What would be a pragmatic shift in a career if I spend 10 years in software development and I would like to move to creative side of things, like film making, architecture, etc.?

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I’ve written about software development career pragmatism before, you can find the relevant answer here. The rest of my answer will assume you’ve managed to come away with my approach to how one should conceive of, approach, build, and maintain your software development career in a pragmatic and non-idealistic way.

The thing I want to say here is that there definitely is room for idealism in your career path. But you have to pay for it. Pragmatism is precisely the opposite of idealism, but you can build up enough momentum in your career that you can launch yourself from one side of it to another without losing a whole lot of steam. But you will lose steam. The question is whether you’ll lose all of it.

So, the software industry operates on the real-world reality that individual technical skills can accelerate the accomplishment of business goals. If it weren’t for this reality, software development would not be lucrative enough to provide an escape from the working class into the professional class. Individual line factory workers cannot meaningfully accelerate business goals. It doesn’t matter how much faster they can knock out widgets, that’s not going to do more than add a few thousands to the bottom line.

Software workers, on the other hand, work directly with the things that can meaningfully affect the bottom line. If middle managers can more easily get and analyze more fine-grained sales and revenue data, that analysis can easily drive percentage point increases in revenue. Hiring another accountant won’t get them that data. Hiring another software developer might.

The “creative side of things,” is a really really really really broad category of industries, each of which operates by its own rules. You’ve given two examples of how to narrow it down, architecture and film making. Architecture is vague, but the inclusion of film making makes me think you mean building architecture, rather than, say, software architecture.

If this is indeed what you mean, then I’m sorry to say that there’s no pragmatic approach to getting started here. There’s no way to use the momentum you’ve generated with a software development career to ease your transition into a creative one, other than to just save up a bunch of money and make a go of it. None of your existing skills will, by themselves, convince a power player in your desired industry to give you a shot.

If you were a little more realistic, like say you wanted to move into, say, project management or business, then I could maybe be more helpful. But pragmatism and switching entire economic sectors just don’t go together in the same sentence.

The best I can do for you is to find a vertical that actually uses software developers, and then to go find a software development job in that vertical. Then use your access to insiders in that industry to launch a new career. The easy example to point to here is video game development.

Video games are interesting to this question because of what consideration of this path illuminates. The vast majority of video game shops simply aren’t going to be interested in you as a line developer, which has far more in common with factory assembly than it does with professional work. They would do a lot to dissuade you from taking a job, because they’d rightly feel that you just won’t fit in. Video game development is not a professional career field, it doesn’t share with business software development the particular economic traits that make it so lucrative for us. So it would not be a pragmatic career jump.

I’ll give one more example so this doesn’t turn into a book. I work with CNN as a software developer. Turner owns CNN, as well as a vast number of media properties, some of which do actually make movies. Turner hires software developers, and I’d be lying if I didn’t say I’ve looked at those offerings and longed to rub elbows with actual creatives and work on super-cool shit. But, well, I already work on super-cool shit, for Great Big Story. But my work is pretty far from the creative side of it. And I get to stay in my wheelhouse of directly using skills that I’ve been developing for years. I’m way too pragmatic to want to jump from my comfortable existence into one where I’m struggling again.

If I jumped into another software development job in a more creative vertical, like I’m suggesting for you, nothing much would change. It won’t be film making or architecture or anything like that. It’ll be software development. And you probably won’t have the kind of access you’d really need, if my experience is anything to go on. You’d only be marginally better off than if you just stayed where you at, saved up six months of living expenses, then launching yourself directly off that way. Maybe it works, maybe it doesn’t. Certainly isn’t a pragmatic way of going about a career change, but as options go, it isn’t the worst one out there to satisfy your yearning for a more meaningful work life.