Changing Your Career Isn’t Easy

Everyone is talking about pivots. If you scroll through LinkedIn or X long enough, you will see a dozen threads telling software engineers to quit and become plumbers, or junior devs to give up and start goat farming. The narrative is always the same: AI is coming for your keyboard, the market is cooked, and manual labor is the only safe haven left.

As someone who has navigated multiple business pivots and spent years in the trenches of both crypto and AI, I have a slightly different perspective. The grass isn't necessarily greener in the trades; it is just a different kind of dirt. Whether you are moving into engineering, trying to survive it, or looking for the exit, you need to understand that there is no such thing as an easy path. The friction you feel right now is not a sign to quit—it is a sign that the nature of work is changing under your feet.

The Loneliness of the Pivot

When you decide to change directions, especially after 30, you expect the technical struggle. You expect to fail interviews. You expect the imposter syndrome. What you do not expect is the lack of support from the people closest to you. Most of the time, this is not malicious. It is just projection.

People see your risk-taking as a threat to their own sense of security. If you fail, it confirms their fears. If you succeed, it highlights their own stagnation. As a founder, I have seen this repeatedly. Your circle wants you to be safe, but in a rapidly shifting economy, "safe" is often a synonym for "obsolete." If you are looking for validation from your family or peers before you make a move, you might be waiting forever. You have to be okay with being the only one who sees the vision for a while.

The Death of the Degree Requirement

For years, the gatekeeping in tech was academic. If you didn't have the right CS degree, you were filtered out by an ATS before a human even saw your name. That is changing. Recent data shows that job postings requiring a bachelor’s degree dropped from over 20% in 2019 to under 18% in early 2024. More than half of current listings have no formal education requirement at all.

This is a massive win for builders. It means the market is finally prioritizing what you can do over where you sat for four years. But it also means the competition is fiercer. If a degree isn't the signal, what is? It’s your proof of work. In the crypto and AI space, we have known this for years. Nobody cares what you studied; they want to see your GitHub, your deployed agents, or the smart contracts you’ve audited. If you are pivoting, stop worrying about getting another certification and start building something people can actually use.

Build in Public, Even for Free

This is the part that hurts the ego. When you have ten years of experience in one field and you move to another, you have to be willing to be a "nobody" again. I have had to do this in my own business multiple times. When I started pitching new services, I didn't lead with my resume. I led with case studies.

If you want to move into AI agents or blockchain development, find a small business or a friend's project and build for them at cost—or even for free. Use that to learn the jargon, understand the pain points, and create a concrete result. One solid case study is worth more than a thousand cold emails. You are not "working for free"; you are buying an entry ticket to a new industry.

The Myth of Stability

We are currently seeing a significant contraction in entry-level software roles—down nearly 20% since late 2022. It is easy to look at that number and panic. But if you look back at the 1990s, the web did the exact same thing to the previous generation of programmers. They had to throw away their old playbooks and learn entirely new stacks just to keep their desks.

Stability is a myth. If you are looking for a career where you can learn a skill once and coast for thirty years, you are in the wrong century. The reality is that every software engineer is in the middle of a career change right now, whether they realize it or not. The rise of LLMs means the commoditization of basic syntax. If your only value is writing boilerplate code, you are already being replaced.

The best move is not to find a "safe" job, but to build a foundation that allows you to adapt when the ground shifts.

What This Means for Builders

If you are a founder or a developer, the takeaway here is simple: stop looking for the exit and start looking for the leverage. AI is not just a threat; it is a tool that allows a single builder to do the work that used to require a team of five. The pivot isn't necessarily out of tech—it's into a more senior version of yourself.

Find communities of people who are actually doing the work, not just complaining about it on social media. Avoid the doom-scrolling and the "go herd goats" influencers. Those people aren't going to pay your mortgage when the market turns. Focus on foundational skills: logic, problem-solving, and the ability to learn new tools quickly. If you can do that, you don't need to fear the pivot.

The Final Word

Change is expensive, uncomfortable, and often lonely. But staying in a dying role because it feels familiar is the most expensive mistake you can make. Whether you are staying in tech or moving out, do it with your eyes open. Don't chase the next hype cycle—chase the skills that make you unreplaceable, regardless of the tools you use.

Read the original at IEEE Spectrum →