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Comment by butlike | Hacker News Reader

Tell me how to paradigm shift careers and I'll get out of your hair and stop shipping uninspired features.

But, right now I'm paralyzed with fear in how to make a successful career switch without starting from literally "new grad level." I have wisdom, so it doesn't feel like I should have to start at the bottom rung again. Egotistically, I don't even mind, it's just the salary hit that would be the main issue.

Maybe it's not even a paradigm shift (though, I've always wanted to work on film productions). I've sort of lost the passion for being an IC, but how can I make a transition to management without any management experience? Should I just apply for a managerial role and in the cover letter state management is my intended path for growth?

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>> Egotistically, I don't even mind, it's just the salary hit that would be the main issue.

This is whare I am right now. Even senior positions have dropped 50-60K in range so I've effectively priced myself out of a lateral move because I would be taking a massive hit in salary for the same role I'm doing now. I'm currently at a company that continues to lay people off in lieu of offshore talent and AI. I'm stuck in a weird state of purgatory.

>> Should I just apply for a managerial role and in the cover letter state management is my intended path for growth?

I know many of my friends in senior dev roles have put their resume in Claude and said they were interested in moving into a management role and had Claude revamp their resume into something that was more management focused. Three of them were hired quite quickly not only based on their dev backgrounds with mentoring, training and light management of junior devs, but having enough emerging AI skills they said helped them close the deal.

Interesting. Thanks for that last anecdote. I feel you on the weird state of purgatory. I'm confident we'll find a path forward, though. Gotta keep your head up

I've decided to take that salary hit. I want to stay an IC and work somewhere that doesn't effectively require a 996 schedule to keep up with openclaw slop for PR count stack ranking purposes. It really depends on your financial situations, but I've seen the human cost of very high compensation jobs on myself and some things are worth more than money.

Same man. I hate everything about this career path right now, but even real (civil, structural) engineers get paid massively less. I think I’ve just come to a realization that software engineering salaries are just massively inflated, especially for those of us that just do the programming part and not the actual engineering part.

It just seems like there’s a reckoning coming for our field. I’m going to keep doing it, I don’t see any other choice right now.

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