HACKER Q&A
📣 ativzzz

Switching from Web to Systems Development


Hi HN,

I've been doing full stack on the web for ~5-6 years. Partially self taught and a bootcamp as education.

I'm currently doing an online masters in CS, which will take me a while to do due the part time nature of the program. I'm interested in switching from doing web work to working on some of the underlying systems in technology.

How do I go about making this transition? I don't have any experience doing any system work besides what I do for my classes.

Should I wait until I take a few more classes to have a more concrete direction of where I want to specialize?

How's the pay for systems work compared to web?

Is this a case of grass is always greener and the work is pretty much the same?

  👤 davismwfl Accepted Answer ✓
I've been on both sides, each has pros and cons as you know. It depends on what you are trying to avoid on the web side as to whether you'll enjoy systems stuff. I personally find systems dev more enjoyable, more challenging and less repetitive in general. That said, I find there are some really hard and fun problems to solve still on web, just not on the front end for me. It isn't that there aren't interesting things happening on front end, I just don't enjoy it and it feels repetitive to me personally, but back end distributed problems is a blast.

Systems dev is also a pretty broad term as well IMO. And depending on who you talk to there are different definitions, so it would help to define a little more what you are interested in and what you want to try and avoid. Some systems issues are repetitive just like web UI can be, so grass isn't always greener.

As for pay, pay is good either way generally, however, I think it is easier to get to higher pay levels in a web stack with less experience. C/C++ is still growing quite fast with all the IoT as well as renewed focus on performance and modeling. Additionally, Rust is growing and people with Rust knowledge/experience will be in higher and higher demand moving forward. One way to make the transition is to learn Rust well, and start looking for jobs there as the requirements for how much Rust experience you have won't be as difficult to meet as the ones for C/C++ type positions.