johnnycarcin

After 20+ years, I've recently come to the conclusion that I don't want to be in "IT" anymore. It is all I've ever done (sysadmin, dev, security), but I just don't enjoy it anymore. I've started to look around at other options, but as you would expect, the pay for non-tech roles is way lower than what I have grown accustomed to. I am looking to pay off all my debt before switching careers, but I still have a family to support, so unfortunately, pay rate still matters.

I'm curious to hear what other folks have done in similar situations. Were you able to find something comparable? Do I just need to accept that I'll never make near what I currently make outside of tech? Do you feel you made the right choice?

TIA

Many HN folks deal with data problems, so I thought I'd ask: if you had to store and index less than 1TB of unstructured (plain text) data, what would you use?

I have a bunch of text files and HTML pages that I'd like to dump into something and then be able to search over it, maybe even be able to find relationships (common terms, phrases, etc) between the various docs. I've heard of things like hadoop, but that seems to be overkill for the amount of data I have. I'd also like to keep things as low-cost as possible as this is just for personal use. I've looked at a few of the cloud providers but am honestly not sure what I'm looking for, so I find myself walking away more confused than when I started.

This seems like an easy problem, but for whatever reason I'm getting wrapped around the axle on it.

Yes, there are a TON of existing static site generators out there, I know. I'd like to learn a new language/toolset and think a static site generator would be a fun project. Ideally the language would have good templating/macro/pre-processing support. It also can't be golang since that is my preferred language already.I'd also like to stay away from the more common languages like Python and JavaScript.

Initially I was thinking of just playing around with M4, but that is kind of boring haha. Maybe a lisp? C? Awk+sed haha.

Just looking for a fun holiday project

EDIT: Here are a few I stumbled across the other day that I thought were pretty neat:

https://github.com/datagrok/makebakery http://m4-bloggery.invergo.net/fossil/home

I feel like this is kind of a "everyone is different" or "duh, just do the math and figure it out" type question, but folks here have been super helpful previously so here goes...

Has anyone, maybe those who have become burnt out, changed your industry (say from dev to forest ranger or something) later on in life (40+)? Did you search out a career that had similar pay or did you have to plan ahead to the lifestyle change regarding salary?

Maybe it's part of a mid-life crisis ;), but I'm not really enjoying life in the world of tech right now so I've been looking at industries/careers that I think I might enjoy. There are not many fields that pay someone without a college degree like tech does, so as you can imagine I haven't found many options that would allow me to continue supporting my family in the way that I currently do.

I guess it really comes down to: Stick it out, bank as much as I can and try to retire early and enjoy life OR take what is likely a huge hit, adjust our lifestyle and hopefully start enjoying work again.

For the security folks out there, what is the market like? How much weight is put on having some of the various certifications out there?

I have always had an interest in security, especially the red/blue team side of things as well as the forensics area. I have spent my entire career in the world of sysadmin/SRE/shitty dev however so nothing on my resume shows "security". The last couple of weeks I have been looking at some of the certification classes and... wow, they can get pretty crazy. The SANS online stuff is like $6k per course!

Being close to 40 and making six figures (not a brag, just using it for background) I am worried that it's too late to make the jump and still be able to provide for my family. It seems like a pretty big risk to drop multiple thousands on certifications only to start at a salary much lower than I currently have. I'm not willing to impact my family by taking a potential 50% pay cut. I realize there are risks with any kind of career change, I just want to make sure I'm not going into this blind.

Does it make sense to go after some of these certifications, even if they are not from SANS? Is the security world hiring and paying well these days? Am I looking for too much and should just except the fact that a major pay cut would be part of the process?

TIA