Reddit Experience · Apr 2026

Left industry for 5 years, how fucked am I?

130 upvotes 76 replies

Interview Experience

I was previously a SWE in a mid tier company working in health and fintech. I have a comp sci degree with a 4.0 GPA at GaTech and was working with golang, php and python on webdev services to ingest E

Full Details

I was previously a SWE in a mid tier company working in health and fintech. I have a comp sci degree with a 4.0 GPA at GaTech and was working with golang, php and python on webdev services to ingest EHR data and create bills. We also did work with VueJS and other various frameworks, etc etc. I was pushing docker containers too and setting up microservices in kubernetes. I haven't touched SWE in a while and moved to do data analysis and statistical analysis in MRI in research (yeah, COVID made me wanna try stuff out). I did work at NIH, and am currently in a PhD at upenn running statistical analyses and software on MRI. I've barely kept up with CS and SWE and recognize my skills have atrophied significantly. How fucked am I if I want to leave my PhD and pursue a regular job in SWE again?

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Topics

System Design