Ask HN: Can I change career to dev without taking a huge pay cut?

4 pointsolliedev12y ago3 comments

Hello all,

I'm 29 and a Support Manager, I've worked in support since getting my degree in Computing and IT a few years ago. A number of poor decisions, wrong place, wrong time scenarios (resulting in being made redundant) and a certain amount of naivety has kept me in support, despite wanting to be a developer for as long as I can remember. I'm desperate to make the jump into a development career but I've also got myself into a situation where I can't realistically take a large reduction in salary. I'm currently doing courses on Codecademy and working on a small private project for a friend, so over the next few weeks I will finish these and then decide what to do next (another private project if I can find one or more courses on other sites). I'm aware that getting involved with open source projects, having a public repo and personal website will all look good on my CV and so I think I'm pretty well geared up to be able to showcase my skills 'once I'm ready'. For what it's worth, I'm learning web skills, HTML, CSS, JS and some Ruby\Rails.

So back to my original question, will I need to look for a 'junior' position? From what I've researched, these positions pay anywhere from £18-25k, and I've calculated that the most I could reduce my salary by is about £9k which would take me to about £33k. Is this realistic for someone with little real world experience? Am I going about this the right way? You feedback, criticism, personal stories and advice are all gratefully received.

Thanks for reading!

3 comments

3 comments · 3 top-level

Spoom12y ago

Do you have to jump right away? You could, for example, work up your skills in development by doing freelance projects on the side while keeping your current job. I recommend guru.com as a decent marketplace for this. You'll have to do a little more work separating the wheat from the chaff in terms of projects there (and good lord is there a lot of chaff), but there are decent, well-paying employers to be found. Not to mention that the freelance marketplaces give you a nice URL to highlight your feedback from clients; this can actually be better than a CV to show that you can do the work.

Once you have some experience, it's a much smoother move to go from development contracting to full time development; you might even find that one of your contract employers wouldn't mind hiring you full time.

Irishsteve12y ago

Because you aren't on serious money it shouldn't be to difficult to make the move.

Entry level in an investment bank in London is in the region of 40k. That could be one option. If you move to Reading you could probably get around 30k+ as a junior dev.

Many companies have support type engineers which might be easier for you to move into. This usually revolves around making bug fixes and updates to some bespoke software inside the company made.

If none of these sound appealing, you could get into some big open source projects, start making commits and lo and behold you are valuable to many places as a pure developer.

projectramo12y ago

There are jobs out there that pay 33k or more in development. The thing no one here can know is how you compare for other candidates for those positions. You could just keep looking till someone offered you 33k or more. It might take a year longer of working on side projects, or whatever. Or, if you put enough time aside, you might be "good enough" for 33k now. The market can answer this question better than anyone on this forum.