Ask HN: Have you successfully done a career do-over, and how did you do it?

I suspect its not as easy as many people make out.<p>I was a great C++&#x2F;OO dev for 10 years before I got bored, starting doing management, business focussed roles and more high level devops style work. After 10 years of that I wanted to move back into pure coding. With great experience should be easy right? Wrong.<p>I got a mid-level java&#x2F;python dev job and it was difficult, I was out of touch and everything was different or new. Languages, styles, CI&#x2F;CD, DI, git, containers, unit testing its a huge amount to learn. After a year I got laid off because I was getting paid like a senior but not keeping up with the grads.<p>A few years later I&#x27;m productive and useful in this new world but I dont really like it. I&#x27;m enjoying Scala and functional programming but with so many libraries and tools I feel like everything is so difficult and complicated. It takes a lot of study effort to keep up. Also I&#x27;m never sure if its because the applications I work on are badly designed, or I just dont really understand modern design. I have a business specialty which keeps me employable but I miss the old days when things were simpler.<p>Being &quot;old&quot; at 40+ really isn&#x27;t so easy - I&#x27;m not sure you can ever redeem yourself in the eyes of the industry. Best you can hope for is get a non-tech domain specialty and find a big stable company that values experience and try to keep working on interesting projects. Once you&#x27;re laid off or fired once its really hard to be the super confident hacker you were at 25.<p>EDIT - thinking about if you want advice. Get a business specialty or technical niche. Dont get too lazy, if you aren&#x27;t learning on the job for a few years in a row, change the tech in the project or leave. It should be easy to keep employed but you have to keep working at it. Best career money-wise is to move to management, but its difficult to move back. Dont take the high paying job on a dead end project without a plan to get out.

I got a super comfortable job for the past 15years as a work from home C++ server programmer. It has allowed me to be around and watch my kid grow rather than be away 8-6PM and just come home to dinner and put them to bed.<p>It was very good pay at the beginning but it hasn&#x27;t keep up and now it&#x27;s not that good (to bad either).<p>A few years ago I started playing with electronics (Arduinos, Raspberry PIs and stuff like that). After a while I started looking and picked up a few easy jobs related to that in Upwork as a way to do something different as doing the same thing for 15years can take it&#x27;s toll.<p>Shortly after I was picking more and more advanced jobs. I picked a few big clients and moved them off Upwork. I&#x27;m now doing advanced embedded system programming and electronic design as a side gig on weekends and afternoons and making more money than my main programming job (which I can&#x27;t seem to be able to leave).<p>And that&#x27;s the story of how I found an alternative to my comfortable job. If I ever leave it I will never go to an office again, I will just expand my embedded freelancing.

Thanks for the replies, everyone. Keep them coming! I didn&#x27;t expect this topic to get this popular.<p>The reason I asked this question is that I am facing a career slump as a software engineer, and finding out that the software industry is brutal if you don&#x27;t know how to carve a path for your own career.<p>And when I mean career slump, I really mean it. I&#x27;m living with my mom at age 35 which is quite the opposite of what someone expects of a software engineer at this age. Most people I know are buying&#x2F;have bought houses and starting families. And I&#x27;m not at a point of self-sustainability yet. I can barely keep up with the insurance payments of my own car, and just keep the vision of having my own place to live in (once more, as I lived alone before things got tough) close to my mind. No longer be dependent of my family, get some privacy, some autonomy and instead of living every day switching between errand boy and going to a coffee shop for the free internet, to apply to jobs, or simply taking a break from my parents.<p>So that&#x27;s pretty much me right now. I have 10 professional years of a &quot;whole lot of nothing&quot;, no big signs of progression, maturity, or taking on more responsibilities. I didn&#x27;t major in Computer Science, but I still expected my first programming job to be like, getting a mentor, working alongside a group of (in-house!) programmers, being able to ask them many questions and learn all about formal development practices.<p>Well, I got none of that in the places that I worked at. So seeing your stories gives me a good idea and hope that I can just move on from the past and have better companies approach me with hope and optimism, like I&#x27;m a bona-fide junior eager to learn.

Can&#x27;t speak on it personally but about 3-4 years ago during my last job search I searched a few &quot;Getting a dev job after 30&quot; type queries. I was around that age and concerned about all the ageism claims. Apparently there are forums full of former developers either out of the industry or struggling to remain in it. There was a lot of talk about depression and guys being suicidal because they couldn&#x27;t keep up with the industry, etc. Really eye opening to me at the time as the industry seemed strong as ever, even for outdated stacks.<p>If you&#x27;re not getting any offers that&#x27;s one thing I guess, but imposter syndrome is real in the industry. We all worry about being up to some rockstar level and all the grueling interview processes out there. Then we brush up for a couple of weeks, hit the market, and field multiple offers again.

47 here. I drove my career into a dead-end.<p>Always been a generalist. Tried many times to do startups and saas products. It never got me anywhere. Between my projects, I worked as a freelancer, while living in many different countries. I took anything I could get. Earned enough money, then tried again. I have broad work experience, but nothing deep. Started a family late in life (with 44). Now I feel my career is a dead-end. Plus I seem to have lost my ability to put up with all that technological mess and the ever-new-shiny-thing.<p>I&#x27;m in a real slump. It&#x27;s been a long time that I slept well.<p>Last year I created an online course. It&#x27;s self-hosted and on Udemy. Compared to the time I have invested it generates peanuts, but I enjoyed the process of teaching.<p>So this is my plan out of the slump: teaching and corporate training. I figure that once I have created sufficient products, I may be able to make a living. And I&#x27;m trying to get my foot into corporate training. Though I&#x27;m an introvert, I do enjoy a lot helping others to learn and acquire skills.<p>I&#x27;m working on my public speaking abilities as well. Last year I gave a talk at a conference. I was nervous as hell, but at least some seem to have enjoyed my talk.<p>It&#x27;s a long hard way, but I feel it&#x27;s the only viable for me.<p>btw - if anyone here wants to chat, get in touch, email in profile.

I started out doing telephone technical support 20+ years ago.<p>After the bubble in 2000 I moved back to NYC to work with my dad as a Private Investigator. I did that for 8 years until I realized I was too young for that life.<p>I applied to only one grad program (RISD) because their ID program sounded interesting and I wanted to get into the design world. Focusing on only one school made it a challenge and allowed me to fine tune everything. Like a cosmic coin flip.<p>After finishing up the program in 2010 (I specifically wanted a 2 year program because of the double hit of negative income and cost) my wife and I moved out to the Bay Area. I went from taking an internship at a design firm ($15&#x2F; hr as a 36yo is humbling) to my current role of building out a UX design team of 20 designers in Providence, RI.<p>In the 7 years of working in the Bay Area I burned through 8 jobs. Some were wonderful stepping stones, some were side tracks, a few were painful situations of treading water with waves constantly going over my head — but all were learning experiences that made my skillset hard to beat in the marketplace.<p>My current role is funding my family (oh yeah, had 2 kids in that 7 year span…. Don’t drink the water in Rockridge unless you want kids) to relocate back to Providence, RI. It feels nice to come full circle back to the place that gave me a chance to experiment and reinvent myself.<p>My advice… life is about collecting experiences. Don’t let any single experience define you. Be proud of your accomplishments, learn from your failures, and be nice to everyone you work with. My network has helped me out countless times.<p>Everyone roots for the underdog.

It&#x27;s all about latching on to domain expertise. Rarely is a developer a pure technologist, there is always some niche you&#x27;ve become involved in whether it be related to payments or UX or a subset of businesses functions. Assuming you have some meaningful knowledge of something non-technical, you can take that with you into a different area of software development.<p>I&#x27;ve transitioned across various technical roles by understanding software architecture, business process mapping, master data management, manufacturing, and a slew of other relatively niche areas of domain expertise. I don&#x27;t think my work was anything unique, I was just aware of the niche components of the projects I worked on and did a good job marketing that knowledge.

I fell into an obscure technology stack out of college (AS&#x2F;400...in 2005). It was comfortable, but technologically unsatisfying and completely useless for my resume. I kept my skills sharp after hours, and then took a pay cut to jump ship to a &quot;proper&quot; programming job, which lead me to a <i>great</i> high paying remote gig after a scant 18 months there. It was for a lot of reasons, and it was scary (had my first kid shortly before the jump), but it was completely worth it and not <i>that</i> hard. Just, be good at it.

I was working as a .NET Developer (still do), but around 2010, I was neck deep in a codebase that was passing around DataSets, stuck in VB.NET, no real leveraging of code. I interviewed for Amazon and tanked miserably, which was a wake up call for me as I wasn&#x27;t aware how much I had let my skills slip.<p>I knew I had hit something of a low point so I started learning on my own again outside of work. I picked up several non-MS languages and technologies which helped me to understand better how I should be using the MS stack. I eventually found DDD, CQRS, distributed computing, and other concepts that colored my design perspective. I petitioned for, and through threat of leaving, got the department permission to use C# and I started to refactor code when I touched it.<p>It was a tough road. I sometimes didn&#x27;t have patience with myself, but I started counting the little victories and kept going from there.<p>I am currently learning front-end frameworks, ES6, and Typescript. Nobody asked me to. I just know I will learn something in the process that I can apply in the future even if I never get a job related to this tech.

I&#x27;m not sure what this means: <i>What did you do to redeem yourself in the eyes of your respective industry?</i><p>Are you talking about someone who screwed up enough times that the mean free distance to a negative referral is essentially 1.0 ? I don&#x27;t see industries as having &#x27;eyes&#x27; but I have known industries that are relatively small communities.<p>I have known, and hired, a number of people who have &#x27;redone&#x27; their career when the thing they started with didn&#x27;t pan out, a chemist into a QA person, a semiconductor process engineer into a UNIX developer, a mom into a product manager. That sort of &#x27;do over&#x27;.<p>And I&#x27;ve met folks who &#x27;grew up&#x27; in a company doing one thing for 15 to 20 years and then failed to find an opportunity to continue doing that thing. Only to switch into a different career all together. Most commonly that is, &quot;Hey you weren&#x27;t you 20 years at BigCorp? What are you doing these days, &#x27;mostly consulting&#x27;&quot; sorts of conversations.

I have done a career do-over. I took a lower paying position that involved pair programming. It was like developer rehab after the startup grind left me wondering if I could even contribute as a programmer anymore. The firm had a good reputation and recruiters were all over me, which was good. Then I took a much higher paying enterprise type job where it doesn&#x27;t matter how I code and there is no point in doing anything better. Not sure what my next move will be, might get knighted as a data scientist soon, who knows. Good luck!

I believe this is a time when a lot of software engineers are asking the hard questions about their careers.<p>Here&#x27;s why: The technologies have become simpler and the barriers to entry have become low. Once upon a time, if you knew the mainstream languages (C++ and Java) it meant you paid your dues learning the hard stuff. Today, with nodejs becoming mainstream, and the cloud at the backend, developers who come from an &quot;html programming&quot; background can now build scalable and enterprise grade applications without breaking a sweat.<p>That leaves the &quot;hard core&quot; dev in a little bit of a fix. &quot;Where do I go from here?&quot; The front end is where the complexity is today. Its hard to compete in the AI and machine learning roles when there are phds doing this for ten years who are on the same table. Devops is also simple enough for someone with 3 years of experience of be on top of the game.<p>Now add to that the fact that the number of devs with 8 years of experience (what I consider the senior dev) grows bigger and bigger each year..<p>The next slow down I believe will be brutal to our industry.

I was a Fortran developer for a few years in the Aerospace business. After a while, I got sick of 1977 and just wanted to be a &quot;regular&quot; full stack guy.<p>At the time Rails 2.X was current and Clojure was pretty new. Both looked pretty neat. I learned Rails and Clojure on my free time, went through Michael Hartl&#x27;s Twitter knockoff to learn, and applied for jobs.<p>Nobody really loved how little I knew about modern web dev, but several told me they could see I was bright-ish and sufficiently motivated that they&#x27;d take the chance. It was hard and stressful at first, because I didn&#x27;t know <i>anything</i> (JavaScript, jQuery, what&#x27;s a &quot;callback&quot; function?, etc.) but I picked it up fairly quickly.<p>Made $80K my first year (pretty good junior dev salary in Texas) and it&#x27;s been better every year since.

Not sure how applicable this is, but I’ve gone back to school to get an M.Eng now that I know I don’t want to do (or only have the skills for) applications development forever. The focus is ML&#x2F;AI but I’ve found a surprising amount of enjoyment out of working with hardware in the rapid prototyping class I’m currently taking. In retrospect, sticking with just one domain was probably why I got bored in the first place.<p>I haven’t necessarily switched careers, but it’s still not easy. If I could go back and give myself one piece of advice, it would be to knuckle down and learn differential equations and linear algebra. That’s the difference between understanding how machine learning works and tinkering around with TensorFlow.

I was a bored private equity lawyer, working like a ninja, ashamed by my firm’s clients. I did a one year Masters in Environmental Economics, did some really interesting work and then joined someone else’s start-up and ran a few side projects. That gave me the experience and confidence to really go out on my own. To anyone else about to pivot their life I would say: 1. A British one year masters (not an MBA) is a great way to build a network and learn enough skills to make a fist of your next step, learningon the job. 2. Don’t do an MBA. Ever. 3. Learn start-up skills on someone else’s start-up before blowing your own cash on your own dumb-ass mistakes. 4. Read Hacker News everyday!

Aren&#x27;t most software engineers already doing this?<p>Initially I was SDET, doing a bunch of boring JUnit work.<p>Then I wanted to get into video game industry while I was still young. Learned Microsoft Visual C++ along the way.<p>Then I got sick of the video game industry, the internet industry looks pretty cool, so I switched to it. Picked up PHP, Python, and Ruby all together at the same time.<p>Then I got sick of SysAdmin telling me what to do, so I learned a bunch of Linux skills and config management to become DevOps.<p>And I am kind of there now. I always fantasize of working on native mobile app, maybe one day I will make a switch again.

Mine is a similar story to others, although I can&#x27;t really say if it&#x27;s a success or not.<p>For the past eight years I&#x27;ve been a C# developer, working my way up from mid-level to senior developer across a number of companies. I&#x27;ve built dozens of websites, contributed to open-source projects, and have given talks at local user groups.<p>The problem with being a single-stack person, especially in the .NET world, is that you look on at your peers on the Linux stack and wonder if you&#x27;re missing out, so I left a cushy job as a senior developer at a large agency to be a standard developer at a software firm, one that focuses on everything but .NET.<p>I&#x27;m a month in, and it&#x27;s been hard going from being the guy that knows things to the guy that struggles. Getting to grips with Linux and the terminal was surprisingly easy (probably because I was an avid Powershell user on Windows), but I&#x27;ve struggled to learn languages and frameworks quick enough. I have enough of a grasp of Python and Ruby to be able to look at code and know what&#x27;s going on, but I&#x27;m still miles behind others, and it feels like a gap that won&#x27;t be easily&#x2F;quickly solved, regardless of the time I put into learning&#x2F;doing. Despite the logic being almost exactly the same, it&#x27;s crazy how one can go from making stupid mistakes in a PHP script to fixing a long-standing bug in an ASP.NET MVC site in the space of a minute.

I think what this thread is highlighting more than anything is the importance of building real, meaningful relationships as you progress through your career.<p>As you progress, make a name for yourself as someone that delivers and build relationships with people. It&#x27;s amazing how willing people are down the line to bring them on to their team&#x2F;company in different roles if they already know you to be good and enjoyable to work with.<p>I&#x27;m already 33, and this is something I haven&#x27;t been the best at, so definitely a wake up call for me.

Did embedded software for a couple decades at numerous companies. Was good at it, but saw the path was going to slowly drift into the weeds (company was aspiring to build products competing with what competitors had discarded as obsolete). Noticed one of those rare ground-floor technology shift opportunities was occurring in the industry...<p>Told my students in my side&#x2F;after-hours gig as professor &quot;there&#x27;s a rare ground-floor technology shift opportunity occurring in the industry, now&#x27;s your chance...&quot;<p>A friend was co-founder of a startup. One day, while in his home for unrelated reasons, he was on the phone with CIO lamenting their [then] inability to find iOS developers. He saw me, pointed, shouted &quot;don&#x27;t leave!&quot;, hung up, and asked if I wanted to do iOS development. &quot;Yes!&quot; I replied with enthusiasm. He then asked if I actually <i>knew</i> iOS development. &quot;No! but I&#x27;d jump at the chance &amp; reason to learn!&quot; We arranged a 6-month trial period, I worked long hard nights learning &amp; implementing iOS code, and within 3 months was hired as the 2nd employee.<p>A few years later, that business was sold, and moved on to doing apps for major corporations.<p>Upshot: technology &amp; business path was stalling out, used an opportune connection to take a risk in jumping to the near-start of a new yet equivalent technology path. Was able to leverage deep &quot;magic&quot; skills (intuition, arcane knowledge, refined techniques) to &quot;do-over&quot; my career, starting with decades of experience into a realm just years old.

I&#x27;m dealing with this right now. I have a ton of experience--since I was a young teenager, in fact--of being a software developer, mostly in positions of technical leadership. Most of my resume consists of architect jobs. And yet, to pay the bills, explore a new area of the country, and expand on complimentary skills, I took a job as a senior DevOps engineer contractor at Idaho National Laboratory. Since my contract ended and I&#x27;ve started applying for jobs again, it feels like I&#x27;m being treated as damaged goods. I can&#x27;t tell whether it&#x27;s the fact I live in the Idaho Falls area or whether it&#x27;s the Senior DevOps Engineer title. I get the standard &quot;We&#x27;ve decided to pursue other candidates&quot; non-reason. I have no data on which to base tactical changes to my approach. My applications are just falling into a black hole.<p>I know I am a very qualified candidate for any of these positions, <i>and</i> I have lots of GitHub contributions where people can actually see my work. That doesn&#x27;t seem to be enough, however. Can&#x27;t I just talk to a <i>real</i> person? My communication skills are excellent, and whenever I <i>have</i> gotten in front of the hiring manager, it nearly always leads to an offer. Am I the victim of algorithm-driven hiring?<p>To plug myself a bit: If anyone is looking for an experienced .NET architect who&#x27;s done a bit of everything (including my own startup), drop me a line. I favor working remotely but I&#x27;ll relocate to a desirable area for the right position. [nathan] at aldenfamily |dot| net.<p>Oh, and OP, you didn&#x27;t mention if your question applies to you, but if it does, hang in there. We don&#x27;t have much control over the ridiculous state of hiring in IT, so there&#x27;s not much we can do except plug along.

My first programming job out of school was on really obsolete tech: IBM Unibasic aka Pick Basic in an ERP system. It&#x27;s a career trap on par with taking a COBOL programming job right out of university: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;medium.com&#x2F;@csixty4&#x2F;pick-was-post-relational-before-it-was-cool-ed610c9d0f14" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;medium.com&#x2F;@csixty4&#x2F;pick-was-post-relational-before-...</a><p>I broke out and rebooted my career by quitting and going to grad school full time and getting a Master&#x27;s degree in CS from a fancier university in a tech hub city. My phone blew up with recruiters when I graduated and posted my resume online.

Does anyone have any stories of career do-overs that aren&#x27;t just a renaming of &quot;software engineer&quot; on both sides?

I reached the end of my career progression in IT Architecture. Started as a Solutions Architect, then reached Enterprise Architect. And there&#x27;s no where to go after that.<p>So I took the leap and tried something different - became a Product Architect focusing on a specific technology. Now I&#x27;m a Mobile Product Manager, something that pays (probably) less than an Enterprise Architect, but tests out new skills like investment proposals.<p>My ultimate end goal is CTO. I think having an end goal in mind helps me focus on what do I need to do in this job or the next that gets me closer to that goal.

I got too comfortable and thought I dont need to be harassed or witness others being harassed. I&#x27;m leaving this craphole and I&#x27;ll be able to get another job when Im ready to go back to work. That was June of last year and I was ready to get back to work in September. Yet all those recruiters knocking on my door and landing me 30 phone &amp; in person interviews never prompted an offer. Though six long months later and as of two weeks ago I started a new gig.<p>Im not sure why it took so long as it never did before, but it&#x27;s either there is more supply then before for UI&#x2F;UX Designer &amp; Developers roles, I&#x27;m getting old(42), I do both design &amp; development which the UX side ppl say Im not experienced in the study testing where this button should go(let&#x27;s talk about that for hours) to developers saying I dont know React. Also, I thought ppl in my field might have been talking about how I just up and left my last job without mentioning the harassment(after Me Too movement started to roll i reached out to the heads of this big company reminding them that I reported a female colleague&#x27;s harassment was ignored then harassed myself .. im a dude).<p>Overall I am glad that&#x27;s behind me&#x2F;working now and it just took time and potentially making ppl shut up about me when they dont know the whole story.

I&#x27;m not sure whether this qualifies exactly, but when I first got into tech I thought ops was what I wanted to do. I always dabbled in programming (I did learn rails when it first came out) and followed generally the state of web development, but my skills simply never developed in that direction. I was boxed in by my job, and I learned nothing new there. I ultimately decided there was no path forward - so I went backwards.<p>I switched from a senior Linux admin to a junior rails development job a bit over one year ago now.<p>It&#x27;s humbling to start over at my age. The degree to which one can specialize in IT is striking, and the amount of knowledge you learn and internalize is vast. I learn something new nearly every day now, and little (though some) of my prior skillset directly translates.<p>I&#x27;m very glad I took this step, but it&#x27;s not been easy. I think a lot of humility is required, especially for somebody who is comfy and well established in their current position. But I&#x27;m lucky enough to work somewhere with patient and helpful colleagues, who do not view my age and lack of direct experience as a detriment.<p>One benefit of starting over when you&#x27;re older: this time around, I fully realize how much I don&#x27;t know, and I&#x27;m never afraid to ask stupid questions. The same was certainly not true of 24 year old me.

I was at one of the FANG companies for 6+ years, joined right after graduation. However, I couldn&#x27;t get senior due to me being naive (I have no ego, hence wasn&#x27;t able to collaborate effectively with teammates, pissed a few off a few times), positioning of the product (none of my team members got promoted to senior while I was in that team). Last year I opted to change my jobs when my promo was denied again. I had hard time finding other teams to switch to (because of mentions of pissing off people) and also was completely bored of my existing team. FWIW, my technical work was never in question, just that no one supported me at promo times etc.<p>I am now in another good software company (similar to FANG, probably a level lower in terms of core compsci ability). The big change I have done is to accept that not everyone is learning all the time and not to try to do the same (its software engineering not research). I learnt this throughout the interview process by talking to lot of good college friends (who also work in tech in Bay Area) and acquaintainces recommended by friends.<p>My change isn&#x27;t complete yet, hoping that this change will lead to better collaboration with team members and work output. Job title might improve too at some point in the future, though I am not too worried about it.

In university, I was studying biology. In my free time however, one day I had the strange desire to build a simple app that would simulate the solar system.<p>After spending months learning how to build software, I realized just how deeply satisfying software development was to me. So I started doing small, low paid freelance work building apps to build up a portfolio. Every time a project ended, I’d move on to bigger projects with higher pay. I’ve never looked back. I dropped out of school and my passion &amp; skill have grown ever since. Eventually I had a good resume and the recruiters came to me.<p>Now I am working at an amazing company in the Bay Area. I love it. It’s a job where I actually look forward to going to work every day, which is fortunate and lucky.<p>Given that the software world is always changing, I am always learning something new. Lately I’ve been learning React-Native.

I owned a brick &amp; mortar business and decided I couldn&#x27;t keep doing it. The particular type of business has a late-night lifestyle attached to it, and a crowd that I felt was &quot;bringing me down.&quot;<p>I left the business (I&#x27;m still a silent partner) and took a web development job. I had been building my own websites &amp; things for about a decade by then, but had no professional experience.<p>I&#x27;m 5 or 6 years in now and getting bored with it. The bulk of the learning is over.<p>My life has been a series of big changes and disparate job-types, and it feels like another one is on the horizon. I sometimes lament not being the best-in-class in almost any discipline, but I find that I&#x27;m adequate or above-average in a great many things and there&#x27;s maybe some comfort to be had in that.

After so many years of growth and development in any industry, you have to change and shift to stay relevant.<p>A big part of being relevant is being interested. If you aren&#x27;t relevant or interested, you aren&#x27;t of any value in that particular niche of that particular industry.<p>What I chose to do when faced with this was to move into an adjacent field where my skills were applicable and relevant to the new and interesting challenge.<p>When the situation arose yet again, I took the knowledge gained by having applied my skills in new ways to focus on applying them in a constant state of change to help others in different niches.<p>It&#x27;s all one big spiral staircase of shark&#x27;s teeth, where there is no shortage of change, growth or people willing to take your place.

Early 2000s, I was a full time procrastinator, college introvert, MTG&#x2F;DND geek and homework&#x2F;thesis freelancer. German government increased fees to a point which I could no more afford it, so I dropped out and found a real job.

Started off as a concept artist for a few years, then started doing particle effects, moved into 3d environment modeling for a few years, and did a few characters, then moved into character modeling for a few years, then animation, then character rigging, then rigging automation through mel script for a few years. then worked as a technical artist for several years, then learned more programming stuff, then wrote a bunch of unreal script for a few projects for a few more years, then learned C# for unity and now i&#x27;ve been writing C# for VR apps for a while...

Often, it&#x27;s the situation that architects your decisions. If you can delay debts and dependencies, you can afford to do more. Live within your means. Downsize your needs. Practice frugality.

Everyone should read<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.kalzumeus.com&#x2F;2011&#x2F;10&#x2F;28&#x2F;dont-call-yourself-a-programmer&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.kalzumeus.com&#x2F;2011&#x2F;10&#x2F;28&#x2F;dont-call-yourself-a-pr...</a><p>Tl,dr: do not be the guy who writes code in x language for y bucks &#x2F; hour and applies to vacancies online. Be the guy who generates business value and talks to people in the industry. Start doing it today!

I got my Ph.D. in physics in 2010, worked for about 1 year in research then took a year to try and build my own startup while collecting unemployment. I didn&#x27;t successfully get a startup going but I learned enough web development during that time that I have been doing it professionally ever since.

Get another job. “Stopped being a good hire for other reasons” makes it sounds like you’re experiencing a lot of rejection. Finding a new job is a numbers game, but also the more you search, the better you get at interviewing. Don’t give up, treat your job search like a full time job, be diligent.

I don&#x27;t think it&#x27;s a good idea for people like me..<p>I&#x27;d rather try to figure out a way to make my career (my skills) fun again. And find a way to get curious.<p>Or, to expand slightly past my skillset ( like management ), and learn that skillset, but as a superset of my existing skills.

This industry is the very definition of career do-over. Every 5 years or so we change our activities. No one writes code or design like 20 years ago. With a career of 50 years, we are all doomed to have to change.<p>Adapt over time. Don&#x27;t just jump. Take on new responsibilities. You will find experience crosses many fields. It&#x27;s a lot about domain knowledge (e.g. financial industry) and we carry a lot of stuff over with us. Never undersell yourself, experience is king. Always be keen on learning, asking questions to younger self. Cross pollinate, experiment and be curious. Too many old devs just corner themselves. They shouldn&#x27;t, they have a gezillion experiences and it always comes down to a race condition ;)

I was a Symbian S40 app developer, after that Symbian C++ S60, developing J2ME applets. Left the job, launched my own app. Made first million doing that! Then I recreated the same app for Blackberry then finally Android, made tons of money doing this. Then it got soo crowded, clones kept coming and I lost my competitive edge. Then I launched a web app in a niche and built SaaS business. At this point - I had all money I ever wanted but I lost motivation, I started getting back to my roots. Hacking on projects, building expertise across dozens of different technologies. It was as if I am trying to justify what I&#x27;ve earned. Naive me! But then I realized that tho I am among the people who claim technology as their passion but this is not what attracted me to this field. What attracted me was a solving problem which many had in common. So, I left hacking and started building small products again. Launching 4-5 more products, all successful - I never failed at anything. But still, sometimes I feel that I just keep getting lucky. This thing still haunts me till date. I am not able to relax or take a day off either. Life has become hell lately, I feel I&#x27;ve to fight to survive. The world just doesn&#x27;t make any sense to me!

Yep I was a programmer at a university until 2002 when I had driven my own career into the ditch along with my personal life. I had to start over from a lower position after gathering my wits about me, and work my way back up.<p>The hardest part was getting that second chance, if you had a more senior job and you&#x27;re applying for a lower one it&#x27;s obvious to people there&#x27;s something going on there. Your best bet is going to be honesty, and convey very clearly you&#x27;ve learned from your mistakes and that you want to improve, your open to feedback, etc.<p>Good luck.

i am somewhat bemused that this got 38 upvotes in 16 minutes. i have no idea how hacker news&#x27; new page works.