Hacker News Reader

Comment by pvnick | Hacker News Reader

What have some of you more career-advanced HNers done to ensure yourselves employment as you guys age? I'm looking for tips to take into consideration through the years.

View on HN

I've grown my leadership skills. As much as I'd love to just code and keep my head down the simple reality is they expect me to step up and guide others. So I study management and process more than I study the latest techniques. Part of it bums me out but part of it is very exciting. I realize now at the latter end of two decades in this career that the true "big" problems in software are usually people or process related. If a project fails or succeeds depends much more on who does the work and how it gets planned and executed than what particular language or techniques you use.

So to sum it all up - I grow my leadership, management, and strategy skills.

Do you have any advice/pointers for someone who is looking to get started on this path?

I think the better course is to follow the Mr Money Mustache idea. Plan, save and invest on purpose, so that you can retire if you want to, or are forced to. Then do whatever you want. You don't have to retire, you can do exactly what you're doing now if you like. If no one wants what you do ... do something else, or "retire" (whatever that means to you).

Always do something newer at home than at work. This is really easy and cheap in CS/IT vs say chemistry or physics or medicine.

There's no need to have hardware at home faster than work. Software that's newer or more complicated than at work, sure.

Keep up with changes in the industry, just like any engineering career. I never fail to be amazed at meeting people who have no idea whats going on in tech outside their work department. They're doomed in the long run.

Coursera, Udacity etc are killer for this. Sure they're not work experience or academic credit but I've gotten positive comments "It shouldn't be a problem [that I didn't know their tech], you've picked up a lot of stuff". (Thinking about it now, I only assumed it included the Coursera work. But it can't have hurt.)

Learn 'the next thing' and get jobs (or volunteer!) doing 'the next thing', mod customer needs, your career goals and your tolerance for risk and change. I've moved from Fortran to PL/1 to C to C++ to VB5/VB6 to ASP to PHP to ASP.NET to R. It isn't pretty, but I've stayed employed for 30 years now, mostly in places that suited my needs/goals. Smarter people with better goals should have better career histories than I.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com