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Comment by nunez | Hacker News Reader

> Working at Techtonic was the best possible early-career experience I think anyone could have had. They did contract development, a lot of which was greenfield Saas MVP launches, across various tech stacks. There was not a lot of time for mentorship so it a very "trial-by-fire" experience -- either figure things out and ship stuff, or get the boot.

I *always* tell older people looking to switch into tech to start at agencies/contracting firms for this reason.

They are much more likely to hire people without experience, invest in your training (even if it's training by fire), and because they are usually heavy cert-driven, they'll pay for certs as well.

It doesn't pay well, and the work can be brutal (nights and weekends; on-call) but it's a great way to get the experience needed to get the job that does if you're starting from zero.

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On the other hand, people with that sort of experience tend to have the worst instincts when it comes to actual maintenance and long-term development of projects. They're great at starting projects, and fast too, but rarely considers the design carefully enough so you don't need a full rewrite once every year just to continue being able to add features. Slow is fast in those cases, and the people who are experts in "greenfield SaaS MVP launches" basically operate with short-term expedience traded for long-term maintainability.

Not to say they cannot learn that, but worth being aware if you're building something long-term and does hiring for that sort of project, to be upfront that the development process will likely be very different compared to what they're used to.

Ha! I started my career in a company where I had to pump out custom web apps as fast as humanly possible. The apps were successful, and then I had to maintain them for several years. That's where the real learning occurred. I learned the cost of every one of my shortcuts and poor design decisions the hard way.

Many years ago, some famous developer said, "Always write your code as if the person who's going to maintain it is a violent psychopath who knows where you live." As I fixed my poor design choices one by one over endless late nights, I sometimes felt the anger of a violent psychopath toward the former, ignorant me who had stupidly plagued current me with all these problems.

When you learn the hard way, you know exactly why good design decisions are considered good. In later jobs, one of my fundamental goals for every new project was "I never want me or anyone else to have to answer a 3 a.m. call about why this system isn't working."

> It doesn't pay well, and the work can be brutal (nights and weekends; on-call) but it's a great way to get the experience needed to get the job that does if you're starting from zero.

sadly that's a non-starter for a lot of people in this economy. doubly so if you have kids.

> sadly that's a non-starter for a lot of people in this economy. doubly so if you have kids.

Seems to me like if it's the option on the table, and you have a family to take care of, then it would absolutely be a starter. If there are other options, then there are other options, but if you're just starting it's fairly likely that you need to prepare yourself for a battle. I don't see how "this economy" makes that anything but more true. I don't even have kids but I sure as hell wouldn't be picky if I did and was just getting going.

What would be a non-starter is no job or no pay for work.

This lacks perspective of the position of OP and people like him. For them, stringing together multiple full and part time minimum wage jobs is the norm. Not having health insurance is the norm. Extreme commutes, often not by car, is the norm. Are these kinds of consulting jobs great? No, probably not. Better compensation and hours than the alternative? Almost certainly.

Consider how he and his wife were surviving before he got back into tech. That's the norm for a lot of people.

lots of people with kids take jobs with a lot of hours that don't pay well...

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