Re:Ask HN: Did you have early career doubts?
by the_only_law on Monday November 30, 2020 @12:56AM
(#25251111)
How do you do it though. Most of these niche’s want experts, particularly people with many years of professional experience. Every time I’ve tried to investigate a niche I’m interested in I’ve fallen flat. Others, such as scientific fields as you mention seem to fall back on heavy credentialism.
Re:Ask HN: Did you have early career doubts?
by softwaredoug on Monday November 30, 2020 @02:40PM
(#25257982)
You do it by some combination of:
- finding something in your job history that speaks to you. Some kind of thru line of experience or areas that really grabbed you
- professional development opportunities and/or team transfers you can do at existing jobs. At many places it’s possible to switch to adjacent teams. In many ways easier than getting hired outside the company.
- build a personal brand. Blog. Speak. Etc. Don’t be afraid you’re a newb. There’s a bigger audience for intro material than high end advanced stuff.
Decide on a path that’s a reasonable pivot from where you are now and use the above to try to navigate there.
The good thing is software development is now a skill underpinning many other fields. There are deeper tech specializations beyond just “software development”
Around my 30s I knew I wanted to stay technical and not go into management. I ended up specializing in search engines (like site search using Elasticsearch). I intentionally pushed hard into a personal brand and skills around the niche. It’s a very in demand space. It’s very hard. I still write lots of code. But it’s combinddd with domain knowledge, data science, nlp, and lots of other cool fields.
I have other friends that have specialized based on other opportunities their careers have presented them, including:
- legacy software refactoring and management
- native C development
- wireless protocols
- operating system internals and drivers
- A/B testing
- MySQL performance
- JavaScript front end performance
- Various scientific fields where coding is useful
There’s so many niches in demand that it’s really hard to think of software development as “one thing”. It really behooves you if you want to stay technical to build a brand around a consistent focus area that interests you. You’ll have more fun AND make more money.