Ask HN: How did you move from IT/software to something unrelated?
It&#x27;s a bit similar to what I&#x27;m thinking about right now. I started my career close to 20 years ago, coding dynamic web pages (yes, I worked with php3), and unintentionally broadened my skillset into something like a CTO skillset for specific environments - I never was a really great coder, so I&#x27;m not suited for the lead-developer kind of role in an early phase startup.<p>Now I&#x27;m losing more and more interest in &quot;core tech&quot;. While I find infrastructure, performance and scaling still kinda interesting on a rather abstract level, I find it more and more enjoyable to work with &quot;people &amp; processes&quot;, so: How do people collaborate within an IT department, how does IT collaborate with its stakeholders, how are the roles &amp; responsibilities structured, where are the frustrations, what can be improved, how do we scale the team.<p>I&#x27;ve been doing this as a freelancer for almost three years now, and I had just two large-ish projects (about 6 months each). Problem is that both projects were started because management thought the problems they were facing were &quot;the IT&#x27;s fault&quot;, so I was hired as an interim CTO to &quot;fix the IT&quot;. Management had the impression that I would look at the code and improve it, and then everything would be fine. However in both projects I discovered there were various severe dysfunctions that didn&#x27;t really have anything to do with what the IT produced.<p>So staying within the jurisdiction of IT seems reasonable, but I&#x27;m also thinking about leaving it completely to become a general &quot;organisational coach&quot;. But at the end of the day, I have no idea what to do, since right now it&#x27;s hard to find clients, since my communication is rather incoherent, and people don&#x27;t really understand what I have to offer. As soon as I say that I won&#x27;t even _read_ code, they think I&#x27;m completely useless.