I am in the middle of trying to make a career change. My work history is in finance. Until recently I worked for a large real estate investment fund. I was really unhappy at that job, and the stress of it triggered two major depressive episodes. After seven years doing it, I have no interest returning.
I have spent a long time contemplating my next career move. I think tech is where I would be happiest. In high school I dabbled in learning C I was very interested in reverse engineering. I had bootlegged copies of Numega Soft Ice and IDA installed. Technical manuals from Intel on the x86 instruction set, from Microsoft on the PE file format. I was, in short, a huge nerd. And I was very lonely.
I gave all this up in hope of reinventing myself in college. After graduating I ended up following the crowd into finance. Eventually I resumed my tech hobby. I wrote some small programs in Python. I experimented briefly with Haskell. I now am writing a webapp in Clojure. All of these things I did for my me and me alone, primarily as learning exercises.
This brings me to today. As I said, I feel like I would be happiest in the tech field. I feel stuck though. My ideal job is one that would be 50/50 tech and business. I enjoy programming but I have no way of knowing whether I would enjoy doing it 100% of the time. Probably I wouldn't. Further, I hate the idea of being pigeonholed into any role. I don't want to be just Programmer, or just Business Drone.
I've considered project and product manager roles, thinking they might provide the right mix of business and tech. I have reservations about these roles though; they seem like middlemen who just coordinate others. E.g. on an informational interview, one project manager estimated to me that he spends a fifth of his time "traffic copping" his email.
Hopefully there are people reading this that were in a similar position at some point. If so, I would love to hear your story and get your advice.
I have spent a long time contemplating my next career move. I think tech is where I would be happiest. In high school I dabbled in learning C I was very interested in reverse engineering. I had bootlegged copies of Numega Soft Ice and IDA installed. Technical manuals from Intel on the x86 instruction set, from Microsoft on the PE file format. I was, in short, a huge nerd. And I was very lonely.
I gave all this up in hope of reinventing myself in college. After graduating I ended up following the crowd into finance. Eventually I resumed my tech hobby. I wrote some small programs in Python. I experimented briefly with Haskell. I now am writing a webapp in Clojure. All of these things I did for my me and me alone, primarily as learning exercises.
This brings me to today. As I said, I feel like I would be happiest in the tech field. I feel stuck though. My ideal job is one that would be 50/50 tech and business. I enjoy programming but I have no way of knowing whether I would enjoy doing it 100% of the time. Probably I wouldn't. Further, I hate the idea of being pigeonholed into any role. I don't want to be just Programmer, or just Business Drone.
I've considered project and product manager roles, thinking they might provide the right mix of business and tech. I have reservations about these roles though; they seem like middlemen who just coordinate others. E.g. on an informational interview, one project manager estimated to me that he spends a fifth of his time "traffic copping" his email.
Hopefully there are people reading this that were in a similar position at some point. If so, I would love to hear your story and get your advice.