I made the jump 5 years ago and have worked for a number of companies since, on 6-12 month contracts. The money has jumped each time, such that I’m on what I consider to be silly money now for the job I do — Ireland, not US.
The work is always interesting for at least 6 months and I learn a ton of new stuff with every contract, much of which I use when building my own products (Downtime between contracts).
Every aspect of contracting is better than being permanent: the ability to jump ship quickly without affecting my hireability, the exposure to so many different technologies and different ways of doing things, the constant freshness of new things and new people, the ideas that come with seeing how different teams create and build different software, the ease with which you can step into new contracts (often one 30 minute interview as opposed to multipel interviews tests and take home projects for perm roles), and of course the money.
In terms of learning, each contract is like spending 3 years in a permie job, and I’ve had 7 in the past 5 years.
I've been contracting for two years now, and I agree with the majority of what you said. (UK here)
However, I've recently started considering returning to permanent, primarily for one reason. At the age of 50, half of which has been in a software development career, I find being a code-monkey -- even a senior one -- quite unsatisfying. I would like to return to leadership roles I had while I was permanent, but they are nearly impossible to find as contracts.
I concur. Consulting works for some people. Myself included.
Two years ago, I went one step further and moved from SF Bay area to Saigon, Vietnam. I've had a variety of tech jobs while here, but I am currently consulting for two primarily US based companies.
My expenses are almost nil (compared with before) and I live a very minimal lifestyle (own and purchase very little). I plan on going nomadic in the next couple months (I've never been technically homeless) and driving a motorbike around Vietnam, Cambodia and wherever else I want. I can work during the week and travel on the weekends.
I'm so much happier with my life. I was doing it wrong before.
I'd be interested in hearing from some US-based contractors who feel the same. The thing that has stopped me going down that road is the insane health insurance costs here.
I was a contractor for 4 years before going back to perm mainly because of health insurance costs (I'm in the US). One of the troubles I had switching back to perm is that my future employer looked at my resume and saw me as a "hopper" since most of my contacts were 6 months to a year long. Luckily I had a friend already working at the company that put in a good word for me. But this experience made me think twice about doing contracting again. This is really the only negative thing about contacting I've encountered. It's a great way to be introduced to a variety of different environments and get a large bump in pay.
I made the jump to contracting 2 years ago and it was an unmitigated disaster. Clients would change course and drop me, leaving me without a revenue stream. I was always playing catch-up, and had actual work less than half of the time, the rest consumed with trying to drum up more business. I read a bunch of consulting books, which all said the same thing: Get satisfied customers and leverage them to expand. But that presents a bit of a chicken and egg problem while your finances sink dangerously low.
If it works for you, great, but there's a lot more to it than people in the business will say.
I'm also based in Ireland, would you mind giving a range for what you consider 'silly' money? My impression is that Contracting works well at lower salaries but once you move into the higher tax bracket (40%) then the the disadvantages of contracting start to outweigh the benefits as most of the additional income is eaten up by tax.
That does sound like an ideal career path to me – I'm one of those people who gets bored with everything far too quickly. What's your tech stack and how did you make the switch?
Taking a chance and joining a very large corporation.
Previously I was all about startups or small companies and was very much against the mega-corp environment.
Over several months a colleague "recruited" me to join their team and I don't regret it.
I've been able to climb pretty high within this corp and it has been a wild ride. Never in a million years would I have thought I'd have any sort of influence over technology strategy that one of the largest US corporations would follow for the next decade.
So, I've learned to keep an open mind and not let preconceived notions on how others do business until I see it for myself. If I had not done this I'd still be hopping from start-up to start-up.
I did something similar. The HN community had been pretty much my virtual mentor ever since I stumbled upon here. Consequently, I had a subconsciously ingrained aversion for BigCorps and joined a (3 person)startup right out of college.
On hindsight, I consider it a mistake. Micromanagement, lack of depth in terms of engineering & vision made me rethink my career path. Joined a BigCorp as a result and I regret not doing it early enough.
Work-life balance, clear decision makings, freedom to experiment with new tech, time to work on personal projects, financial stability and most importantly ability to bring real impact to real users – I clearly see now things that I'd have missed if I continued with that startup.
Were you able to remain technical as your rank and responsibilities expanded? Or did you need to move into a management-only role to reach a turning point in the "influence" you mentioned?
Did you feel like you had agency when you first started? I'm talking to a Global 500 for a senior engineering role and I'm super torn. The role seems cool, but I like my agency and have alot of it currently. It's a hard thing to risk giving up.
>Taking a chance and joining a very large corporation.
I have two questions if you don't mind answering.
How large is the company you are referring to? 10K people? 100K, 250K, 500K?
What type of company is it? A company that builds and sells mostly software, or a company that uses software to sell something else (e.g. automobiles?). Amazon+AWS is a an example that is a hybrid of both.
I was a mid-level developer at a large software company making a very competitive salary and quit to join the U.S. Marine Corps and train to become a Naval Aviator.
I'm now a 'mid-level' AH-1Z pilot.
I work longer hours and have generally a lower quality of life but there's something to be said for the immensely unique things I've gotten to do and how profoundly well-rounded the entire experience has made me.
I will be re-entering the software industry in a few years unless another passion pulls me in some new direction.
The military is obviously not for everyone but picking up the phone, ducking into a side conference room across from my cube, and giving a verbal commit to my 'recruiter' that day (after a years-long selection process) has been the best decision I've ever made.
Circa-2000 I was in my final year of university and working as a Windows service desk monkey in the SysAdmin team of a Sydney-based company that developed a platform for hosting (legitimate, regulated) gambling websites.
Sun Microsystems happened to be across the road from us. My mind was blown the first time I saw the value of the invoices for servers and Solaris licenses that we bought both for ourselves and on behalf of our customers. That's where a lot of those dotcom-era "investment" dollars ended up - at Sun.
One day we needed a router + firewall for some internal service. One of the Unix sysadmins in the team grabbed a spare i386 desktop PC, stuck a 2nd NIC in it, installed Slackware Linux and configured ipchains. Job done: no budget, no managerial approval, no licenses, nothing. I couldn't believe it.
I asked him about Linux and after learning more came to the conclusion that it could basically do most things that Solaris could do but was 1) free and 2) ran on cheap, commodity hardware.
That was the writing on the wall for me. I taught myself Linux and pretty soon had my first bona-fide Linux Sysadmin job. Linux went on to become the OS that runs the world and I've never struggled to find relatively interesting, well-paid work since then.
Does anyone have advice for starting on a path towards sysadmin work?
Ive used linux for years, I develop on a chromebook running an all cli ubuntu chroot and have loved working this way for the past two years. Im very interested in devops (Im a fullstack JS freelancer) and enjoy working with servers and the cloud a lot. But Ive never considered myself “learn-ed” in the ways of linux.
I have the time to devote to linux sysadmin training, and intend to do so.
Specifically:
What areas of linux knowledge are most useful from an employer’s standpoint that would make a candidate attractive? Is it mostly experience architecting systems in production?
I think devops as a realm of work is very interesting, and would like to gain experience doing it professionally to find out if I’d want to pursue it longer term.
Beyond joining a team and learning from real world applications, is there anything useful you would recommend I look into? There are training courses available online for these things (AWS certs and linux foundation training comes to mind), does anyone have an opinion about the usefulness of such material?
There is no loyalty in business. Keep your loyalty for your family and may be friends, not for the company you work for. The company will never be loyal back. Have an opportunity to make more or work more interesting? Grab it with both hands. If you are 99.99% of the workforce, you are not indispensable no matter how much you think you are.
And I'll fly the opposing flag here. Loyalty to people is everything in business. Got a good working relationship with people? Stick to them like glue. Make your moves as a unit.
Having a team of people consistently work well together is lightning in a bottle.
I've built relationships with people just by doing right by them in tough situations that have lasted decades and paid fantastic dividends.
So true! When you experience sudden group layoffs you realize rescuing the balance sheet matters far more than retaining good talent. I once had a boss tell me “Working here should be your career. Don’t treat this place like just another notch on your resume.” Sorry boss, but it might be just a footnote on my resume. I’m only staying here as long as the work and the pay is satisfactory otherwise I’m already interviewing someplace else. Nothing personal boss, it’s just good business.
Disclaimer: I have a company and I've started a few in the past.
My take is that the loyalty a company has towards a given employee cannot be the same, simply because it lacks the emotional basis that usually makes that loyalty as strong and/or as irrational. It's completely a matter of company culture which, in most cases, isn't very empathic to employees.
I don't think lack of loyalty is a rule though. I think that if the company culture is set up properly, it can totally have some form of valuable, albeit different, loyalty towards its employees.
1. My engineering ended in 2013. I was shit broke. I started doing online courses in 2016. Till now I have done 51 online courses in different things and just a month ago I got moved into a DevOps role (from a WordPress developer role). $0 invested in it.
2. The other best thing is growing my LinkedIn network. I grew my network from 200 people to to 15000 people (most of which are founders and recruiters). I invest time in writing articles and sharing new opportunities via LinkedIn.
3. I started reading a lot of books (related to tech and business).
4. I started emailing, tweeting to people (and getting heard by people like Jimmy Wales, Elon Musk, Tim Draper, Craig Newmark, Charlie Cheever) etc. This helped me grow exponentially.
5. Planning ahead. I started visioning life 30 years ahead. What was what I wanted. If your goals are clear, it will be much easier to find the path.
6. Ask, ask, ask. I asked a lot of questions on StackExchange, Reddit -> r/webdev and Hacker News. Whatever I plan to do, I take feedback from these groups. I have also joined Slack channels of professionals from different groups where I talk and take feedback. From ideas to resume review and career guidance.
7. Anyone that could teach me, I made him/her my mentor and listened to them and acted on their advice. Everyone I work with (founders, coworkers etc) see the passion in me and tries to mentor me. The trick is to always be willing to listen to others and keep connecting dots.
I have a ton of questions for you but I'll boil it down to several for now:
1) Which courses would you recommend?
Which had the greatest impact?
How would you do things differently?
Would you forego engineering entirely?
2) Suppose one doesnt have friends from school or work, how does one build a linkedin following?
What did you write about?
How did you promote your articles?
3. Again, favorite books? Most impactful?
4. Maybe once you get back to me, we can talk about 4 this sounds super interesting! But maybe you can give me the jist of what you did? For example why did they bother replying to you when tons are reaching out to them everyday?
Would you mind sharing where you found leads on technology oriented Slack channels? I'm old school, used to hang out on IRC some 15 years ago, but went silent and passive after starting a family. However my boys have grown and I'm looking into getting back into general or topic oriented technology talks and banter, but have no idea where to start looking for like minded people.
One thing I learned along the way is to be very honest to yourself and know that "you don't know what you don't know." When I was at University I always felt like I know it all. But the more you explore you learn so much that you don't know.
A few times throughout my career, I noticed a pattern of dreading waking up and doing the work that I do. Once I've identified that, my number one priority is to figure out if that can be fixed or find something else to do if it can't.
Maybe I'm lucky, but every single one of these changes (there have been 4 major ones in ~15 years) has led to something better than what came before it in one way or another.
Life is too short to hate what you do. That will always be the guiding principle of my career, through all the ups and downs.
By far, applying to work remote for a US based company 3 years ago. I am living in Romania.
I still work for them.
Theoretically I should be able to retire in about 5-10 years, in my mid 40s, depending on how frugal I am with my expenses. This wouldn't have been possible working for a local software company, even though I was paid about 3 times the average national income.
When I got made redundant from a very large company, they were able to secure me a severance package which I pivoted into running my own startup.
They also gave me a huge amount of training on pensions and dispute resolution, which I still use to this day.
They also helped boost my confidence in public speaking by inviting me to address a huge conference. I was a few speakers before the then Prime Minister.
Being a union member also got me face to face with several senior leaders within my industry, and with people from a wide range of backgrounds that I'd never have encountered otherwise.
Basically, for a few quid a month, I was able to completely transform my relationship with work and my peers.
I can't pinpoint a single one, but a few in a sequence:
1. Before I built my reputation and experience, I said Yes to a lot of things. Not all of them I could do, but once I said yes and jumped in the deep end, I found out I can do them and do them very well. Necessity was a big driver.
2. Life style trumps "exit". I worked with various start ups for 20 years. I founded and co founded 4 of them. At some point I decided that if a company succeeds or fails, I want it to be because of me, not despite me. So in 2 of those startups I had no investors and full control. I work at and dictate my own pace.
3. Best decision: My time and family come first. Nothing urgent has never been really that urgent. Nothing requires me to work 20 hour days. Nothing justifies my family being hurt because I'm somewhere working more than I should be.
Long story short - I was brave and stood up for myself, demanding the righteous thing.
I was 15 years old back then. I had just learned how to code and my hunger for programming was insatiable. I didn't think much, browsed through relevant classifieds and sent out a couple of honest e-mails stating that I really want to have a job, but I have no real life experience.
A company replied within a few days and they were interested. It was a very small company, consisting of a CTO and CEO. We agreed on 200$ for a portal type of website(it was a thing back then), with user sign-ups, public and private posts, comments and a few more things.
This company was hired by a rather large media company, to develop a dedicated website for them. I knew who was behind it and I was hoping that I would get recognized by the media company.
I dreamed about writing lines of code in my sleep, daydreamed through school and spent all time I could on coding the whole thing.
I think I was done in three months or so, and then came the day I asked to be paid. I had put daily changes on their FTP server, as we agreed, so I had literally no leverage. And they stopped responding. I tried reaching out to them in numerous ways, such as using my mom's cell to call the CEO, but he hung up immediately after realizing it was me who called.
As I realized that I had been scammed, since we did not have any form of written contract and had agreed that I would be paid in cash when the whole thing was done. Therefore I went on the media group's website, found the contact section and somehow managed to stumble upon the personal cellphone of the CEO of the media company. And I called him. I was an emotional teenager, but I spoke the truth. I did not have any demands other than to be heard. After a 10 minute long discussion where I explained that I was ripped off and worked for free for months, the CEO invited me over. I still remember the awe everyone was in, when they realized that a kid had just called them and walked through their front door in a few hours.
That phone call has been the best career decision I have ever made. The media company terminated their contract with the agency that had ripped me off because of terms violation - they were prohibited from outsourcing any development to any third parties, without a written permission given by the customer a.k.a media company.
And so I landed my first job! The people working for this media company were so genuine, mature and supportive, that I did not lose my love for what I did and had been in web development ever since.
I wish I could say I had a plan that lead me down my career path. I made one dumb random decision after another, and somehow they all got me where I am today. The best decision was way back in 1999 I started a blog because I loved Slashdot. I used that to learn how to program, and that has lead to every job I've had since. So my long winding dumb successful career path is all thanks to me wanting to be like cmdrtaco! (I once got to thank him for that here on Hacker News)
Teaching myself to program. Nothing caused such a hockey stick in opportuinities. I was able to make way more money in a very short time period and work in much more interesting companies.
I never took anything so seriously in my life as when I decided to become a programmer. I bought dozens of used textbooks, read and meticulously underlined them, relentlessly wrote code and read all the programming interview books, made guides for myself to study, said yes to every contract and bug I could help with regardless of the tech stack. I refused to be anal about picking one programming language over another.
I have a marketing degree from a not good school. If I could do it again I would (a) drop out and move to a major tech metro and (b) identify a high growth tech stack and study it intensively. Never should have wasted time getting a useless degree.
The best thing learning to program taught me was how to read books properly - Write in the margins, take extensive notes, phrase and rephrase the lessons, write my own articles and guides to solidify the learnings.
This year I mad $350,000 and got promoted to manage five people. I couldn’t have gotten here without learning to code.
I enrolled in the JET Programme [1], got accepted, quit my job at 39 and taught English for 5 years in Japan. Oddly, I think I'm less effective as a programmer now. Before I left I was definitely an "alpha dog" programmer and pushed my way towards success. Teaching changed my perceptions and I think I am more effective as a person. It's been a hard transition and often frustrating because I now back down in situations where I know the team will suffer. But young people have to learn and they need someone who is willing to let them do so. I still need a fair amount of practice not being grumpy about it, though ;-)
Note that while I feel this is the best decision in my career, I think it's debatable whether it has helped my career in the traditional sense (i.e. more money, more influence, etc). Probably not :-) Still, I like the direction I'm going, which I would not have said before I made that transition.
Changing jobs! Seems like it's so much easier to make more money by getting a new gig than by negotiating with your current employer. I've changed jobs every year since I graduated college; each jump has added 20k or 30k to my salary. I didn't have the best grades, didn't go to a good uni, but I've gone from 45k to 170k in 6 years.
Doesn't the employer often ask that why you change jobs every year ? Is it fair enough that if one company offers better gig than other so I can negotiate with other to increase gig?
Bailing out of my first full-time development job after just a few months.
I was driving 30+ minutes to work, working overtime every week, and got a bad performance review on the grounds that I wasn't working enough. The company had a "work hard, play hard" culture, which in practice meant "work all the time and occasionally we'll invite you to take a booze-filled trip without your family". They had flown me in for the interview and let me eat sushi with the CEO, but after that it was "nose to the grindstone".
After a few months I got a call from a recruiter about a job 5 minutes from my house, using a language I liked more. In talking with the company I learned that they worked business hours only. I felt slightly guilty about making the switch, but I got a lot less stress, more learning, and more respect at work out of the deal.
In the nearly-a-decade since then, I've never again been told I don't work enough, and have always ruled out jobs that smelled of workaholism. I'm having a happy career.
I'm actually unsure if I've ever made any particularly good career decisions aside from switching into computer science. Aside from that I have largely been reliant on the combination of being reasonably competent and the generally high demand for developers to make up for lack of good career decisions.
On multiple occasions I have resigned from jobs after 2-3 years with no clear plan for the future, let alone another job lined up, simply because I didn't like my current job anymore.
On multiple occasions I have poured hundreds, maybe thousands, of hours into projects and start-up ideas that never had a realistic chance of working out. I did this safe in the knowledge that I could run down my finances working on some fun speculative project and someone out there would give me a job to let me pay the bills when I needed it.
So I certainly haven't maximized within my career but I chose a career well.
Don't make money your first priority. Take it into account, yes, and fight for raises if you deserve them; but prioritize other things that have a greater impact on quality of life, such as location, commute time or absence of overtime.
The best paid job I ever had was also the worst by any other measure.
My best career decision was transitioning from wet lab biology to computational genomics during my postdoc circa 2011.
I saw the kinds of DNA sequencing analysis our collaborators were doing and said "hey, I could do that", so I checked out all the R books from the library and taught myself some stuff. And then around that time both Coursera and Insight data science were just starting to become a thing, so I looked up the Insight curriculum and cobbled together my own version with Coursera and made a genomic data viz website.
That computational transition set me up to go into data science in 2014, which has turned out to be a succession of being in the right place at the right time for incredible learning and growth opportunities, but it never would've happened if I hadn't decided to analyze my own sequencing data.
At age 42 (11 years ago), going back to school and completing a Masters degree in Enterprise Architecture. I had been in the same job for 5 years when I made the decision. Work had a self-education program that paid for my tuition. The decision was literally made in the space of a couple of days before the mid-year intake. If I'd had to wait another 6 months, I probably would have talked myself out of it. It was hard work (had a young family at the time), but paid off handsomely when my stupid employer not only refused to utilise me in my chosen field (having graduated top of the class at their cost), but literally pushed me out of the company. One of my industry lecturers got me my first contracting gig and I haven't looked back since.
I guess I learned a few things:
1) don't overthink decisions (which is not to say "don't think");
2) to back myself and my abilities with the requisite effort. I'm typically smarter than I think but I need to put in a matching level of effort. When I got my Bachelor degree 20 years earlier, I literally skidded out the door in a haze of alcohol and with a shit grade. That cost me a few years;
3) don't be afraid of a challenge; don't be afraid of the unknown;
4) be sensitive to where you are in your life - can you afford to take a hit if things go pear shaped? Time-box your attempt to shake things up in your life;
5) If you work as a contractor - networking and self-brand management rules. I rely heavily on LinkedIn and the network of contacts I have cultivated, and keep my brand alive with posts and articles relevant to the kinds of work I want to be doing - not necessarily flavour of the month.
There's probably more but that's pretty much it. My income now is almost 3 times what it was in 2007, and while I'm not suggesting that's the only measure of success (far from it), it affords me a professional freedom to be more picky in the work I take on, and to live with far less fear than before.
EDITED TO ADD:
The reason I chose Enterprise Architecture was because it suited my temperament. I discovered I was a "systems" thinker pretty early on, and as I moved through a typical IT career trajectory, the "systems" I was thinking about became bigger and bigger. EA probably sounds pretty passe compared to all the "it" technologies people are playing with, but it's kinda like politics - reality is gritty, the problems are hard, endless and fascinating (if you're so inclined).
Wow, I am 35 and thinking its too late for me. Thanks for your reply. Btw money should be used as measurement of financial decisions, nothing wrong with that.
[+] [-] DerekQ|7 years ago|reply
I made the jump 5 years ago and have worked for a number of companies since, on 6-12 month contracts. The money has jumped each time, such that I’m on what I consider to be silly money now for the job I do — Ireland, not US.
The work is always interesting for at least 6 months and I learn a ton of new stuff with every contract, much of which I use when building my own products (Downtime between contracts).
Every aspect of contracting is better than being permanent: the ability to jump ship quickly without affecting my hireability, the exposure to so many different technologies and different ways of doing things, the constant freshness of new things and new people, the ideas that come with seeing how different teams create and build different software, the ease with which you can step into new contracts (often one 30 minute interview as opposed to multipel interviews tests and take home projects for perm roles), and of course the money.
In terms of learning, each contract is like spending 3 years in a permie job, and I’ve had 7 in the past 5 years.
[+] [-] BerislavLopac|7 years ago|reply
However, I've recently started considering returning to permanent, primarily for one reason. At the age of 50, half of which has been in a software development career, I find being a code-monkey -- even a senior one -- quite unsatisfying. I would like to return to leadership roles I had while I was permanent, but they are nearly impossible to find as contracts.
[+] [-] latchkey|7 years ago|reply
Two years ago, I went one step further and moved from SF Bay area to Saigon, Vietnam. I've had a variety of tech jobs while here, but I am currently consulting for two primarily US based companies.
My expenses are almost nil (compared with before) and I live a very minimal lifestyle (own and purchase very little). I plan on going nomadic in the next couple months (I've never been technically homeless) and driving a motorbike around Vietnam, Cambodia and wherever else I want. I can work during the week and travel on the weekends.
I'm so much happier with my life. I was doing it wrong before.
[+] [-] christophilus|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sakopov|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kstenerud|7 years ago|reply
If it works for you, great, but there's a lot more to it than people in the business will say.
[+] [-] dolguldur|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Kaius|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] golergka|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DIVx0|7 years ago|reply
Previously I was all about startups or small companies and was very much against the mega-corp environment.
Over several months a colleague "recruited" me to join their team and I don't regret it.
I've been able to climb pretty high within this corp and it has been a wild ride. Never in a million years would I have thought I'd have any sort of influence over technology strategy that one of the largest US corporations would follow for the next decade.
So, I've learned to keep an open mind and not let preconceived notions on how others do business until I see it for myself. If I had not done this I'd still be hopping from start-up to start-up.
[+] [-] lewisjoe|7 years ago|reply
On hindsight, I consider it a mistake. Micromanagement, lack of depth in terms of engineering & vision made me rethink my career path. Joined a BigCorp as a result and I regret not doing it early enough.
Work-life balance, clear decision makings, freedom to experiment with new tech, time to work on personal projects, financial stability and most importantly ability to bring real impact to real users – I clearly see now things that I'd have missed if I continued with that startup.
patio11 wrote a brilliant piece here regarding this, along with other awesome career advice - https://www.kalzumeus.com/2011/10/28/dont-call-yourself-a-pr...
[+] [-] rufius|7 years ago|reply
I’ve learned a huge amount and appreciated the opportunities and flexibility I have.
I think experiences in both worlds are valuable and wouldn’t trade either experience for anything else.
[+] [-] btown|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] badtuple|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] apohn|7 years ago|reply
I have two questions if you don't mind answering.
How large is the company you are referring to? 10K people? 100K, 250K, 500K?
What type of company is it? A company that builds and sells mostly software, or a company that uses software to sell something else (e.g. automobiles?). Amazon+AWS is a an example that is a hybrid of both.
[+] [-] nosjwshere|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] yutyut|7 years ago|reply
I'm now a 'mid-level' AH-1Z pilot.
I work longer hours and have generally a lower quality of life but there's something to be said for the immensely unique things I've gotten to do and how profoundly well-rounded the entire experience has made me.
I will be re-entering the software industry in a few years unless another passion pulls me in some new direction.
The military is obviously not for everyone but picking up the phone, ducking into a side conference room across from my cube, and giving a verbal commit to my 'recruiter' that day (after a years-long selection process) has been the best decision I've ever made.
[+] [-] amorphic|7 years ago|reply
Sun Microsystems happened to be across the road from us. My mind was blown the first time I saw the value of the invoices for servers and Solaris licenses that we bought both for ourselves and on behalf of our customers. That's where a lot of those dotcom-era "investment" dollars ended up - at Sun.
One day we needed a router + firewall for some internal service. One of the Unix sysadmins in the team grabbed a spare i386 desktop PC, stuck a 2nd NIC in it, installed Slackware Linux and configured ipchains. Job done: no budget, no managerial approval, no licenses, nothing. I couldn't believe it.
I asked him about Linux and after learning more came to the conclusion that it could basically do most things that Solaris could do but was 1) free and 2) ran on cheap, commodity hardware.
That was the writing on the wall for me. I taught myself Linux and pretty soon had my first bona-fide Linux Sysadmin job. Linux went on to become the OS that runs the world and I've never struggled to find relatively interesting, well-paid work since then.
[+] [-] jonchurch_|7 years ago|reply
Ive used linux for years, I develop on a chromebook running an all cli ubuntu chroot and have loved working this way for the past two years. Im very interested in devops (Im a fullstack JS freelancer) and enjoy working with servers and the cloud a lot. But Ive never considered myself “learn-ed” in the ways of linux.
I have the time to devote to linux sysadmin training, and intend to do so.
Specifically: What areas of linux knowledge are most useful from an employer’s standpoint that would make a candidate attractive? Is it mostly experience architecting systems in production?
I think devops as a realm of work is very interesting, and would like to gain experience doing it professionally to find out if I’d want to pursue it longer term.
Beyond joining a team and learning from real world applications, is there anything useful you would recommend I look into? There are training courses available online for these things (AWS certs and linux foundation training comes to mind), does anyone have an opinion about the usefulness of such material?
[+] [-] phakding|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] busterarm|7 years ago|reply
I've built relationships with people just by doing right by them in tough situations that have lasted decades and paid fantastic dividends.
[+] [-] snorkel|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mattdmrs|7 years ago|reply
My take is that the loyalty a company has towards a given employee cannot be the same, simply because it lacks the emotional basis that usually makes that loyalty as strong and/or as irrational. It's completely a matter of company culture which, in most cases, isn't very empathic to employees.
I don't think lack of loyalty is a rule though. I think that if the company culture is set up properly, it can totally have some form of valuable, albeit different, loyalty towards its employees.
[+] [-] gadders|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] FahadUddin92|7 years ago|reply
1. My engineering ended in 2013. I was shit broke. I started doing online courses in 2016. Till now I have done 51 online courses in different things and just a month ago I got moved into a DevOps role (from a WordPress developer role). $0 invested in it.
2. The other best thing is growing my LinkedIn network. I grew my network from 200 people to to 15000 people (most of which are founders and recruiters). I invest time in writing articles and sharing new opportunities via LinkedIn.
3. I started reading a lot of books (related to tech and business).
4. I started emailing, tweeting to people (and getting heard by people like Jimmy Wales, Elon Musk, Tim Draper, Craig Newmark, Charlie Cheever) etc. This helped me grow exponentially.
5. Planning ahead. I started visioning life 30 years ahead. What was what I wanted. If your goals are clear, it will be much easier to find the path.
6. Ask, ask, ask. I asked a lot of questions on StackExchange, Reddit -> r/webdev and Hacker News. Whatever I plan to do, I take feedback from these groups. I have also joined Slack channels of professionals from different groups where I talk and take feedback. From ideas to resume review and career guidance.
7. Anyone that could teach me, I made him/her my mentor and listened to them and acted on their advice. Everyone I work with (founders, coworkers etc) see the passion in me and tries to mentor me. The trick is to always be willing to listen to others and keep connecting dots.
[+] [-] thrower123|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TheArcane|7 years ago|reply
I can't imagine the low SNR because of that enabling you to derive any use from it.
[+] [-] minhazm423|7 years ago|reply
1) Which courses would you recommend?
Which had the greatest impact?
How would you do things differently?
Would you forego engineering entirely?
2) Suppose one doesnt have friends from school or work, how does one build a linkedin following?
What did you write about?
How did you promote your articles?
3. Again, favorite books? Most impactful?
4. Maybe once you get back to me, we can talk about 4 this sounds super interesting! But maybe you can give me the jist of what you did? For example why did they bother replying to you when tons are reaching out to them everyday?
[+] [-] aavotins|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] FahadUddin92|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] djuralfc|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] malux85|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nrb|7 years ago|reply
Maybe I'm lucky, but every single one of these changes (there have been 4 major ones in ~15 years) has led to something better than what came before it in one way or another.
Life is too short to hate what you do. That will always be the guiding principle of my career, through all the ups and downs.
[+] [-] tudorconstantin|7 years ago|reply
I still work for them.
Theoretically I should be able to retire in about 5-10 years, in my mid 40s, depending on how frugal I am with my expenses. This wouldn't have been possible working for a local software company, even though I was paid about 3 times the average national income.
[+] [-] edent|7 years ago|reply
When I got made redundant from a very large company, they were able to secure me a severance package which I pivoted into running my own startup.
They also gave me a huge amount of training on pensions and dispute resolution, which I still use to this day.
They also helped boost my confidence in public speaking by inviting me to address a huge conference. I was a few speakers before the then Prime Minister.
Being a union member also got me face to face with several senior leaders within my industry, and with people from a wide range of backgrounds that I'd never have encountered otherwise.
Basically, for a few quid a month, I was able to completely transform my relationship with work and my peers.
[+] [-] harel|7 years ago|reply
1. Before I built my reputation and experience, I said Yes to a lot of things. Not all of them I could do, but once I said yes and jumped in the deep end, I found out I can do them and do them very well. Necessity was a big driver.
2. Life style trumps "exit". I worked with various start ups for 20 years. I founded and co founded 4 of them. At some point I decided that if a company succeeds or fails, I want it to be because of me, not despite me. So in 2 of those startups I had no investors and full control. I work at and dictate my own pace.
3. Best decision: My time and family come first. Nothing urgent has never been really that urgent. Nothing requires me to work 20 hour days. Nothing justifies my family being hurt because I'm somewhere working more than I should be.
[+] [-] aavotins|7 years ago|reply
I was 15 years old back then. I had just learned how to code and my hunger for programming was insatiable. I didn't think much, browsed through relevant classifieds and sent out a couple of honest e-mails stating that I really want to have a job, but I have no real life experience.
A company replied within a few days and they were interested. It was a very small company, consisting of a CTO and CEO. We agreed on 200$ for a portal type of website(it was a thing back then), with user sign-ups, public and private posts, comments and a few more things.
This company was hired by a rather large media company, to develop a dedicated website for them. I knew who was behind it and I was hoping that I would get recognized by the media company.
I dreamed about writing lines of code in my sleep, daydreamed through school and spent all time I could on coding the whole thing.
I think I was done in three months or so, and then came the day I asked to be paid. I had put daily changes on their FTP server, as we agreed, so I had literally no leverage. And they stopped responding. I tried reaching out to them in numerous ways, such as using my mom's cell to call the CEO, but he hung up immediately after realizing it was me who called.
As I realized that I had been scammed, since we did not have any form of written contract and had agreed that I would be paid in cash when the whole thing was done. Therefore I went on the media group's website, found the contact section and somehow managed to stumble upon the personal cellphone of the CEO of the media company. And I called him. I was an emotional teenager, but I spoke the truth. I did not have any demands other than to be heard. After a 10 minute long discussion where I explained that I was ripped off and worked for free for months, the CEO invited me over. I still remember the awe everyone was in, when they realized that a kid had just called them and walked through their front door in a few hours.
That phone call has been the best career decision I have ever made. The media company terminated their contract with the agency that had ripped me off because of terms violation - they were prohibited from outsourcing any development to any third parties, without a written permission given by the customer a.k.a media company.
And so I landed my first job! The people working for this media company were so genuine, mature and supportive, that I did not lose my love for what I did and had been in web development ever since.
It pays off to be brave and righteous in the end.
[+] [-] blakesterz|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hackanewz|7 years ago|reply
I never took anything so seriously in my life as when I decided to become a programmer. I bought dozens of used textbooks, read and meticulously underlined them, relentlessly wrote code and read all the programming interview books, made guides for myself to study, said yes to every contract and bug I could help with regardless of the tech stack. I refused to be anal about picking one programming language over another.
I have a marketing degree from a not good school. If I could do it again I would (a) drop out and move to a major tech metro and (b) identify a high growth tech stack and study it intensively. Never should have wasted time getting a useless degree.
The best thing learning to program taught me was how to read books properly - Write in the margins, take extensive notes, phrase and rephrase the lessons, write my own articles and guides to solidify the learnings.
This year I mad $350,000 and got promoted to manage five people. I couldn’t have gotten here without learning to code.
[+] [-] mikekchar|7 years ago|reply
Note that while I feel this is the best decision in my career, I think it's debatable whether it has helped my career in the traditional sense (i.e. more money, more influence, etc). Probably not :-) Still, I like the direction I'm going, which I would not have said before I made that transition.
Edit: Link :-P [1] -http://jetprogramme.org/en/
[+] [-] throooowaway|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] meetz|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] iopuy|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nathan_long|7 years ago|reply
I was driving 30+ minutes to work, working overtime every week, and got a bad performance review on the grounds that I wasn't working enough. The company had a "work hard, play hard" culture, which in practice meant "work all the time and occasionally we'll invite you to take a booze-filled trip without your family". They had flown me in for the interview and let me eat sushi with the CEO, but after that it was "nose to the grindstone".
After a few months I got a call from a recruiter about a job 5 minutes from my house, using a language I liked more. In talking with the company I learned that they worked business hours only. I felt slightly guilty about making the switch, but I got a lot less stress, more learning, and more respect at work out of the deal.
In the nearly-a-decade since then, I've never again been told I don't work enough, and have always ruled out jobs that smelled of workaholism. I'm having a happy career.
[+] [-] pandapower2|7 years ago|reply
On multiple occasions I have resigned from jobs after 2-3 years with no clear plan for the future, let alone another job lined up, simply because I didn't like my current job anymore.
On multiple occasions I have poured hundreds, maybe thousands, of hours into projects and start-up ideas that never had a realistic chance of working out. I did this safe in the knowledge that I could run down my finances working on some fun speculative project and someone out there would give me a job to let me pay the bills when I needed it.
So I certainly haven't maximized within my career but I chose a career well.
[+] [-] gordaco|7 years ago|reply
The best paid job I ever had was also the worst by any other measure.
[+] [-] bonniemuffin|7 years ago|reply
I saw the kinds of DNA sequencing analysis our collaborators were doing and said "hey, I could do that", so I checked out all the R books from the library and taught myself some stuff. And then around that time both Coursera and Insight data science were just starting to become a thing, so I looked up the Insight curriculum and cobbled together my own version with Coursera and made a genomic data viz website.
That computational transition set me up to go into data science in 2014, which has turned out to be a succession of being in the right place at the right time for incredible learning and growth opportunities, but it never would've happened if I hadn't decided to analyze my own sequencing data.
[+] [-] phs318u|7 years ago|reply
I guess I learned a few things:
1) don't overthink decisions (which is not to say "don't think");
2) to back myself and my abilities with the requisite effort. I'm typically smarter than I think but I need to put in a matching level of effort. When I got my Bachelor degree 20 years earlier, I literally skidded out the door in a haze of alcohol and with a shit grade. That cost me a few years;
3) don't be afraid of a challenge; don't be afraid of the unknown;
4) be sensitive to where you are in your life - can you afford to take a hit if things go pear shaped? Time-box your attempt to shake things up in your life;
5) If you work as a contractor - networking and self-brand management rules. I rely heavily on LinkedIn and the network of contacts I have cultivated, and keep my brand alive with posts and articles relevant to the kinds of work I want to be doing - not necessarily flavour of the month.
There's probably more but that's pretty much it. My income now is almost 3 times what it was in 2007, and while I'm not suggesting that's the only measure of success (far from it), it affords me a professional freedom to be more picky in the work I take on, and to live with far less fear than before.
EDITED TO ADD: The reason I chose Enterprise Architecture was because it suited my temperament. I discovered I was a "systems" thinker pretty early on, and as I moved through a typical IT career trajectory, the "systems" I was thinking about became bigger and bigger. EA probably sounds pretty passe compared to all the "it" technologies people are playing with, but it's kinda like politics - reality is gritty, the problems are hard, endless and fascinating (if you're so inclined).
[+] [-] cryptozeus|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dplavery92|7 years ago|reply