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Ask HN: Ever faced difficulties pivoting your job or career later in your life?

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Re: Ask HN: Ever faced difficulties pivoting your job or career later in your life?

#21

Post by innomansland »

siculars wrote: post #17
vvvv wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>There is absolutely nothing wrong being a pre-sales guy. Good pre-sales people with technical knowledge and some commercial acumen are like gold dust.

Ya, I didn't even know what "pre-sales" meant before getting the pre-sales architect job I have now. Know your tech, know how to dev something, but mostly know how to communicate. It's the communication thing that often separates folks. I really like having that customer interaction in different industries and solving different problems, also traveling.

Exactly!

There is one thing I am absolutely confident with is my ability to not only deal with customers but to also lead technical teams to deliver what they require. I have great references from both my clients and internal teams hence why I thought this will be an easy enough transferable skill to other industry. Nope! After applying for similar pre-sales roles in other industries, I get the feeling that most require actual experience in the industry that role is in (which is fair enough).

Re: Ask HN: Ever faced difficulties pivoting your job or career later in your life?

#22

Post by innomansland »

rsto wrote: post #19

Given your skills and industry focus you might have good chances to land a consulting job at one of the big IT consulting shops in telecommunications. I have worked as a business consultant at Accenture for six years in its telecommunications practice. Assuming your resume highlights both your technical and sales skills, you surely would have made it to an onsite interview for our team. With 12 years industry experie…

Thanks for the offer mate! That was really nice!

I want to note that I actually do still have a job (funny enough, most consider my company as "consulting") and the reason I want to change jobs is simply that I been in it for 12 years and want to move on from my niche.

Also, being in telco for so long, I have had my fair share of dealing with Accenture, IBM, Deloitte, Infosys, etc and no offense to these companies but it is not exactly the sort of working environment I will like to be in having been in a similar company for the past 5 years. ;)

Re: Ask HN: Ever faced difficulties pivoting your job or career later in your life?

#23

Post by innomansland »

chx wrote: post #9

I am now preparing for a small-ish pivot. For the last 12 or years I have been a Drupal / PHP consultant, architected a few very large sites, including one at the time being in the Quantcast Top 100. I am now trying to branch out to Elixir or Go and can't really find a part time job doing either. I think this would be necessary to build up some experience before completely jumping the Drupal ship. I am 42.

Gosh, reading what you just typed hits home real hard. Replacing all the technologies, companies and achievements with my own and I can relate word for word. And i am almost a decade younger!

I won't be much help since I am in the same boat as you but all I can say is keep your chin up mate and hope you pull through and find something!

Re: Ask HN: Ever faced difficulties pivoting your job or career later in your life?

#24

Post by innomansland »

arethuza wrote: post #6

" pre-sales, architecture design and lead the onshore/offshore teams to deliver client projects" Usually senior technical people who can do pre-sales and lead projects as a "safe pair of hands" are in demand. Smaller companies are usually always recruiting people for those roles - I suspect you are getting filtered by clueless HR people for not having the the right buzzwords. Have you thought about maybe paying for s…

This actually crossed my mind! I worked with these guy and he was recently "fired" and straight off in 2 weeks, he found a job in another industry. I was curious why and took a look quickly at his LinkedIn profile and wow, every cliche buzzword you can imagine is on his profile.

My profile is fairly straight forward plus I just can't bullshit the way he did it.

Re: Ask HN: Ever faced difficulties pivoting your job or career later in your life?

#25

Post by innomansland »

strongai wrote: post #4

Hey, you're not old! Really. I'm 57. At a guess, if you're experiencing 'ageism' - this is really a proxy for an employer's suspicion that you're no longer as biddable as early-career folks who can be persuaded to work 12 hours a day. It's their loss.

Haha I definitely not think myself as old! I think antiquated will be a better term. ;)

Re: Ask HN: Ever faced difficulties pivoting your job or career later in your life?

#26

Post by expertentipp »

As a person still minimally younger than 35 your opinions are quite sobering. I think at this point of my career I should focus on high salary (in live in EU though) while maintaining a good physical condition as I might have no other choice than salary and lifestyle downgrade in 10-15 years from now.

Re: Ask HN: Ever faced difficulties pivoting your job or career later in your life?

#27

Post by rsto »

innomansland wrote: post #22
rsto wrote: post #19

Given your skills and industry focus you might have good chances to land a consulting job at one of the big IT consulting shops in telecommunications. I have worked as a business consultant at Accenture for six years in its telecommunications practice. Assuming your resume highlights both your technical and sales skills, you surely would have made it to an onsite interview for our team. With 12 years industry experie…

Thanks for the offer mate! That was really nice! I want to note that I actually do still have a job (funny enough, most consider my company as "consulting") and the reason I want to change jobs is simply that I been in it for 12 years and want to move on from my niche. Also, being in telco for so long, I have had my fair share of dealing with Accenture, IBM, Deloitte, Infosys, etc and no offense to these companies bu…

I can relate to that and there is also a reason why I left the industry.

In my case, I started freelancing again as developer (which raised a few eyebrows at my first clients, but that went away quickly) and contracted a couple of years at a telecommunications provider implementing provisioning services. I was at the start of my thirties then, so probably your current age.

I now work completely outside the big corporations and I wouldn't want to go back. Good luck!

Re: Ask HN: Ever faced difficulties pivoting your job or career later in your life?

#28

Post by innomansland »

soneca wrote: post #7

I am at a similar position but have not yet to started to actually look for a job. I am a 37 yo marketing guy and now I am learning to code to become a software developer (web). My approach is to take some time to learn the basics, create some projects that a potential future employee would recognize as demonstrative of my hard skills and then start looking. When you talk about software development, this path is obvi…

wow, you are doing more of a pivot then I am!

In my years of working, the most rare gems I ever found was people that are not only good at marketing but can code. If you are a champ at these 2 skills, man.. such a killer combo.

I said somewhere above but I actually do code and have a portfolio of side projects but it doesn't seem to matter (at least with the companies I have applied for). Nevertheless, you are right that 3 months is not that long.. I will start despairing at the 1 year mark! :D

Re: Ask HN: Ever faced difficulties pivoting your job or career later in your life?

#29

Post by zeptomu »

innomansland wrote: post #18
zeptomu wrote: post #5

So if they tell you you are too old in your early 30s/40s/50s/etc. their hiring policy is fucked up in the first place, so do not worry about that, as you do not want to work for such a company anyway. My advice is to think about the $domain (news, social-media, medical devices, bioinformatics, vision, gaming, earth-observation, automobile, chemistry, education, ...) you would like to work in and the $activity (softw…

Just to be clear, I was never told that I am "too old" but simply wasn't a "culture fit". Note that particular reason was given probably 1 out of every 10 times and the other 9 times, it is usually along the lines of "we did not find you a good fit for the role". Funny enough, I do have a particular industry (actually two) that I am extremely interested in - FinTech and Cloud Computing/Hosting. Neither which I have a…

> Funny enough, I do have a particular industry (actually two) that I am extremely interested in and that is fintech and cloud hosting.

Fintech and cloud hosting are very broad terms, but assuming you like the domain of financial tech, the question remains what you would like to spend your time on: Programming? Writing market analysis reports? Talking to customers?

Re: Ask HN: Ever faced difficulties pivoting your job or career later in your life?

#30

Post by murrayb »

I am in my late forties and on my third career pivot. My progression was from electronics technician to unix system administrator to project manager with some short stints in other occupations between "real jobs" - I worked as a high school cleaner for a while and as a grave digger. Last pivot (to PM) was just over 5 years ago. I wouldn't rule a fourth (or more!) pivot out, though it is more likely to involve going from employee to self employed/business owner rather than a different type of salaried position. You can succeed and do well at anything at any age if you are willing to work at it. And by work at it I mean in company time and in your own.

I recommend: only do stuff you are interested in any-way and only work with people/companies who are fun and worthwhile.

Good luck!

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