Changing Your Career Isn’t Easy

This article is crossposted from IEEE Spectrum’s careers newsletter. Sign up now to get insider tips, expert advice, and practical strategies, written in partnership with tech career development company Parsity and delivered to your inbox for free!When I changed careers at 30 to become a software engineer, I expected it to be hard. I expected to struggle to fit in, and I expected to bomb a lot of interviews (I did). What I didn’t expect was how few people would support me.As a parent, I get it now.A career change is a risk, and the people who care about you tend to project their fears onto you. They don’t want to watch you struggle or fail, so they discourage you or just don’t offer much enthusiasm.Right now is a strange time to be in engineering, or knowledge work in general. Plenty of us are excited about what AI means for our jobs. More of us are nervous, and I think that fear is justified. Employment for entry-level software developers has fallen nearly 20 percent since late 2022, according to Stanford’s 2026 AI Index, and it can feel like the knowledge we spent our careers building is being commoditized. Lately I’ve seen a flood of social media content telling software develo…

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