Ask HN: Who do you get career advice from? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Who do you get career advice from?

10 pointspkdpic8 comments

I've been a bit surprised at how little interest in mentorship / advice giving I've encountered since career pivoting into software development.

I feel like I'm at a big crossroads where choosing between a straight-forward remote pretty isolated position building practical government LLM tools with ideal work-life balance, and hopping back into startup land with one of the new much sexier ai startups that seem to be going into hiring mode. I'm a dad and spending time with my kid, taking care of myself etc is obviously the top priority, but it's hard to judge if it's a long-term career mistake not to jump ship to a more exciting project with more energized peers that could provide a better professional network etc.

Details aside I just realized that even though I feel like I know a lot of people in tech from Recurse Center, conferences, highschool etc no one has shown any particular interest when I've reached out for long-term, big picture career advice. I know no one has a crystal ball or wants to be at fault if things don't work out but it still feels like there should be some place to turn for those annoying kinds of questions.

Anyway just wondering where people turn when they're seeking tech career advice. Thanks in advance to any responses.

I don’t know much about AI, but I’ve thought a lot about career guidance and mentorship.

My best advice: Try to start a virtual community within the specific area/sub-area that you’re interested in. (AI/ML/LLMs if I understood correctly.) If you’re lucky, you can find one that’s already established. Otherwise I would start one on Slack or Discord. Then you can be mentors to one-another. IMHO that’s probably much easier to pull of than finding a traditional mentor and maybe even more powerful, since you’re no longer limited to one single person’s availability.

Going to conferences could probably be useful as well. If you focus on the “hallway track”, you ought to find people who are interested in discussing these kinds of questions.

So, that was my ¢2. HTH!

PS. You might want to consider adding your e-mail in your profile. Otherwise, people will not be able to reach you out-of-band https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28012969

I just read a lot of stuff online. I don't feel any one person can give me "tech career advice". If I have decided say I want to work at Google, maybe I would reach out to X people who have got hired by Google for career "tactics". But for strategy who can help me? Everyone comes from a different background anyway. I feel like they would get me doing things that work well for them.

I'm in a position where I need advice but there's no good resources out there. Ideally the best advice would come from your peer group organicslly, but I fell apart with all my friends who are in the field.

There's a bunch of people who use topmate who sell services but I'm skeptical because I haven't heard good things in general.

Basically just myself Googling around. I have a pretty solid idea of where I want to go, but I'm pretty far from the target so it's kinda like a wishlist than a real plan. With the current market I'd be lucky to keep my job (or find one quickly once dumped) so that's just in the back of my mind.

I also have to confess that my target(s) might be phony. They look pretty cool but demand a huge amount of technical skills that I simply do not have the time to learn -- and not much employment chance even if I learn the basics. Back in my 20s I thought people can pick up skills at any age, which is true btw, but regarding the individual "me", my time and cognitive ability deteriorates so much that most of my free time is being used to chill out the frustration.

Usually I ask my seniors or peers in different career paths for the advice. Experience of others can surely help in getting closer to what we are searching.

Do you have an email address?

You can send an email, see the profile description of this account.

May I email you too?

Me three

Reply on news.ycombinator.com