Hacker News Reader

Comment by TbobbyZ | Hacker News Reader

This post shows why programming as a career overall sucks. Sure it’s great if you really enjoy programming. However, staying relevant to earn a decent living your entire life is difficult.

View on HN

I would argue this post (and the majority of resultant comments) have demonstrated that programmers staying relevant isn't as difficult as it seems. They were curious about how to pivot, had a forum in which they could ask, and in minutes started getting a wealth of practical, actionable advice from folks who have done the same or similar. The theme so far is that those programming skills aren't obsolete just because you want to change the vertical you work in and learning materials to help you achieve that goal are abundant.

Right, it’s a lot easier to shift than it would be to go into an entirely different kind of law, or become a different specialty of doctor.

Some people like learning new things. If you go into tech you should know that it's a career where you basically have to retrain every 5 years. But in return for that, you get high wages and low barriers to entry. If you're someone who enjoys learning new skills, this is a profession tailor made for you.

How do you know what to retrain in?

Follow your interests.

I prefer the framing of "the intersection of things you enjoy doing, things you're good at, and things that other people find useful". There are unhappy failure modes if any of the above are missing. The high-flying corporate lawyer who's a miserable divorced alcoholic is what you get when you're good at something others find valuable that you don't enjoy. The underperformer who gets fired from every job they like is when you enjoy doing a job others find useful but aren't very good at it. The broke Millennial guitarist who followed their musical passions is what you get when you enjoy doing something you're good at but nobody else finds it useful.

If you follow your interests, though, it at least guarantees you'll be interested in what you're doing.

At least in the U.S it's been one of the greatest careers possible imo in most objective measures - money, comfort, working conditions etc etc. I'm saying has been because job security plummetted in the last year or two and I'm not sure if its even going back to what it as befoer.

Maybe in what we think of as traditional tech, but there is enormous job security working as a developer in government or government adjacent organizations. You obviously take a pay hit, but also don’t have to live in an area with a huge cost of living relative to CA, NYC, etc.

Ignoring industries built on regulatory capture / credentialism gatekeeping like law and medicine [by the way, even those both have continuing education requirements], are there actually exceptions to this?

Plenty of careers just go away. Might as well pick one where you can stay relevant by picking up incremental/adjacent skills continuously.

Electrician and plumbers have it pretty good in this regard. I don't see that being replaced anytime soon and there's not all that much to learn and a lot less changing on you.

Maybe we'd get bored though.

Very true, though, those jobs also present significant occupational hazards, unlike software where the biggest threat you face is a sedentary lifestyle.

I’m a 15-year SWE. If I sat at a desk or in an office/cube all day I’d lose my marbles.

The software I write and ship also requires me to be able to grab a socket set, take panels off things, fish out DB9 connectors, run wiring, etc. testing also happens in heavy snow in the winter and high heat in the summer. Oh, lots of travel as well.

I’ve been interested in finding a different job, I’m just worried I would get very bored very quickly, tying together api calls or stitching together libraries.

Embedded software?

Kind of, yeah. Not in the traditional sense, it’s about 80% x86_64.

> the biggest threat you face is a sedentary lifestyle

Which is a serious threat, to be clear. It's just more easily mitigated.

It's absolutely a serious threat, but being easier to mitigate is the crux of the distinction I'm making.

Not as sure about electricians, but plumbers at least pay for it with their body. Even though PPE can reduce the strain, there's still a reason why these trades haven't just shot through the roof. Bad knees, bad backs, respiratory dangers, etc.

Trades in general are fraught with physical perils for the unaware.

i personally love the expectation of constant learning, growth and innovation in our field

but yes, anecdotally, compared to all of my friends and family, i don't know any profession with those same expectations. to name a few - market researchers, psychologists, primary school teachers.

I think it's the opposite, there is a growing bubble of interest in hiring for AI stuff. In 5 years time your RAG pipeline model training career is going to pop and become my new `brew install ai-thing`. If I need image recognition/generation or LLMs, I'll call openai APIs the way one might call stripe or Spotify APIs. Don't trust them? Claude. Don't trust anyone? Self-hosted with RAG will be good enough without model training and easy to use by then.

I am a web dev and I think I’ll stay relevant to earn a decent living as a web dev until I retire (it’s hard to predict 20 years ahead, but definitely the next 5-10 years at least).

It seems the author just want to change their career, not necessarily because of they won’t be able to earn money if they don’t.

I don't think web development is becoming irrelevant anytime soon.

I enjoy letter-writing. So should I go on writing physical letters to everyone today? Moving with technology is essential, not just for developers, but for public as well. The trap is that we have to do it even if we don't want to. E.g: your neighbor country has nukes and you don't.

> However, staying relevant to earn a decent living your entire life is difficult.

You either stay relevant (or close to relevant) or lose your job. Unfortunately, this is the field in the 2020s.

This is one of my favorite aspects. I love learning new things. I love being in a field where there are new things to learn every decade or so.

The fundamentals of how computers work are essentially unchanged since the 60s or 70s. If you have a strong foundation (typically a CS or CE degree), picking up new stuff shouldn't be particularly difficult.

I mean, I just had a PR merged in a language I had literally never used before. It took me five minutes to pick up the basics. Sure it would take much longer to be fully productive, but it would be a comfortable transition.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com