Ask HN: Returning to tech after 4 years?

I think if you already tried it for two years and got burnt out, and don't have a passion and natural interest in it, then you should find something you like, and not force yourself into tech.

The treadmill of new technologies and constant change and learning won't go away. It would be one thing if your boss was an asshole or the company was bad, that could be fixed by a new job, but if you just have no natural affinity for the work, forcing yourself to do it for the money will lead you quickly to severe burnout, depression, etc.

People can usually do better in a field that seems stagnant but they have a passion for and enjoy than they will in a hot field that they don't like.

It's not easy right now to get hired, even if you're a senior engineer with 10 years of gapless employment at well-regarded companies.

Having a CS degree and work experience helps you, and puts you ahead of new-grads and bootcampers at least (do bootcampers still exist or was that a ZIRP?).

But that 4 year gap will be a pain for you. I mean, you've been out twice as long as you've been in. Lots of places will view that as a red flag and put your resume directly into the wastebasket.

So, in your position I would do the following:

1. Ask myself and think long and hard about whether I even want to work in tech, considering that you "burnt out" after only 2 years in industry the last time. If the answer is still "yes", proceed to step 2.

2. Accept that it's going to be a grind, and try to find literally any tech job in order to get your foot in the door. Try to stay for at least 2 years and do not leave this job, unless it is for another, better job in industry. The first job search will be the hardest. After a few years, your work history will look better and no one will care about the 4 year gap.

What tech stack are you most comfortable with?

The industry changes pretty quickly but I can't think of anything too significant that's changed in the past four years. Also once you've learned enough tech it's not too hard to pick up something new quickly.

I knew basically no React when I was hired at my current job, I only knew Angular, and while they hired me for a client that wanted Angular, that fell through and they put me on a React team and I picked it up well enough to contribute more than bug fixes after like, two weeks, and now 3 years later I'm waaaay more comfortable with React than I ever was with Angular.

You say you're a react developer, but also have a CS degree. Do you think you'd be more passionate doing work that isn't front-end?

Front-enders are valuable, but the best are people with a passion for design and that pixel perfect attention to detail. As design is constantly evolving, this also somewhat leads to constantly needing to learn new things.

For the past few years we've been working in hardware, and in the health market. It's C++, we've built some tools in rust, but it's definitely not constant learning of languages, it's constantly learning new algorithms, and finding the best way to get around the challenges to serve our users.

Perhaps medtech isn't your thing, what about energy and environment? These guys need robust control systems, which again, aren't front-end. Is robotics your thing?

Maybe you're right that you're just not into coding anymore, and that it's time to try a different field.

If you're capable of not just jumping into a new job right away, are there some local projects that you can try to contribute to and help out with? You may find that you get really into a project, and maybe it's as an SE, or maybe you'll find that adjacent role that you just slot into.

I was an SE for about a decade. I enjoyed it and worked with some amazing coders. I still do, but I wasn't up to their abilities. My boss recognized this and they pulled me off code, but had me take over a product management role, and now I'm running my own 2nd start-up.

Your degree and work experience are huge assets, and it would be wise to leverage them. It's too bad that you got burned on your first job, but there are huge differences across jobs. If you don't like learning new tech you can find many jobs where it's not required (government and bigger companies). Even if you decide you don't want to do coding, you can leverage your education, experience, and tenure at a company into adjacent roles (product manager, manager, business intelligence, DBA, QA, etc.).

Were you burnt out _and_ bored or burnt out _due to_ boredom? I've experienced the latter and all I can say is exploring full-stack dev rather than limiting yourself to frontend. There are so many really demanding but also rewarding jobs out there.

I'd find a job applying my skills towards a problem I cared about. Focus on the problem or product, not the tools. What excites you?

I have returned to tech at least twice -- one time, in the mid '10s, I'd been away so long I'd forgotten some of the git subcommands! -- and the bad news is that it's hard.

When you're fresh back, you won't be competitive in most job interview test scenarios, for two reasons: one is that you often won't have the specific skills (or context) being tested (e.g. facing down a TypeScript coding interview instead of a JavaScript coding interview,) or, worse, you'll have skills in the _wrong_ packages, and in the design interview, these skills will incline you to make outmoded architectural choices (you'd solve a problem with Selenium instead of Playwright, for example.)

In my experience, you'll be dependent on people around you for guidance and context for at least a year.

That's the bad news. The _good_ news is that you'll bring to the table your original core skills and experience, which essentially vouch to an employer that you _will_, within a dozen months, be a non-regrettable hire. Turning the chessboard around, this means that they can essentially hire you at below-market rate, with a higher probability that their bet will pay off (in comparison to someone entering the industry fresh.) It also means that you'll be less likely to bounce to another employer, as you will (correctly) perceive your chances as worse-than-average, and you will (probably) have goodwill for the employer that gave you a hand back up.

In short, you will appear not only to have favourable 'burn' characteristics, but favourable 'churn' characteristics as well, and one or both of these facts, to the right employer, might put you at the front of the line. (Recalling that burn and churn are the two greatest foes faced by smaller tech companies.)

So, your loss becomes their gain, which, if communicated properly, becomes your gain again. Sort of.

This argument works best on companies that are _not_ hand-to-mouth first-hire startups (as they can't afford to wait a year on any bet, let alone provide the peers you'd need to re-up and re-orient your skillset,) and are also not large corporations (who are generally too big to respond to argumentation; a balleen whale does not argue with krill.)

Companies that have been around for a year or three and have between 10 and 100 employees, though, are prospects.

Finally, I can't overstate the importance of two other factors: personal network, and luck (luck being $RAND * $PERSONAL_NETWORK). This whole pitch works much, much better with someone who has some connection to you.

Good luck <3

eh, you don't have to mention you took 4 years off. Just say you were consulting independently or working on a startup.