Did you consider pre-sales/professional services consulting. Most folks who do this that I know are in their forties. Good pay, interesting work, and relies a lot on soft skills
Ask HN: 40+ Career Advice?
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Re: Ask HN: 40+ Career Advice?
#12> Do you suggest I go solo and take on development jobs myself
Yes.
You don't want to help juniors. You don't want to waste your time in meetings explaining things to "incompetent" managers. You only want to work in a private office on your own schedule. You don't want to be stressed or asked to put in extra hours. You only want to work on "hard technical problems" that you find interesting.
Re: Ask HN: 40+ Career Advice?
#13I think these jobs exist. Mine does. We’re a small company that makes high value physical items with a large software component. We encourage remote working but not remote only. I know this is not a popular view on HN, but I think there is huge value with regular irl interaction. It doesn’t need to be every day, but it does need to be regular. We also offer mostly single person offices (interns are currently 2 per ro…
"My only concern hiring older engineers is that they are stuck in a rut." Wow, better check that bias.
Biased or not, experienced people fighting change is nothing new
Re: Ask HN: 40+ Career Advice?
#14I think these jobs exist. Mine does. We’re a small company that makes high value physical items with a large software component. We encourage remote working but not remote only. I know this is not a popular view on HN, but I think there is huge value with regular irl interaction. It doesn’t need to be every day, but it does need to be regular. We also offer mostly single person offices (interns are currently 2 per ro…
have you considered you are in a rut, and it might not be a very good one, so people with seniority call you out, while the freshman/woman you keep hiring and doctronating just reinforce your own bias?
Re: Ask HN: 40+ Career Advice?
#15Earlier quoted context omitted.
"My only concern hiring older engineers is that they are stuck in a rut." Wow, better check that bias.
Biased or not, experienced people fighting change is nothing new
Inexperienced people advocating change is not new either. They both have their pros and cons.
Re: Ask HN: 40+ Career Advice?
#16Given your requirements, I would suggest a consultant/contract developer position for large/established companies building enterprise solutions. Large, because they will have challenging business problems that they cannot deliver through their normal project development process. Enterprise solutions, because the problems will be better defined and your experience will be better appreciated.
Re: Ask HN: 40+ Career Advice?
#17Earlier quoted context omitted.
Biased or not, experienced people fighting change is nothing new
Inexperienced people advocating change is not new either. They both have their pros and cons.
Experienced people advocating against good changes is a bad thing.
Experienced people advocating against bad changes is a good thing.
Inexperienced people advocating for a good change is a good thing.
Inexperienced people advocating for a bad change is a bad thing.
It's almost like it would be great if we knew what changes were good and what changes were bad before we started arguing about them. Any ideas???
Re: Ask HN: 40+ Career Advice?
#18Most of your requirements depend on the quality of each particular workplace; the only aspect that is susceptible to advice is the alignment between somewhat relaxed environment, more or less Android and web for technology, and hard technical problems.
For that, I suggest companies that are as small as possible (you would be more of a generalist and less of a cog), established (filtering out bad ideas and incompetent teams, and ensuring the time to reach a high competence level), product-oriented (to work on interesting improvements, customizations, support requests of something you can become an expert of, instead of random low quality consultancy projects).
As specific examples: machines of all sorts (likely computer-controlled and with external management apps and other auxiliary software) or business software at the intermediate scale at which customers are many enough to ensure stability and variety, but large enough to need interesting kinds of individual attention.
Re: Ask HN: 40+ Career Advice?
#19The bigger companies I worked for in the Bay Area were more like this than the smaller.
As a late 40-something who started his own marketing & technology agency to get out of the "working for others and their bad boss habits" conundrum, the one thing I can strongly recommend is that you have to interview companies as carefully as they interview you.
I've directly hired more than 100 people in my career, and it was always notable to me how many people show up for an interview, answer questions, ask just a few, and then accept a position in a company without any qualifying process of their own. People take jobs that are offered to them, more or less.
Re: Ask HN: 40+ Career Advice?
#20I think these jobs exist. Mine does. We’re a small company that makes high value physical items with a large software component. We encourage remote working but not remote only. I know this is not a popular view on HN, but I think there is huge value with regular irl interaction. It doesn’t need to be every day, but it does need to be regular. We also offer mostly single person offices (interns are currently 2 per ro…
What does a rut look like, like what is the last recent tech rut folks use. And what is an example of tech that non-rut folks have that rut folks don't have?
At a large, well known software company, I worked with senior engineers, with a decade's more development experience than I, who couldn't use React properly, or even understand Redux. These are not difficult tools.
They had been working on the specific codebase for over a year, fwiw.