Thoughts on Doing Web Development for Rest of Career Or Entering Medical School @ 30. Money now versus job security, status, higher income, and ability to work into old age. What would you do?

ransay3277 · 2015-11-27T02:37:44+00:00

Do what you like better. And don't worry about age in IT.

I know a guy in his fifties running an amazing small IT company. He owns it. He lets his employees keep up with the details and new technology. His job is to keep the doors open and the customers happy. This is because many of his high tech employees are very bad at people skills and running a business.

mugatucrazypills · 2015-11-27T02:58:17+00:00

Not telling you what to do. You are obviously very gifted and have options Mugatu simply didn't have as mugatu isn't that bright. Mugatu started his fashion empire and banked several million before he was 25 because he was forced by his stupidity to work like a filthy beaten down dog always closing like a maniac and copying anything that worked from smarter people.

My sense is that you aren't cut out for an entrepreneurial role, based on your descriptions of your employer as a cheat selling worthless product and screwing you by only paying you 150k. A real entrepreneur would admire his boss for turning crappy work by underpaid mechanics into real world sales and be figuring out how to do it himself. Or have some messianic zeal for doing things better than this boss.

Med school seems like its better for your personality. As mentioned med school has benefits. Medical Doctor despite govt involvent in health care is still pretty much the top of the status pyramid, aside from long shots like inventing ebay or becoming Tony stark, which is the non black person equivalent of dreaming of being in the NBA.

Most people if they go bankrupt are down for the count. But they can't repossess your MD ! MDs are the only people that can go tits up, wash all their debts and get back in the saddle with a high income. Some I know have done so a few times.

fap_the_pain_away · 2015-11-27T04:29:28+00:00

A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush. The only reason to leave IT is because you absolutely hate it. With every fiber of your being you just need to get the hell out of there ASAP. Otherwise don't kill the golden goose.

Thinking about doctors getting pussy is STUPID. That's like majoring in psychology in college because there are lots of girls around. Don't ask me how I know...

FearDearg2015 · 2015-11-27T04:56:59+00:00

Computing doubles as an industry (in terms of number of people employed there) about every year or so. That means after 2 years working in the industry, you are already in the top 25% of talent in terms of experience. The "old" guys now, who've been around since punch cards, are a tiny minority, with a shit tonne of built up knowledge that is applicable regardless of the technology of the minute. And the majority of people working in the industry have little to no experience, because of the growth rate.

Edit: source "uncle bob" Martin (robert c. Martin)

As long as you are keeping your skills current, keeping your ego in check, and seeking out mentorship from more experienced people in the field, you are guaranteed to find yourself in a sought after minority (and therefore VALUABLE) after a few years.

The other thing about computing is scalability. You cannot scale medicine unless you develop a new drug or something.

MattyAnon · 2015-11-27T05:07:55+00:00

Depends what you want. Dynamic, changing career, taking long holidays, flexibility? Go programming. Stable, accumulating your resumé, working hard, getting a good reference for your next job? Go doctor.

Which one will make you happy? Depends who you are. Only you can answer that.

sir_wankalot_here · 2015-11-27T02:23:53+00:00

He will spend $500K plus to go to med school. You have to count lost income for the X years in med school. Once he is finished, he doesn't just start making $400k a year as a specialist, he needs several years to build up his practice.

From an economic point of view, going to med school is stupid.

On the other hand if OP really wants to be a doctor I say go for it.

life2ifeless · 2015-11-27T06:18:48+00:00

i am currently in a similar situation as you. I'm 29 this year at the crossroads of my career too.

Working in a HUGE tech company now doing some pretty low level work, but my work contract is ending in december. Did not have much relevant work experience outside, so employment for me is really tough.

My only choices are either start out on my own with some business idea i have in mine (love dating courses etc, something to help the blue pills betas here). In where I live, men here are helplessly bluepilled and almost no one knows what TRP is. With some proper social media marketing I believe I can carve out a nice slice of niche market here.

Or, I can take out a hefty 200k loan for a commercial pilot license, join a prospective and new local airline and become a captain by 38, which will make me 12-20k a month along with some alpha status.

laredditaccounts · 2015-11-27T07:47:12+00:00

OP, give me advice for front-end web development. I'm learning bootstrap atm, what else should I go for? JQuery and Angular? Node? What about things like MeteorJS?

And what can I read to learn about layouts, design, colour theory, typography, etc? I can code already, so learning the technical things probably won't be an issue for me, but I'm not really a creative expert

BradPill · 2015-11-27T07:54:53+00:00

Have you considered finance? As you sound like a banker :)

Definitely not RP - as you do it for the money and 'status' (whatever that is... oh right, other people's perception ....). You should seriously do some introspection - find out what you like.

Also, living smartly now, you can save money - perhaps invest it or daytrade? Or, with saved money, find some other guys to build something we all need - in the medical field? Helping people with digital solutions? Being social? Living in SV, the (digital) world should be your oyster - go to meetups, network. Talk to specialists (in other fields) and try to figure out what their jobs need. And forget the women: if she marries you for your status, she'll divorce you for your trust-fund.

raceAround126 · 2015-11-27T08:26:12+00:00

I'll throw my cents in here. Source: Old school developer, C++, Java, some electronics and assembler, currently have a staff of 28 running the gammut of junior web developers through to senior PCB engineers.

If you're making money doing web development at the moment, then that's great. Personally given your age, I would stick with that idea simple as it's earning you the money right now.

OK so Javascript, AngularJS et al are all great technologies. I do think that Javascript is overly bent into shape in the web world to make it do what it was never designed to in the web world which is its weakness. But it's doing what it should do.

Now full stack development is a good way of producing seemingly full-featured software on the cheap. You save money on real software testers, UI expertise and QA analysts by throwing all of it onto the full-stack developer. The problem is most full stack developers very much fit the classification of jack of all trades, master of none. The things some of my full-stackers just plain don't know is concerning!

The answer as to why is bluntly clear. Full stack development is not a very difficult form of development. The truth is most developments are nothing more than taking data from a repository, doing a very small amount of mangling, have a view get it and throw it back and make it look pretty using a myriad of pre-prepared libraries and frameworks, the most common being bootstrap and angular.

Is this a bad thing? Well technically not. It serves a purpose and certainly fulfills the brief of "we need a device-agnostic application for people to use on the road". It works well.

But it does have limitations. This is dangerous when coupled with the fact that if you have developers who essentially don't have to be very good, you also have development managers who don't have to be as good.

To paraphrase, another department in my company specializes in single page applications. Their department head sounds like a nightmare as he has next to zero experience in real software development and he keeps demanding more and more from his team. They really have pushed the limits of what the web can deliver via a single page, but he won't hear "no". To the point where he has had staff leave on him because, well in a nutshell, he's trying to produce what my department produces but via the web and fails badly.

What am I trying to say here, that web developers are bad? Certainly not. It fulfills a requirement and a good way to get started in the software development world.

Which is really my point. Web development is all well and good but as a developer, you are not immune from the cold hard fact about working in computing and IT. The responsibility to learn new technologies as they appear and adapt is entirely on you. You career progression is all down to you. And frankly, if you'd spent ten years being a web dev and suddenly wanted to become a financial programmer, I would wonder about you.

So what I would say is this. Be warned that the tech you will use advances all the time. And I mean all the time, AngularJS is pretty close to being old hat now. Secondly, don't expect most web-dev teams to behave like traditional software development roles. Third, realize that you are at risk being a web dev because sooner or later companies will realize that web development isn't all that difficult and bam you'll have a nice Indian company specializing in cheap full-stack development. And finally, there is this to consider.

http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index.html

This is an index of the most popular development languages. While JavaScript is constantly on the rise, the fact of the matter is the top three spots have been shared between C, C++ and Java for decades. Those languages have survived every other impact over the years and they will most likely survive the likes of C# and JavaScript too.

The other simple fact is most companies, when they need something a little more than a web application, struggle to find decent developers who are skilled in those languages. So a good tactic for you may be to carry on as you are, but concentrate skilling up in one of the Top-3. Given you have your mathematics background, none of those should be too difficult for you to get skilled up in.

As for medical school, I have no idea. It doesn't sound like a good option to me, but you should not be under the illusion that web development is a job for life. It's a job for the next 5-10 years tops. Don't think otherwise!

TL/DR: Stick with web development but learn a core language and move over to something useful.

ubercoolhipsterguy · 2015-11-27T02:07:33+00:00

Don't be a dumbass go to medical school.

You're too old to be striking it rich in a dot com startup and once you get too old you'll find it hard to compete with up and coming tech talent; at least on paper.

MachiavellianRed · 2015-11-27T11:59:48+00:00

If I was in your situation, the first thing I'd do is post this in /r/asktrp.

shadowz151 · 2015-11-27T03:27:50+00:00

Medicine is where all the hot chicks and $$ is. When people are sick they go to the Doctor. When people have other issues they procrastinate until it's too late. That's why the medical field will continue to grow.

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