Ask HN: Should I become a developer? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Should I become a developer?

7 pointswishingfp17 comments

Hi all, I have a special snowflake career question: should I quit my management consulting job and try to become a developer?

About me: 31 years old, work for a tier 2 strategy consulting firm doing mostly pure strategy work. I'm an engagement manager. While I like the intellectual challenge of coming up with growth strategies, I've ended up doing mostly private equity due diligences and exit options that look interesting appear limited.

Meanwhile, I've been an amateur coder since 2006 - started with R / SAS / STATA (Econ research) picked up emacs in undergrad (graduated in 2008), got pretty good at elisp and org mode [0], picked up clojure about 6 years ago, spent all of my MBA (top 3) coding web apps instead of networking (mistake!). I was watching a rich hickey lecture (hammock driven development) and was just thinking that if this is something I really like doing, should I try and put together a portfolio and get a job as an entry-level developer at a shop that uses clojure? I'm in NYC if that matters.

I'm pretty sure I could go from where I am now to an entry-level understanding of clojure + clojurescript + Java in 6-12 months. That being said, my one developer friend told me that working for a large company as a developer can also really suck and be a real dead end.

What do you think?

[0] Which has absolutely given me a huge leg up at my current job, btw

Having worked both as a developer and business consultant, I agree with your friend that a developer job is no more fun than doing due diligence. The main reason is that you actually don't do that much programming a typical job. You spend time in meetings and trying to make sense of specs (if there any), debugging problems with libraries and modules written by others and updating documentation.

Maybe you should look at automating the tedious parts of management consulting work with your knowledge of Clojure, etc. You might do this as a side project initially. Once the MVP actually provides productivity, accuracy, etc gains, then you could look at marketing it or simply using it within your current organisation. The latter should win you a reasonable promotion and bonus.

One problem that I have experienced first-hand is that when changing careers it is very hard to adjust your lifestyle to cope with the reduced income. With your current technical skill set you will no doubt have to take a pay-cut until you work your way back up a different career ladder.

As a person studying MBA now (but mostly interested in tech), may I ask you one question?

My question is: do you suggest a person in my position to go for fields like MIS (Management Information Systems), Technology Management, and Digital Marketing?

I have this feeling that they'll be much more about tech, but maybe I'm wrong.

You have to ask yourself, why do you want to change? Unless you're freelancing/working for yourself, being a cog in someone else's machine will be just as much a soul drain as what you're doing now. Changing careers is a huge step for anyone, you won't be a manager anymore, you'll be entry level, entry level at 30 years of age. Competing with fresh grads.

If it's something you want to do, I'd get upto speed then take an extended vacation from your current job and try it out. Don't quit your current job and leave yourself a way back in.

Makes sense thanks!

If you enjoy programming then I suggest you keep it as a hobby rather than pursuing a career. As a developer you have no say and get zero respect and for all the talk about us commanding big salaries, well, not everyone lives in SV and my cousin who is a truck drivers makes three times what I do.

Yeah I would look at building your own product on the side, the best gig you can get as a developer is to be able to quit your day job to take the helm of a product you successfully bootstrapped yourself.

Really good point...

This is not necessarily the best approach in this case, because taking the helm means doing a lot of management work and almost no coding.

I think most developers become developers for the creativity of creating a product.

In reality most of that fun part is the the product manager role.

I love programming. If you want to program, then program. But I wish I had chosen any other career. Anything.

Think of it like sports. Programming is fun. But professional programming?

It's very often competitive. You have to remain at peak (mental) fitness. You'll spend a lot of nights and family gatherings just looking at tech stuff to keep up to date.

You become adored, respected, have a lot of money and power. But with that comes unrealistic expectations. People expect you to win and keep winning. You end up exhausted by the middle of the day and people will still expect you to keep going.

You start taking performance enhancers to deal with the pressure. First, it starts with Jolt and Red Bull. Then you experiment with nootropics, going for any edge. Then you start hacking your own habits and routines.

You end up on death marches. Heck if you're a startup, all of them will feel like a death march. You can quit and have your team lose, or march together with them with almost no chance of success.

If this appeals to you, then you might just enjoy a career as a developer. It's not about the highs, but enjoying the lows as well. There are less stressful versions of the job, but then it pays a lot less than management consulting.

> You become adored, respected, have a lot of money and power.

These are very grandiose visions of what being a developer is like. The reality is much more mundane.

Literally I laughed at this. Developers aren't really respected or have much power in organisations.

Why not try writing contributing to open source projects in your spare time? Maybe try and get a low-paid freelance job or two. Test the waters. Once you have contributed to opensource/done freelance projects you will find it MUCH easier to find a junior developer job since you have actual experience to draw upon.

You say you "spent all of my MBA (top 3) coding web apps instead of networking", where are those web apps? Are they still around? Put them together into a portfolio to showcase them to employers.

I was a hobbyist programming in my teens and now do it full time. I don't program anymore in my spare time since I spend 8 hours a day doing it but who cares? There are plenty of other hobbies to be had..

If you end up quitting your job to go into programming, how hard would it be to go back to your old line of work? If not very hard why not give full time coding a go? What do you have to lose?

I think it could be hard to find a clojure gig as a developer with no industry experience. Plenty of really strong developers would like to play with a "cool" language like clojure, and I think it's a market where suply exceeds demand.

I would try to build a product myself.

Being a developer for a company is pretty much tedious. I have many years of experience and would definitely trade it for a finance job(something I deeply enjoy, portfolio management etc) if I could.

You are risking turning your hobby into a boring job, please keep in mind this risk, also the compensation will be a lot less...

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