u/perioddramaqueen988

I’m at a bit of a career crossroads and would really appreciate some perspective from people working in UX/HCI, particularly those who have made a significant career pivot.

My background is in biochemistry, and I’ve spent the last few years working in life-science/biotech roles, including research and laboratory-based work. More recently, I’ve moved into customer success at a software company that develops software for the life sciences. Customer success is not where I see my long term development. I’m based in Europe. I’m 27.

Interestingly, I’m now seeing a potential path into UI/UX within my company, particularly because I have the scientific domain knowledge. I’m considering starting to study HCI alongside working part-time as I have a place on a masters program already, with the longer-term idea of moving into UX/product design within scientific software.

On paper, this seems like a really interesting combination: life sciences + software + HCI/UX. I could potentially work in a fairly specialised niche where my existing scientific background is actually useful rather than starting completely from scratch.

But I’m having a lot of anxiety about the long-term career implications of making such a big pivot.

I’m essentially deciding between three broad directions:
Continue further into science — potentially returning to a lab/research role or doing a scientific PhD which has a 50/50 lab/computational focus.

Stay in scientific software, potentially moving from customer success into a UX/UI or product-focused role, therefore committing more fully to HCI/UX, with the goal of building a career in UX/product design, ideally within life sciences or scientific software.

The thing I’m struggling with is that I’m not sure whether I’m looking at a genuinely promising niche or convincing myself that this career path could work out.

I also worry about the opportunity cost. I have a fairly solid baseline scientific background already, whereas moving into UX would mean investing time studying and money (going part time to keep studying for 2 years) into a new field where I’d initially have much less experience. At the same time, I’m not sure I actually want to spend the next 10–20 years doing traditional scientific/laboratory work.

For people working in UX/HCI:
Does this sound like a sensible career pivot? How valuable is domain expertise in a field like life sciences when moving into UX/product design?

And for anyone who has moved from science into UX/product/software (or vice versa), how has the career progression and job security compared with what you expected?

I’m particularly interested in hearing from people who work in healthcare, biotech, scientific software, medical technology, or other specialised technical domains, rather than generic UX advice.

I realise nobody can predict where the job market will be in 10 years — I’m more interested in whether this combination of skills is something you’d consider a strong long-term career direction, or whether you’d recommend keeping the door open to a more traditional scientific career.

Looking for some honest career advice.

About 8 months ago I took a fairly significant pay cut to move into a role that I thought would be a better long-term fit for my background and interests. Before that I was actually earning more money in a role that wasn’t really related to my degree, but the work was relatively low stress.

The new role is in a small tech company (also my first time working in tech) and is a mixture of customer-facing work/meetings, customer project ownership, onboarding/training, documentation and acting as a bridge between customers and the product team.

The problem is that after giving it a genuine try, I’ve realised I really don’t enjoy the customer-facing side of it.

I enjoy:

Documentation
Training and onboarding
Creating resources
Potentially QA/testing

I don’t enjoy:

Leading customer projects
Being the main point of contact
Driving meetings
Managing stakeholder expectations
Constantly being “on” with customers

The more experience I’ve gained, the more I’ve realised I genuinely don’t want a long-term career built around customer ownership or project leadership. It’s not even that I think I couldn’t eventually grow into it (through gritted teeth and lots of stress/anxiety), I just don’t enjoy it at all and I don’t really see that changing.

What’s making me question things even more is that I took a decent pay cut to move into this role because I thought it would be a better fit long term. Now I’m earning less than I was before and I’m not actually convinced the role is a better fit.

Part of me wants to have an honest conversation with my manager and ask whether I can focus more on the documentation/training/process side of the role and less on customer ownership. The other part of me worries that after only 8 months it will sound like I’m trying to avoid responsibilities or that I’ve joined the wrong company.
Has anyone had a conversation like this and had it go well? Is 8 months enough time to know a role isn’t taking you in the direction you want to go?

Hi everyone! I’m relatively new to technical writing. Our company currently uses Docusaurus for our documentation, but we’ve hit a massive bottleneck regarding customer enablement and video content.

Right now, I create a lot of customer-specific video tutorials. Our current workflow involves hosting these videos in Google Drive and sharing links, which is a nightmare to maintain. To make matters worse, many of our enterprise customers strictly block external cloud drives (like Google Drive/Dropbox) due to security policies.

We want to bring our text documentation and our video library into one unified platform, rather than forcing customers to jump between docs and a separate LMS. However, our infrastructure requirements are strict.

Here is what we need:

• Open-Source & Self-Hosted (Hard Requirement): The entire platform must be deployed on the customer-side or within our own self-hosted infrastructure. Zero external SaaS dependencies allowed.
• Built-in Media/Video Library: Needs to natively host, organize, and stream videos, docs, and assets together.
• Easy Content Editing (No-Code/Low-Code): As a writer, I need the autonomy to update content, upload videos, and organize layouts easily.
• Customer-Specific Segmentation: We need the ability to gate or segment resources so customers only see the content relevant to them.
• Enterprise Security Ready: Must support SSO/Authentication to integrate with customer infrastructure, and pass DevOps/Security compliance reviews.

We love Docusaurus for pure docs, but managing a massive media library inside it is not ideal

Has anyone tackled a similar "Docs + Video Academy" problem using entirely open-source, self-hosted tools? What platforms should we be looking at? (Or, if you managed to bend Docusaurus to do this cleanly with self-hosted asset management, how did you do it?). We would also consider looking at having a separate LMS but I wanted to explore possible all in one solutions first...

Thanks in advance!

I’m looking for some perspective from people who have gone through something similar.

I studied biochemistry and moved abroad straight after graduating. My first role lasted around 16 months before I moved to a spin-off company where I stayed for about 20 months. I genuinely thought that would be my long-term career path. I enjoyed the work, could see progression, and felt confident in what I was doing. Unfortunately the company was bought out and dissolved, and most of us were laid off. Late 2024.

Since then I’ve felt quite lost professionally.

I moved to a new city to live with my husband where he works and took a temporary 10-month contract outside my field. The work wasn’t particularly fulfilling, but it paid extremely well and the stress levels were low. Towards the end of that contract I took a chance on a part-time role where my friend worked that was more adjacent to my scientific background (customer support/software-related position) alongside further study. (The studying didn’t work out for boring bureaucratic reasons)

I’m now ~8 months into that role and questioning everything again.

I don’t feel like I fit naturally into the tech/startup environment. I often feel unclear on where I should be contributing, I don’t particularly enjoy client-facing work and find it extremely anxiety inducing, and I’m quite introverted. I’ve been expected to take the lead on some client projects, and I’ve realised that’s something I find very stressful rather than rewarding. I find it extremely difficult to understand the technology and even some of the more complex scientific concepts that come up as part of the software/projects. I’m constantly worried I’m just not the right fit and how it would look on my CV to have another relatively short length of time at this position if things don’t work out. I have the opportunity to try further study again this Autumn (and therefore reduce my hours) in a tech adjacent field I would’ve never considered before, but feels like the only study option in this city that slightly interests me. I don’t even know whether to voice all my feelings to my supervisor.

At the same time, I regret leaving my previous role because it paid significantly better and I felt much more comfortable there, even if it was slightly unfulfilling with it not being related to my studies or background at all.

The problem is that the city where we live has very limited opportunities in my field, and my husband and I genuinely love living here. We could see ourselves settling down and starting a family here, but my long term career feels increasingly uncertain. I’m constantly considering just moving back home for better career prospects and lower costs of living and better salary. But we love so much about our life we have built here and my husband loves his job here that it’s so hard to even envision what that would look like.

I think what bothers me most is that I’m in my late 20s (27) and still don’t feel like I’ve found the thing I’m genuinely good at or want to build a career around. I don’t even really care about building a career in terms of climbing ladders and chasing titles, more I just want to feel comfortable and good at what I do and like I’m contributing meaningfully.

Has anyone else gone through this? Did you eventually find a direction that felt right, or did you stop trying to find a perfect fit and focus on other priorities in life?

We are now moving into our 4th cycle. I wanted to share my experience from cycle 3 and ask a couple questions. On the evening of 12dpo in cycle 3 I took a test and I immediately saw a faint line pop up immediately, it was the first time I’d ever seen something so clearly (even though it was faint) and I got so excited and showed my husband and he could see it too! The next day I woke up and was bleeding, and that evening had really severe cramping (which I don’t usually get now my IUD is out). My period wasn’t due for another 2 days (usually starts around 15dpo and I’m very regular) and a BFN. I’ve been really upset ever since. I don’t know if it was a chemical pregnancy or not, but the fact that I saw it and got some hope to just being crushed again the next day has left me upset days later. I took yesterday and today off work because I’m just crying a lot and feeling totally emotional about everything and struggling to focus at all.

Is this likely to have been a chemical pregnancy? I’m trying to understand it for myself to just help process it. My husband doesn’t really seem to understand why I’m so upset and says it might not have been a pregnancy anyway since the line wasn’t very dark. I don’t think he fully grasps that any line faint or dark is a positive result. I feel like I’m getting on his nerves being this upset and I guess it’s just getting to me how much of this feels to be on the woman, in terms of cycle tracking, paying attention to body signs, the hope and disappointment. I didn’t expect this to happen quickly, I’m well aware it takes up to a year for healthy couples. I was very relaxed and with the attitude of ‘if it happens this cycle great if not there’s more time to try’, but seeing that positive changed everything for me. It’s really just gotten me so down in the dumps.

Has anyone got any advice how they processed a similar experience and moved forward? Now I’m entering cycle 4 I had thoughts of just not tracking at all and not preventing and just seeing what happens moving forward. I’m type A and like to feel ‘in control’ which is why I didn’t mind the testing, but I started to get a bit obsessive over it and I’m thinking of just stopping it altogether. I also don’t know how to express why it’s hurt me so much to my husband, I think he just assumes this is a normal period for me but seeing that positive gives it such an emotional weight for me.

I’m looking for some perspective from people who have gone through something similar.

I studied biochemistry and moved abroad straight after graduating. My first role lasted around 16 months before I moved to a spin-off company where I stayed for about 20 months. I genuinely thought that would be my long-term career path. I enjoyed the work, could see progression, and felt confident in what I was doing. Unfortunately the company was bought out and dissolved, and most of us were laid off. Late 2024.

Since then I’ve felt quite lost professionally.

I moved to a new city to live with my husband where he works and took a temporary 10-month contract outside my field. The work wasn’t particularly fulfilling, but it paid extremely well and the stress levels were low. Towards the end of that contract I took a chance on a part-time role where my friend worked that was more adjacent to my scientific background (customer support/software-related position) alongside further study. (The studying didn’t work out for boring bureaucratic reasons)

I’m now ~8 months into that role and questioning everything again.

I don’t feel like I fit naturally into the tech/startup environment. I often feel unclear on where I should be contributing, I don’t particularly enjoy client-facing work and find it extremely anxiety inducing, and I’m quite introverted. I’ve been expected to take the lead on some client projects, and I’ve realised that’s something I find very stressful rather than rewarding. I find it extremely difficult to understand the technology and even some of the more complex scientific concepts that come up as part of the software/projects. I’m constantly worried I’m just not the right fit and how it would look on my CV to have another relatively short length of time at this position if things don’t work out. I have the opportunity to try further study again this Autumn (and therefore reduce my hours) in a tech adjacent field I would’ve never considered before, but feels like the only study option in this city that slightly interests me. I don’t even know whether to voice all my feelings to my supervisor.

At the same time, I regret leaving my previous role because it paid significantly better and I felt much more comfortable there, even if it was slightly unfulfilling with it not being related to my studies or background at all.

The problem is that the city where we live has very limited opportunities in my field, and my husband and I genuinely love living here. We could see ourselves settling down and starting a family here, but my long term career feels increasingly uncertain. I’m constantly considering just moving back home for better career prospects and lower costs of living and better salary. But we love so much about our life we have built here and my husband loves his job here that it’s so hard to even envision what that would look like.

I think what bothers me most is that I’m in my late 20s (27) and still don’t feel like I’ve found the thing I’m genuinely good at or want to build a career around. I don’t even really care about building a career in terms of climbing ladders and chasing titles, more I just want to feel comfortable and good at what I do and like I’m contributing meaningfully.

Has anyone else gone through this? Did you eventually find a direction that felt right, or did you stop trying to find a perfect fit and focus on other priorities in life?