An observation: you mentioned that you're hesitant to pivot in your writing career by starting a new pen name (due to sunk cost fallacy and difficulty to gain traction with new pen name), yet...
An observation: you mentioned that you're hesitant to pivot in your writing career by starting a new pen name (due to sunk cost fallacy and difficulty to gain traction with new pen name), yet you're willing to experiment with pivoting to IT/web development/etc. with a small company (where you'd be starting from a junior level position - where you'd have to work to gain traction, grow, and work up to a higher paying position, possibly with a larger company as funds in this small development company may have you hit a ceiling fast. In that case, you may find yourself within a sunk cost fallacy soon too).
Sounds like you want a change imo. The newness may be something that is exciting to you. You already know the writing business, starting a new pen name, as you mentioned, will probably take time to gain traction, but a caveat is that you're coming from a more experienced/knowledgeable level, so hopefully the traction wouldn't be as slow as the first time 'round. But that doesn't mean you can't do it on the side or do it later on in life... or not at all, maybe it's okay to have writing as something you did in the past. Our interests change.
I just hope you aren't looking at this to spend more time with your partner. Or maybe only jumping into it because, well, someone likes you and we like to be liked and receive gratification/ connection. I don't get that vibe from you though.
Just a different perspective. Can't say I'm giving advice. Just a thought.
Have you tried for a few interviews at remote first companies in order to test the water? Have you published at least one book under your real name that you would be proud of? What about a short...
Have you tried for a few interviews at remote first companies in order to test the water?
Have you published at least one book under your real name that you would be proud of? What about a short story?
What does your wife think of your writing skills? I presume she is one of the few who know your pen name and has read your works?
Whatever you decide, you should feel really proud of yourself. You are an author. You make your living from the pen. You are self published. You are a self made artist.
In this day and age, I think you are going to find yourself at a disadvantage if you don't have a Linkedin. It wont so much matter if you take the route of hiring with someone you know, but...
In this day and age, I think you are going to find yourself at a disadvantage if you don't have a Linkedin.
It wont so much matter if you take the route of hiring with someone you know, but eventually you might need to hold your nose, get a google voice number, get a google email, and sign up.
You do not need a LinkedIn to get a job, even a well paying one. Recruiters are, in my experience, largely useless and little more than the HR version of a shady "SEO" contractor. Their entire...
I did create a LinkedIn at the insistence of the recruiter I spoke with, but I found that I hated LinkedIn (like I do most social media), I wiped my account of personal information, and then I found myself locked out of it. I hope to not go back to that awful website to find work.
You do not need a LinkedIn to get a job, even a well paying one. Recruiters are, in my experience, largely useless and little more than the HR version of a shady "SEO" contractor. Their entire strategy seems based around making you discoverable by companies looking for someone with your skillset, thing is no one does that unless they're looking for something extremely specific not the vast seas of general IT/developer/jack-of-all-trades people out there.
Many recruiters have no other tools at their disposal other than the search bar on LinkedIn and will be out of a job if/when LinkedIn collapses.
I think there are two questions you are trying to answer at the same time: What do I want to do with my life? What is my passion? How can I make a living? What job should I do? The degree to which...
I think there are two questions you are trying to answer at the same time:
What do I want to do with my life? What is my passion?
How can I make a living? What job should I do?
The degree to which you want these questions to interact, and the degree to which any one answer will overlap these questions, is highly fluid. Some options:
Job must also be passion. Try and make a living writing exactly what I want to write.
Job must be enjoyable and pay well, but not necessarily be my passion. Get a DevOps job in tech which is interesting and in demand. Pursue passion writing in spare time.
Job satisfaction doesn't matter, I just need money. Take a random part-time job and focus on maximising free time to work on passion writing.
I would suggest to think about your long-term objectives and work back from there, I have found that has helped me with aligning what I'm doing now, what I want to be doing in a few years, and what I want to have achieved before I leave this plane.
Part-time might be a good option: less money, but more time to work on your passions. You could probably pursue that through a job in tech as well, either by being open about that at recruitment time, or just by finding a good place to work and then trying to swing it after a few months.
The job with your partner's company sounds like an ideal way to get your foot in the door. You might be able to take on more sysadmin/DevOps responsibilities over time and really enjoy it. Otherwise it just gets you something on your CV to help you start moving along the dev career path.
Sounds like you'd be a good fit for a DevOps type position. Or what do they call them now - "reliability engineers"? Haha. Something like that. Breaking in would be the hardest part, though, so I...
Sounds like you'd be a good fit for a DevOps type position. Or what do they call them now - "reliability engineers"? Haha. Something like that.
Breaking in would be the hardest part, though, so I am also on team "really consider that small company, at least for a little while". And a lot of the important part of the experience is just working professionally in software development in general - getting used to the pace, the tools, the organization - regardless of the end product or the language. Just the confidence to get your hands on something and learn it. If you can get any kind of mentoring or do any shadowing, that's very valuable.
In software it's also very very common to change jobs every couple years, leveraging your previous experience to get new experience in a new thing. Don't feel like one job will lock you in to one thing. I went from writing virtual machines in Assembly (don't recommend) to writing automation in JavaScript to writing phone services in Lisp and now I'm trying to get a job doing data analysis in Python. You just take bits and pieces from each previous thing and fill out what you're missing at the new place on the job, and it gets easier to do that every time.
I think you should work for the company and write the stuff you want in your free time. It's general advice that you can't usually "do what you love" as your job. Even if you were to get good...
I think you should work for the company and write the stuff you want in your free time.
It's general advice that you can't usually "do what you love" as your job. Even if you were to get good money writing what you want, if it's your only source of income, eventually you'll get bored.
At the same time, having a job doesn't mean you have to devote all your time and energy to the job, in fact that's generally a bad sign and it's a shame that it is kind of normalized. Clock in, work, clock out so that you have money, and then write whatever you want.
Personally speaking I would probably keep doing the writing job if it pays the bills, but that really depends on the mental load that it gives you. But the main reason why I say this is that...
Personally speaking I would probably keep doing the writing job if it pays the bills, but that really depends on the mental load that it gives you. But the main reason why I say this is that hiring in the tech industry sucks far more than any other industry that I'm aware of. There's some pretty extreme ageism, many jobs are filled either by networking or nepotism, and because nobody's willing to spend any money on training, you'll probably only ever get hired if you know the specific frameworks that they're using and have proof you've completed a project using it.
But if I were to read between the lines, it seems like your biggest ask is less about what you spend your time doing, but how you spend it and with whom. In particular It sounds like you want more social interaction in your life. And if you want to go back to tech to do that, I think it's a perfectly valid reason for it. So I think while you could take the leap and change your career, perhaps before you make such a dramatic change you should consider alternative ways to enrich your social life. For instance, consider joining a writer's group, or donating your time to a social cause (local community centers are great options!). If you want to do something technical you might want to consider becoming a freelance technology consultant and canvassing your local businesses as to how you can offer them improvements.
I say go for the small company. In my 10+ years of dev experience, they can eventually find a role that you’ll enjoy. If they can’t, you look for a new job. Unless you really want to write the...
I say go for the small company. In my 10+ years of dev experience, they can eventually find a role that you’ll enjoy. If they can’t, you look for a new job.
Unless you really want to write the stuff you want to write. Can you keep writing the current stuff and slowly shift to the new stuff? I’m not super knowledgeable about how that money comes in, but it could be an option.
Sounds like you’re leaning toward the tech role! Crossing my fingers it works out for you and you can maybe do some of the writing you’d like to in your off-work hours. :)
Sounds like you’re leaning toward the tech role! Crossing my fingers it works out for you and you can maybe do some of the writing you’d like to in your off-work hours. :)
I wonder if technical writing would be a good way to get a job at some kind of tech company? If it’s a small company then roles won’t be as fixed and you could end up doing more once they know you.
I wonder if technical writing would be a good way to get a job at some kind of tech company? If it’s a small company then roles won’t be as fixed and you could end up doing more once they know you.
I have a friend who is also a professional writer, under a pen name, that writes uhh... romance? sexually explicit romance? erotica? smut? (we just call it smut in the friend group, even though...
I need your advice. For the past 7 years I've been self-employed as a writer. I self-publish books on Amazon and other platforms and I've had a lot of successes as well as a lot of failures. It's been amazing and weird and fun and stressful. But I'm just not where I hoped I'd be this far into my career. Being a professional artist is really hard.
I write under a pen name and the stuff I write--while I do think is good and I am proud of it--it's also slightly embarrassing. I don't share it with anybody, friends or family. Most people understand when I tell them why I can't share, but I know over the years my close friends have felt a little jilted that they don't get to know my secret.
I have a friend who is also a professional writer, under a pen name, that writes uhh... romance? sexually explicit romance? erotica? smut? (we just call it smut in the friend group, even though it's no where close to being a Penthouse Forum thing, as it's just easier than whatever the genre actually is called) and like you, it took/takes a lot of work and a lot of time to get to his current point where he's self sustaining/no longer struggling to make ends meet.
He started out under his own name, but wasn't getting anywhere quickly enough, so he worked ghostwriter for some other "big names" for awhile, getting some experience in and then went back to his own name and success has come relatively quickly since then. If you want to remain a writer, this may be an approach you can take as well. Otherwise I'll echo what @wcerfgba stated, of finding approach works best for you. The vast majority of people don't have the opportunity to do what they enjoy for a living, so you're in an advantageous situation to have done so/be doing such now.
An observation: you mentioned that you're hesitant to pivot in your writing career by starting a new pen name (due to sunk cost fallacy and difficulty to gain traction with new pen name), yet you're willing to experiment with pivoting to IT/web development/etc. with a small company (where you'd be starting from a junior level position - where you'd have to work to gain traction, grow, and work up to a higher paying position, possibly with a larger company as funds in this small development company may have you hit a ceiling fast. In that case, you may find yourself within a sunk cost fallacy soon too).
Sounds like you want a change imo. The newness may be something that is exciting to you. You already know the writing business, starting a new pen name, as you mentioned, will probably take time to gain traction, but a caveat is that you're coming from a more experienced/knowledgeable level, so hopefully the traction wouldn't be as slow as the first time 'round. But that doesn't mean you can't do it on the side or do it later on in life... or not at all, maybe it's okay to have writing as something you did in the past. Our interests change.
I just hope you aren't looking at this to spend more time with your partner. Or maybe only jumping into it because, well, someone likes you and we like to be liked and receive gratification/ connection. I don't get that vibe from you though.
Just a different perspective. Can't say I'm giving advice. Just a thought.
Have you tried for a few interviews at remote first companies in order to test the water?
Have you published at least one book under your real name that you would be proud of? What about a short story?
What does your wife think of your writing skills? I presume she is one of the few who know your pen name and has read your works?
Whatever you decide, you should feel really proud of yourself. You are an author. You make your living from the pen. You are self published. You are a self made artist.
In this day and age, I think you are going to find yourself at a disadvantage if you don't have a Linkedin.
It wont so much matter if you take the route of hiring with someone you know, but eventually you might need to hold your nose, get a google voice number, get a google email, and sign up.
You do not need a LinkedIn to get a job, even a well paying one. Recruiters are, in my experience, largely useless and little more than the HR version of a shady "SEO" contractor. Their entire strategy seems based around making you discoverable by companies looking for someone with your skillset, thing is no one does that unless they're looking for something extremely specific not the vast seas of general IT/developer/jack-of-all-trades people out there.
Many recruiters have no other tools at their disposal other than the search bar on LinkedIn and will be out of a job if/when LinkedIn collapses.
I think there are two questions you are trying to answer at the same time:
The degree to which you want these questions to interact, and the degree to which any one answer will overlap these questions, is highly fluid. Some options:
I would suggest to think about your long-term objectives and work back from there, I have found that has helped me with aligning what I'm doing now, what I want to be doing in a few years, and what I want to have achieved before I leave this plane.
Part-time might be a good option: less money, but more time to work on your passions. You could probably pursue that through a job in tech as well, either by being open about that at recruitment time, or just by finding a good place to work and then trying to swing it after a few months.
The job with your partner's company sounds like an ideal way to get your foot in the door. You might be able to take on more sysadmin/DevOps responsibilities over time and really enjoy it. Otherwise it just gets you something on your CV to help you start moving along the dev career path.
Good luck! x
Sounds like you'd be a good fit for a DevOps type position. Or what do they call them now - "reliability engineers"? Haha. Something like that.
Breaking in would be the hardest part, though, so I am also on team "really consider that small company, at least for a little while". And a lot of the important part of the experience is just working professionally in software development in general - getting used to the pace, the tools, the organization - regardless of the end product or the language. Just the confidence to get your hands on something and learn it. If you can get any kind of mentoring or do any shadowing, that's very valuable.
In software it's also very very common to change jobs every couple years, leveraging your previous experience to get new experience in a new thing. Don't feel like one job will lock you in to one thing. I went from writing virtual machines in Assembly (don't recommend) to writing automation in JavaScript to writing phone services in Lisp and now I'm trying to get a job doing data analysis in Python. You just take bits and pieces from each previous thing and fill out what you're missing at the new place on the job, and it gets easier to do that every time.
I was thinking the same thing - a test engineer position would probably be a good fit.
I think you should work for the company and write the stuff you want in your free time.
It's general advice that you can't usually "do what you love" as your job. Even if you were to get good money writing what you want, if it's your only source of income, eventually you'll get bored.
At the same time, having a job doesn't mean you have to devote all your time and energy to the job, in fact that's generally a bad sign and it's a shame that it is kind of normalized. Clock in, work, clock out so that you have money, and then write whatever you want.
Personally speaking I would probably keep doing the writing job if it pays the bills, but that really depends on the mental load that it gives you. But the main reason why I say this is that hiring in the tech industry sucks far more than any other industry that I'm aware of. There's some pretty extreme ageism, many jobs are filled either by networking or nepotism, and because nobody's willing to spend any money on training, you'll probably only ever get hired if you know the specific frameworks that they're using and have proof you've completed a project using it.
But if I were to read between the lines, it seems like your biggest ask is less about what you spend your time doing, but how you spend it and with whom. In particular It sounds like you want more social interaction in your life. And if you want to go back to tech to do that, I think it's a perfectly valid reason for it. So I think while you could take the leap and change your career, perhaps before you make such a dramatic change you should consider alternative ways to enrich your social life. For instance, consider joining a writer's group, or donating your time to a social cause (local community centers are great options!). If you want to do something technical you might want to consider becoming a freelance technology consultant and canvassing your local businesses as to how you can offer them improvements.
I say go for the small company. In my 10+ years of dev experience, they can eventually find a role that you’ll enjoy. If they can’t, you look for a new job.
Unless you really want to write the stuff you want to write. Can you keep writing the current stuff and slowly shift to the new stuff? I’m not super knowledgeable about how that money comes in, but it could be an option.
Sounds like you’re leaning toward the tech role! Crossing my fingers it works out for you and you can maybe do some of the writing you’d like to in your off-work hours. :)
I wonder if technical writing would be a good way to get a job at some kind of tech company? If it’s a small company then roles won’t be as fixed and you could end up doing more once they know you.
I have a friend who is also a professional writer, under a pen name, that writes uhh... romance? sexually explicit romance? erotica? smut? (we just call it smut in the friend group, even though it's no where close to being a Penthouse Forum thing, as it's just easier than whatever the genre actually is called) and like you, it took/takes a lot of work and a lot of time to get to his current point where he's self sustaining/no longer struggling to make ends meet.
He started out under his own name, but wasn't getting anywhere quickly enough, so he worked ghostwriter for some other "big names" for awhile, getting some experience in and then went back to his own name and success has come relatively quickly since then. If you want to remain a writer, this may be an approach you can take as well. Otherwise I'll echo what @wcerfgba stated, of finding approach works best for you. The vast majority of people don't have the opportunity to do what they enjoy for a living, so you're in an advantageous situation to have done so/be doing such now.