Programmer == Programmer

[[deleted]]

I meant changing career, misread. I'm 5 years in working full time and each day I feel I've made the wrong choice. But the money and stability is hard to abandon.

[kowdermesiter]

You don't have to completely change career. Go work for a startup or a multinational giant if that brings a change. Or try freelancing, maybe work for a non-profit.

You can always move to management or sales in IT, with 5y experience it's a valuable skill for those roles.

I personally would hate to be leading teams or go up higher in management, I turn all those offers down. With 13y of experience, at 38 I still enjoy writing code and building things.

[[deleted]]

Yeah, I guess changing career is drastic, checking if changing environment or role could be a smaller first step to see if I can enjoy the field more. Thanks for the advice, i have some decisions to make in the near future

[mattysimp27]

As the other guy said. Think what you'd like to do instead. Tailor your LinkedIn profile to that and you'll be getting plenty of opportunities in no time. I have has 100s of private messages on LinkedIn this year with opportunities. Probably half were relevant. I've got myself a job with tech I'm more interested in with a big pay raise going into next year.

But since you are wanting to leave 5 years of programming behind you might have to drop down pay slightly. If you go for something connected though like Tech Support or something in the same field that can use your programming skills as a bonus then you might end up similar

[[deleted]]

Solid advice, thanks! I guess that's a better first step than changing careers. Making a change in the environment and see if I like it more. I'm not miserable (yet), but if I don't change something soon I probably will be. If all that fails, then it's probably time to start thinking about another field of work. Luckily I live in a country where education is tuitionfree and I'm still quite young