I have no advice, but I am curious what new careers you are considering. (One successful transition I have seen was getting an MBA from a prestigious school and moving into leadership.)
I'm more on the data sci side right now, and am interested in commodities trading and geopolitical analysis. Less lucrative (well, the latter is, anyway) but seems more important + interesting.
I'm not posting because I'm making an imminent decision, though -- more that I see people discuss transitions every once in a while and am curious what challenges they see + how they overcame them.
Something I think I might like to do if / when I'm closer to financial independence, that sounds like it might be up your alley as well, is write about some deep and interesting topic. Basically, be a beat journalist with a self-driven beat that is heavy on empirical analysis.
For me, and my current interests, this would be climate and energy technology, a la heatmap.news. For you, maybe something in the commodities and geopolitical analysis space.
It's easy to make fun of how everyone has a newsletter and a podcast now, but at the heart of that is that it truly is the case that there has never in history been a better time to do reporting on interesting things, and possibly even find a large enough audience for it to be a real and sustainable vocation.
Depends on the size of the company. Most big companies, even in tech, do have people with MBAs in most of the executive roles. Not front-line people managers that is, but leadership, decision-makers.
Yea, take it from someone who tried to do this: (MBA from reasonably good top-10 school)
1. The degree itself, even from a top school, doesn't guarantee you anything. It opens a few doors in finance (Investment Banks) and consulting, but you still need to fight your way through them. Wall Street also doesn't really like career changers, so it's already an uphill battle before you even enroll.
2. Silicon Valley doesn't seem to give even a tiny shit about the degree. In fact MBAs get regularly dunked on here at HN (as if the degree itself turns a smart engineer into a drooling dumbass, but whatever). So if your plan is to get an MBA to zoom back to tech to become a Director or VP or something, your plan is flawed.
I wasn't successful at either of these paths, so I went right back to "Individual Contributor" software engineering after spending 6 months unemployed hopelessly looking for an investment banking job. So the degree ended up being a waste.
Thats why i was intrigued by that comment. Bunch of my friends got an MBA because their employer paid for it but do the same job as dev like me years later.
Still curious about "getting an MBA from a prestigious school and moving into leadership" how they did it.
