Comment by hintymad

A trajectory question: has anyone thought about becoming a journeyman in their day-to-day work? Like a backend engineer switching to building machine learning models. Or a frontend engineer moving into optimizing LLM serving infrastructure. The challenge isn’t so much technical—it’s social.

Here's a typical scenario: you're a well-respected senior engineer at your company. Say you're an E8 at Meta. You spend your days in meetings, write great documentation, and read more papers than most, which helps you solve high-level architectural problems. You’ve built deep expertise in your domain and earned a strong reputation, both internally and in the industry.

But deep down, you know you’re rusty with tools. You haven’t written production code in years. You’re solid in math and machine learning theory from all the reading, but you’ve never actually built and shipped production ML models. You're fluent in linear algebra and what not, but you don't know shit about writing CUDA libraries, let alone optimizing them. When you check the job specs at companies like OpenAI, you see they’re using Rust. You might be able to write a doubly linked list in Rust, but let’s be honest—you’d struggle to write a basic web service in it.

So switching domains starts to feel daunting. To say the least, you'll lose your edge to influence. Even if you’re willing to take a pay cut, the hiring company might not even want you. Your experience may help a little, but not enough. You’d have to give up your comfortable zone of leading through influence and dive back into the mess of writing code, fixing elusive bugs, and building things from scratch—stuff you used to love.

But now? You’ve got a family of five. You get distracted more often. Leadership fits your life better—you can rely more on experience, communication, intuition. Still, a part of you misses being a journeyman.

So how does someone actually make that move? Do you just bite the bullet and try? Stick to adjacent areas to play it safe? Join a company doing the kind of work you want, but stay in your current domain at first—say, a backend engineer goes to OpenAI but still works on infra? Or is there another path?