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Geek Career Paths

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175 pointsrcarmo37 comments

> Remember when the Obama administration wrested control of healthcare.gov out of the hands of the consultants, aimed a bunch of competent geeks at it, and rescued it?

Yeah, but the government screwed up healthcare.gov in the first place. Some engineers were surely death-marched and then besmirched afterwards for a variety of reasons that boil down to having a bad manager and a bad customer who ended up being the same clueless organization.

Maybe it's getting better, but I have experience contracting for the government. It's underpaid and higher stress than it's worth. And it's not like you can get a new boss or a new customer. Not without changing countries anyway.

Also, to be completely accurate, they wrestled control of healthcare.gove from one set of consultants and handed it to another set (though I believe with a greater degree of oversight and involvement from the government).

From what I recall, the final specs weren't set until months before the original launch. With that sort of situation, level of oversight isn't the biggest issue.

The consultants from whom it was wrested are consulting companies. These are described in the article as

"loathsome blue-suit operations whose core competencies are winning public-sector bids then cashing in by charging for every ripple coming out of those classic waterfall projects"

"These companies work their people insanely hard, and in my opinion, based on thirty years of observation, charge too much and deliver too little. They are definitely Part Of The Problem, and you should stay away"

The consultants to whom it was handed to would be better described as an ad hoc, temporary startup

You should check out 18f.

https://18f.gsa.gov

They seem to have taken a totally different approach of bringing agile and startup culture into government software engineering. This podcast about cloud.gov on SoftwareEngineeringDaily has very interesting insights about how they work: https://softwareengineeringdaily.com/2016/06/26/cloud-gov-wi...

Totally changed my opinion about software development and the government.

Slightly off topic, but I'm curious if there's anyone on HN who "pivoted" into being a doctor. I'm started to be tempted by the idea and I'm flirting with going to med school part time while I work as an software dev.

There is no part time as a med student. I was md/phd and dropped the md because no time to do both reasonably well. You can eventually be a part time doctor but have to pay many years of dues giving 100% effort. It's not dissimilar from being a startup founder.

Med school is super dissimilar to being a startup founder. If you pass, dead last or at the top of your class, you will be known as Doctor untilHellbanned. Also, you will most certainly have a job and lots of debt post med school, unless you can afford a couple hundred thousand dollars to finance your md. In the end, I think the risk (financially) of med school is WAY less than that of a startup founder.

I have to agree. Although the life of a medical professional may be crushing (workload+debt), it is far less risky overall compared to that of a start up founder. People will for the foreseeable future surely need doctors, and not so much your product.

They will need medical care. The government could decide to break the doctor's cartel at any moment. There's also pressure from the administrative side- hospitals would rather empower cheaper nurses and the technical side- it looks like radiology, long a super high paying specialty, may get eaten by automation.

I didn't say anything about risk. My comment was exclusively about effort level.

> tempted by the idea

Hearing from people who want to talk about their ailments is probably at the bottom of the wishlist for most here.

The doctors I know are not enjoying it as a career path. It's crushing - tons of debt for medical school (like >$100k), two week stints working nights in the ER or other major hospital, little choice over your true career path due to matchmaking, etc. I'd only go into medicine if it's your passion, because it has so many downsides that it may crush you otherwise.

Maybe I'm missing something but it seems like medicine close to ideal once you're in your late 30s and have paid off med school debt. You've got insane job security (due to the extremely high barriers to entry), high pay, location independence (in the sense that you can find employment in whichever city you'd like to move to without taking a significant pay cut), and you don't need to worry about ageism unless you're in surgery. I'd also think there's probably less pressure to stay up to date with new developments or risk irrelevance than there is in tech.

Honestly, seems pretty ideal. Anything I'm missing, other than the debt? And that might not be that much of an issue for someone transitioning from having spent some time in tech, as they'd probably have built up enough savings to not have to incur significant med school debt?

Just had a convo last week w/ 70+yo ER doc on this very topic. Outside of a private practice, the beauracracy is stifling(perhaps in private, too, IDK). Your actions are dictated by a/the committee. Your hands are tied if the insurance provider does not cover certain procedures or patient is un/under-insured. You will be held accountable if someone elses' dictate proves erroneous or damaging. Your earnings will erode with each new policy adjusment and never-ending growth of regulatory costs and re-ed requirements. You will be over-worked as budget cuts pile more load onto your already burdened workload. And the cherry on top, the mountains of paperwork you can complete on your off-time b/c you never have time to do it when on duty. Also, read "The House of God" for some of the other down-sides.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_House_of_God

I've long thought I should have gone into medicine instead of tech. But not necessarily as a doctor, but rather some other medical technician position.

The pay wouldn't be that high, but that's OK: the job security in tech is the pits, and the high-paying jobs in tech are located in extremely high-cost-of-living locales like Silicon Valley. Making $60-70k as a medical tech in a low cost-of-living city would easily make up for that. And I wouldn't have to worry about unpaid overtime either, unlike tech.

Married to a doctor. Yes, you can make good money, but like with most other things that pay well, the are significant downsides. Namely:

- cost of medical school - "the match" (Google it) - recertification every 10 years - most time spent on paperwork - still report to retarded business people - you will be sued

Brother is currently in med school. I can confirm these things. It was mind blowing to learn of "the match" with the relative freedom we have in tech.

I'd love to hear from some fellow web developers who have made the jump into a completely different career.

In my view, most of the pathologies that infect the tech sector, starting with self-absorbedness, arrogance, and lousy diversity, are joined at the hip with VC culture.

Q: Should you work for startups? · Absolutely, yes

I'm getting mixed messages here.

He's talking about being a VC and/or working for a VC, not working for a startup that has gotten VC funding.

How is that not "VC culture" tho'?

a) You don't have to take VC funding to be a startup.

b) If you do take VC funding, you don't have to adopt VC culture too. (VCs don't even get a board seat until the series A.) Some startups do adopt VC culture anyway, but it's not a forgone conclusion.

Good startup founders manage their VCs so that their VC is just another resource they call upon when necessary. (Ironically, VCs seem to like this situation a lot better than when they have to manage their founders.) Weak startup founders do whatever their VCs tell them to. The former leads to startups with the culture of the individual startup, which is usually closely patterned after the founding team's core values. The latter leads to startups with VC culture.

"Should you work for a non-tech company?"

Yes!

You get to solve all types of interesting problems developing for non-tech companies. You are able to help with real business problems. Think shipping and warehouse companies or companies that deal with a lot of products/inventory. So many things to automate in a business like that. You can have the opportunity to work on inventory management software, bar coding software, order entry software, call center software, etc. I worked at a company like this early in my career and it was really rewarding. Company consisted of a few hundred employees with less than 10 in IT.

I looked at this briefly, but it was odd. I found that non-tech companies paid tech FTEs very little -- even companies which heavily relied on tech (Airlines, Insurance, etc..). On the other hand, they paid oodles to contractors, and vendors.

I found myself a "pre-sales engineer" and it's a great combo of engineering and being a "people person" with other engineers who aren't "people persons". Pays like middle management with only half the bs.

I'm confused by his warning that there are few opportunities for advancement as a product manager, and that PMs end up becoming marketers. Is this true in smaller companies maybe? Definitely not the case at big tech cos.

A software engineer can rise to Principal, to a Distinguished Engineer or a CTO and stay technical.

A manager can of course become everything from a director to a CEO.

But what's a director-level-or-above equivalent for a Product Manager?

Most companies I've worked for don't distinguish that much between "manager" and "product manager", so maybe that's part of the confusion.

VP of Product

Director of Product

These titles both exist...

Directors of Product and VPs of products are no different than Directors of Software Development and VP of Software Development.

Directors and VPs are on the management hierarchy.

While PM at Microsoft is a slightly (or extremely YMMV) different rôle, a lot of people who are GMa (General Manager) and higher used to be PMs

There's a Director of Product and a VP of Product where I work. PMs seem to have a fulfilling and rewarding career path in big tech companies from what I see.

Engineer who turned into a PM, here (now a Project Manager, same situation applies). I, too, found there was no upward career path as a software engineer, and thought a role switch would help. It doesn't. Same root cause: The pyramid gets very small towards the top, and companies' only advancement opportunities involve going up the pyramid. At some point, you find you're not going to advance unless your boss quits, and even if that happens, that one promotion will just as likely go to one of your 20 peers.

Thoughts on the switch? I decided to become a PM full-time after a couple of dev internships, thinking that given the pace of change in tech, it would be a better idea to spend time building people skills instead as those seemed to be more 'durable'.

After a couple of years, I've completely changed my mind. Though I've done well in my role, I find that it's hard to point to a concrete skill set (such as deep domain knowledge in some field), and the fact that the PM role varies so much across companies makes it difficult to transition.

It's a mixed bag. Product management and project management are broader roles that let you see the bigger picture, and let you interact with more people at your company. If you're a PM or PJM at a smallish (100-300 person) company, you'll know everyone in the company within your first year. So it's a good career move if you're more outgoing/extroverted. It's also nice to not have to constantly be running the "hot technology" treadmill to stay relevant. I can pick and choose what languages/frameworks to learn that I think will be most valuable, instead of having to dabble in everything because "Framework X is outdated--Everyone's using Framework Y now!"

Downside is you generally have to let go of direct control of what code goes into the products and let your talented engineers do it. My first few months as a PM I still wanted to commit code and had to stop myself. There is also far less demand for PMs and PJMs at tech companies. Everyone's hiring developers by the truckload, but PM positions are few and far between. The whole "it's easy to change jobs in Silicon Valley" thing only really applies to developers. Pay is also not as good as engineering (currently).

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