Have you faced the challenge of changing jobs? Share your experiences and insights into making the switch.
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Top comments (4)
It's pretty for common someone who has a growth mindset.
I had joined Army, reached plateau of all the training and left after 7 years. Became a software engineer, worked for 5 years, did MBA and became an IT manager. Once Cloud and Blockchain technologies came, I learnt both (solidity programmer and DevOps engineer) and got over with them. Currently I am aiming for research in AI and extensively working on PyTorch.
It always unsatiable!
Let's see where it ends. I am happy to execute whatever I plan.
Just wondering if the title would be clearer asking if you have changed careers. When I read it I thought about promotions, role changes, and changing companies within the IT/dev industry was also included.
When I met my wife 10 years ago, I was a stereotypical geek working in IT in France while she was a coach and a psychologist coming from Colombia. She tried recruitment a bit to get her professional life in Europe started.
10 years later, we have switched countries twice and we also have basically switched jobs.
She is the working as an IT project manager in a nuclear power plant
I have stopped programmign this year and I am a weird mix of career coach and recruiter of developers.
I switched careers of sorts not too long ago. In 2017 I got into management for the first time. By 2020, I was actively reflecting on how I wanted to end my career and both Chief Technology Officer (CTO) and software engineering instructor looked like viable options I might enjoy. Through speaking in the community, I decided that teaching was a good fit for me and began actively investing in that.
In 2020 I left software engineering leadership to become a software engineering instructor. Frankly, I loved it. It was amazing and the students were almost universally fantastic. The organization got acquired and, as things happen when you gain a parent company, priorities and ethical values changed. My priority remained the students, but as time went on it became harder and harder to shield them from negative things in the organization that would impact their education. Additionally, the economy plummeted and people largely stopped hiring new devs. This was hard from an emotional standpoint to be very invested in people and proud of them and see them unable to get into the industry.
This year, the organization committed a pretty flagrant HR violation that went unaddressed and so I found myself shifting from teaching back into software engineering, but not quite software engineering. In my 3 years as a teacher, I established myself as someone with a strong AI leaning and happened to earn a graduate certificate in data analytics right as I needed to change jobs (I get the full master's degree next summer) along with Microsoft's MVP award in AI a few months before that. This resulted in me being hired on as a senior software engineering consultant and then quickly promoted to the organization's first AI specialist.
All 3 paths I've gone down are fulfilling ones, though teaching and getting invested in people is a very emotional journey. I expect nothing else will ever rival the joys of teaching, though the lows were hard as well.
Right now, I'm not sure what to call myself. I do software engineering work, consulting work, teaching work through community events, writing through my blogs and technical books (Refactoring with C# released a few weeks ago and Data Science in .NET comes out next year).
I no longer view myself as a software engineer, and I'm not sure data scientist or AI engineer is the right word for me either. I think, I'm just a high-level technologist being the best Matt he can be, and I'm okay with that label and greatly enjoy the paths I get to travel.