Ask HN: How to get back into tech after two years of absence because of burnout?

by tabs_or_spaces on 12/29/2022, 6:41:10 PM with 2 comments
So I did not do anything coding or technical for the past two years because of severe burnout. Instead, I chose to become an engineering manager because it was a much different career path and this was really helping me get over the coding burnout that I've accumulated over the years.

I feel that I'm at a stage of my life where I can code again and move back to the IC path. Not that I dislike management, I just like being an IC more. My technical skills are very rusty, like I can probably system design my way through but will struggle initially writing code again.

But since that's my goal, I need a bit of advice in terms of how to "get back" into the industry after effectively being gone for 2 years as an IC? My current strategy is to do what I did before (choose a language, do leetcode, do sideprojects, join community, read books, etc, etc) but I'm confused about whether I should be specialising at my age or not? Specialisation for me means to either go into a specific industry (crypto, self driving, etc) or specialising like become a SRE, Data Engineer, etc.

Personal context (if stats matters): 37 yrs, 15 yrs tech industry experience. Last language I used before burnout was Go.

  • by amalgamated_inc on 12/29/2022, 6:43:59 PM

    I did pretty much the exact same thing in the same situation. Just never came up. I applied for a bunch of jobs, I got offers. Yay?

    Didn't do any leetcode, but then I didn't go for super competitive FAANG jobs or anything. Just some that sounded fun in a technology I was interested in.

    Don't overthink it.