Feeling lost after 8-9 years of experience. Request for guidance on what role to target next.
The author, a software engineer with 8-9 years of experience, reflects on a non-traditional career path that included freelancing, startup leadership, and technical work, but feels uncertain about their professional growth and direction. They describe early success in ETL/BI development, followed by launching a startup without formal corporate experience, which eventually closed due to financial and operational challenges. Now seeking guidance, they want to understand what roles align with their background and how to move forward in their career.
- ▪The author has 8-9 years of experience in software engineering, starting as an ETL/BI developer before transitioning into freelancing and entrepreneurship.
- ▪They founded a small software startup, managing teams and projects without prior corporate leadership experience, which ultimately closed after 2.5 years due to funding and client shortages.
- ▪During their career, they gained exposure to technologies like Python, .NET, React.js, and data engineering, while also earning certifications in Agile and Scrum project management.
- ▪The author struggled with lack of documentation, inconsistent workflows, and absence of industry best practices, especially during their startup phase.
- ▪After the startup ended, they returned to freelancing and are now seeking advice on suitable career roles and paths for professional growth.
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Record
| Original publisher | DEV.to (Top) |
| Canonical URL | https://dev.to/anoldsoul/feeling-lost-after-8-9-years-of-experience-request-for-guidance-on-what-role-to-target-next-69e |
| Publication time | Sat, 16 May 2026 20:39:06 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-05-16T21:10:19.063Z |
| Last seen | 2026-05-16T21:10:19.063Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | VbPP8XqYKwmj |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
try { if(localStorage) { let currentUser = localStorage.getItem('current_user'); if (currentUser) { currentUser = JSON.parse(currentUser); if (currentUser.id === 3935480) { document.getElementById('article-show-container').classList.add('current-user-is-article-author'); } } } } catch (e) { console.error(e); } Soul Posted on May 16 Feeling lost after 8-9 years of experience. Request for guidance on what role to target next. #career #developers #discuss #softwareengineering Hi everyone, First of all, apologies for the long post, but it's required for context. I am posting this to seek guidance and help regarding my career. I was born and raised in Saudi Arabia and went to Pakistan (my homeland) for bachelor's degree.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at DEV.to (Top).
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