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Comment by Winterflow3r | Hacker News Reader

I'm really curious about your career change (since I'm thinking of the same!) - if it's not too personal, could you please elaborate a bit more?

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I was in marketing and always had about 20% technical responsibilities. It took stepping back to realize that the more technical the project, the more praise and recognition I was getting. I pivoted much more technical, which of course meant more money and in my specific industry my skills are in short supply. Plus I have a business understanding that most technical people don't have because I used to be the customer.

This may seem obvious and inevitable. It's not and only appears so in hindsight. Nothing in life is inevitable. If you want something to happen, you need to make it happen.

Cool! Thanks for replying!

This describes my journey somewhat. Started at ad and media agencies, was client side at tech companies, and gradually got more and more into the analytics, data, and technical bits.

I've held marketing and media leadership roles. But I've been teaching myself to code for fun and realized I might need to focus on more technical roles when I found myself doing things like reading the OpenRTB and AdCOM API docs for fun, and hanging out with engineers and data science folks more than fellow marketers.

Would you mind sharing what sort of role you're in now and how you went about that pivot?

I went to a gold rush and started selling shovels. We temporarily went to SF and I got a contract on a team building some reporting backend for low hourly rate. It was a job I wouldn't have been able to get in my home state and after a few months, I was able to springboard back into my industry in a purely technical role. I'm not sure where the gold rush is now, but sooner or later there will be another one, somewhere.

>Nothing in life is inevitable.

Once you're over 40, life becomes lived inside the margins of things that are inevitable, such as physical decline and, of course, ultimately death. The plays out by the shortened timeline and more painfully by the disappearance of parents, loved ones, and colleagues. There is a lot of important things in life that are indeed inevitable.

I recently read that the 40s is often the least happy decade in life, as it's usually when people start hitting hard limitations and adjusting life goals. On the plus side, adjusted life goals often make later decades very happy.

We are all dying. In the meantime, we can live.

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