Comment by ccajas | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ccajas | Hacker News Reader

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>Anyway, having said all that, I'll say that embedded work is mainstream :-). I have a hard time thinking of stuff that isn't mainstream.

Ah, well in Chicago area at least, the market is dominated by web development, mobile development, data science, and algorithmic trading roles, in that order. I'm part of a few local Slack groups for Chicago programmers and it's been hard to find leads for embedded programming jobs. Several people have told me embedded programming is not something Chicago has a lot of.

>As I have done it many times, I will say that it is challenging to hop over domains. If you are a web developer, then people often tag you as a "web developer".

And this is the obstacle I'm trying to overcome, when I don't necessarily have the time or budget to dedicate several years for another degree. I'm in my mid 30s after all. How to get into those heavily engineering oriented firms, like JPL or NVidia, doing the low level stuff? When your last full-time job was in front-end JavaScript with PHP for a dime-a-dozen SaaS company? Can I find a suitable replacement for STEM college education that has the same level of organization AND credentialing? (remember I want my resume to at least make NVidia want to interview me)

I don't think anyone likes being pigeonholed, and it's especially troublesome when the majority of jobs here have a programming language in the damn job title. I want to work in "concepts", not languages.

I'm still trying to map out how to get from point A to point B. Maybe go from a local web dev shop to a local web-and-mobile shop that uses Java, then use that Java experience to work at an enterprise firm, then slide in some C++ work? That's just a guess :) It's also gonna likely take as much time as getting the college degree, so I don't know, I'd like to get a do-over in college life.

> How to get into those heavily engineering oriented firms, like JPL or NVidia, doing the low level stuff?

Maybe first try to talk to someone who does that kind of work, to see if it's even appealing to you? I say this because my understanding of this issue is very similar to the parent poster - no matter what the domain, programming as a career WILL be dominated by dealing with large and ugly code bases, where your main struggle will be to understand them and then try to make intelectually trivial changes in a non-breaking manner. For example, I spoke with people who developed GPU drivers, and they said that the code base was an insufferable mess, and that they escaped it to do something theoretically much more mundane, but at least with much less preexisting code.

My gloomy conclusion is that software engineering is not the best career choice for someone creative and intellectually curious. It's just too dull.

From my own experience:

One approach is to try software in academia. Look for departments that need web developers, and once there see about branching out into other areas (they often like folks who are willing to learn new things that can be applied in their domain).

In addition to the ability to branch out, you'll likely have the opportunity as FT staff to pursue a degree at reduced tuition (depending on the university/college).

It's often the case that you take an income hit in academia (which is often a reason they're willing to hire anyone with relevant experience), but the learning experience can be beneficial.

Of course, I could be generalizing my experience.

Just a thought.

I can actually +1 this. While I was getting my degree I worked in various departments at my university (I'm not the kind of person who can study without working, so I worked pretty much full time). I worked in Chemistry, Physics, Astronomy and even in the computer services group. Astronomy was probably the most fun because I wrote code to animate star fields with the planetarium projector. Lots of math!

Downsides are that sometimes (well... lots of times) they need you to do trivial things. Often you are working with some stinky piece of code that a grad student wrote in fortran 10 years ago and that another grad student rewrote in C -- transliterating the design from one language to another. Nobody understand software development practices, so it's cowboy time every day (unless you are good at managing it yourself). And the pay is generally pretty low :-) Still it is probably the most fun I've ever had and I would go back if I was anywhere near a university.

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