do more of it deliberately! Almost exclusively staring at a screen from 8-5 is a mistake quite a few of us (including me) make. If you don't connect with those around you then you already know what to do :)

On the other hand, if you are adventurous and you really enjoy medicine then now would be a pretty good age to switch. It's probably not that hard to come back if you reconsider. You could also find something interdisciplinary if you like both, and if you're lucky. But remember, luck is achieved by hard work! No joke.

--

You know, rereading what you said, you might just be unhappy with your current job. Start applying to new ones. Interviews are always fun, you get to tell people about yourself over and over again, and might get a clearer perspective of yourself. Also, don't just be applying, but use the conversations to ask for advice. You'll be surprised on what you'll find. You're not alone in wanting something better.

If you are that entitled and lacking in self awareness, you will be unhappy either way.

I'd recommend you find a new company and product to work on. This sounds more like burnout and less like a problem with software. I've done windows, web, iOS, and now game programming. They are all different and it's quite fun to broaden your understanding of computer science. It's also amazing to try to apply yourself to new problems and new products. In short, there's always something new to learn, and if you're having trouble believing that, then it's time to change places!

At the same time I want to specifically react to your two points because I think your perception isn't accurate:

1) In my opinion, there is nothing easy about programming. If people around you think it's easy, you should find somewhere harder to work. You aren't growing anymore!

2) And to second what others in HN have said, doctors have it really hard right now. The school alone takes 6+ years and saddles you with high financial debt. Then the work can be pretty rote -- much more than software.

Keep in mind even at a new job it will take 2+ months to stop feeling burnout. I hope you find what you're looking for!

I think you're a bit too pretentious. Your problem is not such much the field in itself but of how others look at you and your idea of class.

My experience is the opposite. I work on front end but I focus on applications. There is a lot of change but it's exciting and browser-based applications are replacing native applications more and more.

I'm getting paid very well to do this work (much more than any blue collar worker in my area). It is challenging as there are always new things to learn but some pieces are falling into place and work well (ie React, Redux/well managed client-side state, etc).

I think this time is more exciting than any other for web application development. I think comparing software development jobs to blue collar is somewhat dishonest as it ignores the high compensation aspect -- if you tried having this discussion with an actual blue collar worker, I 100% expect you would learn some new things.

You sound burned out. This is what you should do:

* figure out what drew you into this work to begin with -- figure out a path to get back to that and focus on it

* stop paying attention to all the hype and buzz -- focus on what you care about, don't dwell on overly pessimistic articles (they get page clicks and there is always something new that threatens our income)

* focus on getting better at what you do

* make a long term plan to learn more about computer science topics that are useful to your long term goal -- this kind of knowledge doesn't churn as much

* write more code -- instead of reading doom and gloom, go write code

I suspect part of your issue is working for a smaller consultancy. Go work for someone for whom the web is a core part of their business -- it is best if it is their business. As in they are 100% reliant on it and you are contributing to their product which grows their company. Focus on finding a team with experience that you can learn from rather than a slightly higher salary.

My advice would be to get out of web dev and finish your CS degree. Cobbling websites together is a nice and easy way to get some money during school and college, but chasing the latest hype is tiresome. Get a wider perspective of software development.

Try some systems programming with Rust or C++.

Try embedded/close to hardware stuff. Work with FPGAs, Arduinos, Raspberry PIs.

Try mind-bending languages like Haskell, Erlang, Smalltalk, Prolog.

If you are strong with theory, try verified software with theorem provers (Coq, Isabelle). I believe it finally might be the right time to build a career on this, since first products are available (SeL4, CompCert).

Try to contribute to some mid-size or large Open Source project. Building software is a team effort.

A goal could be to get into Google/Facebook/Apple/Intel/IBM/Microsoft. If you do software development there, the work is much more social. If you want development to be mature and traditional, build software that goes into planes, cars, dams, space shuttles, factories, banks.

> They dress badly, they swear alot, simply they look like people from lower social classes.

If you go into medicine, guess what kind of patients you have to interact with daily. And depending on your chosen path, how skewed the ratios are doing to be due to socio-economic status impacting health.

If you are interested in leveraging your current experience; The medical industry has lots of space for data management, image processing, community detection (graph theory), computational statistics, and NLP.

Web development may get boring, I admit. That's why people go deeper into backend, devopsing, etc.

Certifications (and most uni diplomas TBH) in IT are generally bullshit so I'm happy we're, as an industry, relieved from that.

I have hard time trusting people who care about formal looks. A person with skills and dedication doesn't need to look like a good pet engineer.

> they swear alot, simply they look like people from lower social classes

The irony of criticising people for "looking like" "lower classes", while making mistakes like "alot".

Stop stigmatising blue-collar workers.

You might consider a career at some fortune 500 company (do not limit yourself to software companies here, every one of them has a large software department). My experience is that it involves a lot more communication and 'people skills'. Also the dresscode is often more 'white colar' due to a 'fake it till you make it' attitude. It definitly does feel adult.

Also even if you start out in a technical role, there are usually also non-technical career paths (If you think programming is too blue-colar) which you can explore from there.

EDIT: Talking about "lower class", I didn't mean it in an elitists way, I'm sorry if it sounded like that. Probably I should use other words than "class". I wanted to explain that many technical people in IT business (programmers, engineers...) kind of put themselves down with their soft skills, manners or the way they behave. Like they are really clever and skilled but the way they behave make them look somehow "lower" many of them can't ask for the money they deserve etc...

Well it sounds like you can afford the costs of medical school so just plan out your pre-med undergraduate requirements and get on it. There's nothing remarkable about being age 22 and many people have successful career transitions at far more advanced ages. It sounds like you're fishing for arguments to justify it to someone else and there's no need for that, if you're sick of webdev then do something else. It's your life, after all.

If you really think medicine is the right career for you, godspeed. If, however, you want to change careers, as you say, because you don't think software is the right carer, then I submit that your view of software development is limited and--shocker--immature. Do something vastly different in software development before you write it off: work for a large company, learn back end development, try out product management, etc.

If you like deterministic things, you will not like medicine. Perhaps the most deterministic part of medicine is orthopedic medicine because orthopedic doctors can treat the structure of the human body in the most (relatively) mechanistic way, but even that is limited.

Human Machine Interaction is an art (or craft, if you prefer) not a science. So the size of the code dedicated to the user interface can easily be orders of magnitude larger than the fundamental business logic they interact with. So there will likely always be a lot more work there.

Then other areas of computing that are not deterministic yet are very scientific, like Data Science, which is probablistic as opposed to deterministic. Which is an almost 180 degree flip in your mental modeling.

The class sensitivity you exhibit is astonishing. Especially for someone your age. I really think you aught to do some soul searching there. Classism is an objectively bad thing to indulge in.

As far as the loneliness is concerned, well, deterministic work tends to be cut and dried and narrowly proscribed. So, say, writing a device driver for an OS will not require you to interact with people because the work can be specified exactly. Increasingly deterministic work will be outsourced to machines too. They're spectacularly bad at interacting with humans (just ask Alexa ;)

Changing to medicine is going to be as tough as staying in Computer Science. Also, since you are 22, if you change to medicine it takes close to 7 years to complete, not mentioning whatever mastery you want to do. (At least around it it takes close to 7 years, don't know how long it takes in your country.)

Definitely don't come to the West and try to talk with the upper classes with your current English level.

When you say thinking of a career change. Do you mean quitting the course of study you are currently on? If so can I suggest sticking with it till you graduate, then if you still want to pursue medicine the door is still open to you, but you haven't lost your current qualification for nothing.

Edit: grammar

How was this voted up?

>developers becoming blue collar workers

This is possible only in the lowest most commodified positions. There will always be specialists, regardless of the number of libraries, frameworks or SAAS that exist. You most likely have not looked at the edges of what's being developed by those doing the real science and writing papers on their progress and experiments.

>web development with inexperienced people

You are a freelancer. Everyone can call themselves a freelancer and throw together a quick site to say what they can do. You've stated your specialty is being a generalist. This puts you at the easiest tier because "jack of all trades master of none" typically means you just glue libraries together that have been made specifically to cater to people who don't have the special knowledge required to make those libraries. This is not an infrastructure engineer. This is not a WebGL expert, this is not a computer vision specialist, this a not machine learning engineer, nor a data scientist, nor statistician. Your stuff has been generalized and simplified from the esoteric skill, knowledge and techniques of specialists that came before you. You have been standing solely on the shoulders of giants that hunched in front of computers before you and I were born.

>spending time in front of a computer

Congrats, you finally noticed. Here's another thing that a lot of people don't seem to notice until it's too late: The ones that get paid the most are the salesmen. They're the ones that can prove that they made the company money. When they bring a check through the door it hits the bottom line, they prove their worth that way. As such, the people who live in the nicest places in SF? The $MM condos closer to Pacific heights or the apartments near the ports? Executives or Sales. People people. The engineers working for relative peanuts are living 5 to an apartment. Sales eats what they kill, Executives are similar in that they bring people in who provide the meat. The two ways around are that your startup lottery ticket pays off for FU money (highly unlikely unless you spot winners better than VCs) or to work at a BigCo[1] and rise through the ranks as an engineer (likely if you get in and contribute hard).

>medicine

You're looking at credentialed blue collar workers. It's a step up, you have more specialized knowledge but unless you handle it correctly you may still be under the sway of the hospital you work for, not to mention the cost of becoming one. You would be a doctor. Respectable but given your disdain for your current situation you may become just as jaded with it in 15 years time.

I'm not sure why I wrote all of this.

[1] http://danluu.com/startup-tradeoffs/

I think pivoting could be a great idea if you plan on combining your future skills with your current skills (for example knowing how to code to be more efficient OR starting a new business). I don't know if that's feasible with the medicine area though.

Good luck !

Make the change. I'm a career programmer and am happy with it. I had a friend who quit in his mid-20s to go to med school, that was a smart decision for him.

If you don't love what you're doing, change now. You have plenty of time at 22.

So this seems to be more about prestige than actual job satisfaction?

I suspect medicine involves a long period of training and menial toil before you get prestigious roles.

Finance is the obvious choice for people who can feel important because money.

This is going to sound very harsh, but I think you need to hear it.

What you’re saying here comes across as extremely immature (even for someone who is 22). I don’t believe your perspective is beneficial for your own personal development, happiness or long term career sustainability. I also disagree with your characterization of both the industry and the people who work in it. To be blunt, it’s laughable to me that you, at your age and level of experience, can dismiss an entire industry as a “punk business” just because you personally don’t like it and disagree with how many people in it choose to work. And to be clear, rhis isn’t personal for me; I don’t work in web development and I have my own reservations about the long term outlook of various subfields in tech. But the way that you’re speaking about it, in both your tone and contempt, belies a hubris that is honestly mind boggling to me.

Yes, you’re technically right when you say that web development is inherently an “unscientific” field - but it’s not clear to me why this means that the field itself constitutes a “punk business”, or why its practitioners are “script kids”. Web development (and software development in general) exist in a continuum of engineering rigor. If you stepped outside your bubble, you’d see that there is a significant amount of 1) value contributed by the web development industry, 2) qualified practitioners who cannot be accurately described as “script kids”, 3) serious care in engineering excellent frontend interfaces, both in user experience and functional stability at scale. But the fact that you can’t see any of that indicates to me that you’ve either not spent a significant amount of time in the industry, not met people who take the craft very seriously, and essentially parrot the same criticisms everyone else has.

This is before I even get to your vapid, classist perspective on the incumbents of the tech industry. It sounds like you don’t have any passion for web development or medicine; what I’m inferring from the way you’re talking about the industry and the people in it is that you’re far more concerned with how difficult your work is perceived to be than how excellent and useful your work actually is. If you have a problem with people who have “blue-collar” mannerisms, you’re going to have serious difficulty interacting with a significant number of human beings who can’t simply be ignored. People are different, have different idiosyncrasies and generally enjoy different things. The way that you speak about them and their work is polarizing and will likely offend them if you’re as honest about your feelings as you are here.

In my opinion, you need to take a serious look at who you are as a person, who you want to be and what will make you happy. I suggest internalizing Bahamut’s comment in this thread as well. You’re espousing a very hypocritical worldview if it’s more important to you that a person dresses and speaks a certain way so as not to offend your civil sensibilities than that they are qualified and can produce excellent work in their field.

There are more class barriers (and then, just the hard for any living human being ones) to becoming a doctor, it sounds like it would be a better fit if that is what your concern is.