Ask HN: Ever faced difficulties pivoting your job or career later in your life? • Hacker News Board

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

#51

Post by thwd » Tue, Jan 31, 2017, 2:21 PM UTC

> So, have any of you ever been in the same situation and do you have any advice on how should I overcome this?

I haven't, but a good friend had a very similar experience. He worked in telco, stayed at the same company for almost 20 years and then wanted to move on.

The problem wasn't him, it was the company he worked for. They had (still have) a reputation for being bad on the technical side, using age old technology and an even older management style, never updating anything to contemporary standards. Sub-par products.

Potential employers didn't want him because they were afraid he was representative of his old companies' culture. Half his resume was just the different positions he filled at that one company.

The solution he eventually found was to dissociate himself from the company as much as possible on paper. He also picked up 2 modern technologies that he had never used and mentioned them in the applications, as a form of showing he was ready to learn new stuff. It worked.

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

#52

Post by mathattack » Tue, Jan 31, 2017, 2:25 PM UTC

The best way to combat ageism is to look for hiring managers that are as old or older than you. It does limit your search a little, but you have to limit the universe of potential positions in some way. Enterprise roles tend to have less ageism than consumer ones.

A couple other thoughts:

1 - When you have too much experience for the job, employers are concerned that you're desperate, and will leave when a better opportunity comes by. If you connect with someone senior in the organization, you can negate this. (They'll have other uses internally for your skills)

2 - Smaller companies don't like hiring people from bigger companies. You have to push hard on technical skills and show that you're flexible. Also don't oversell the brand names of your employer. Names like Cisco and IBM mean something to big corporates, but less in the startup world.

3 - Look for ways to leverage multiple areas of your background. For more experienced people, it can help to look for jobs that are asking for 2 or 3 disparate skills that are less likely to be found in a junior person. For example, "I'm looking for someone who has done both consulting management and front office banking" In your case, telecom + testing + support engineering + architecture is unique enough that there are jobs where you will be differentiated.

4) The more senior you get, the harder it is to find the right job. It's a matching problem. There's either 0 or 1 jobs at each company for your position, but also much fewer candidates.

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

#53

Post by yoshyosh » Tue, Jan 31, 2017, 2:35 PM UTC

whack wrote: post #35

innomansland wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is gold! Can't thank you enough for your input. Just as a side note, while my professional life is very "narrow", I have been doing stuff on the side! I own 3 dropshipping sites (WooCommerce & Shopify) and 2 pseudo-SaaS sites (one MEAN stack and the other Meteor.JS). I started these projects last year just so that I can get my hands dirty in the latest web technologies (last time i made a full fledged website, I…

Off topic but I had the same experience as well. I had a side project which was twice as challenging and impressive as anything I had developed in my 9-5 job. But for some reason, interviewers only ever wanted to know what I did 9-5. I never did figure out why. My best guess is that they figure it can't really be all that great if no one paid you for it.

At the end of the day, the person is hiring to fill a specific job. A side project can represent every aspect of a business/product, it's the interviewee's job to spin it in a way that makes it relevant to what the interviewer is trying to hire for.

I think a big mistake a lot of people make with side project marketing is throwing the entire kitchen sink at the interviewer.

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

#54

Post by jagtesh » Tue, Jan 31, 2017, 2:49 PM UTC

whack wrote: post #35

innomansland wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is gold! Can't thank you enough for your input. Just as a side note, while my professional life is very "narrow", I have been doing stuff on the side! I own 3 dropshipping sites (WooCommerce & Shopify) and 2 pseudo-SaaS sites (one MEAN stack and the other Meteor.JS). I started these projects last year just so that I can get my hands dirty in the latest web technologies (last time i made a full fledged website, I…

Off topic but I had the same experience as well. I had a side project which was twice as challenging and impressive as anything I had developed in my 9-5 job. But for some reason, interviewers only ever wanted to know what I did 9-5. I never did figure out why. My best guess is that they figure it can't really be all that great if no one paid you for it.

Your prospective colleagues and bosses would have been impressed by it. However, to impress the recruiter is a different ball game. Especially the inexperienced recruiters, who don't always understand the challenges of one technology vs another. Another possibility could be you were person #25 or even #7 to apply to the job and they already found a pretty good fit in the first 6.

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

#55

Post by snarfy » Tue, Jan 31, 2017, 2:58 PM UTC

You basically have to start over at the bottom. You might be a lead in your current position but you are entry level in another. You'll need to take a pay cut to switch careers, in my experience.

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

#56

Post by abpavel » Tue, Jan 31, 2017, 3:00 PM UTC

zeptomu wrote: post #29

innomansland wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

wow... With that eloquence I can't imagine you looking for a job, but, please, if you would ever consider a startup as your future challenge, with highly scalable business model with target of 200x on the current stock option plan price, interesting technical NODE.JS/ArangoDB scalability challenges, solving worldwide network infrastructure stability, with a good salary and 30 days paid vacation in Prague, CZ, please, do let me know at pavel at ipfabric dot io.

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

#57

Post by mxuribe » Tue, Jan 31, 2017, 3:01 PM UTC

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…

This is interesting, in my almost 20 year career, I took the opposite approach: started out as a web dev. ("coder"), then moved to marketing...Actually it was as follows: web dev. > tech lead > project mgr > product mgr.

It is weird for me though; whenever I am in interviews, and the interviewer finds out my past, their eyes light up (because I can straddle both the tech and non-tech/business/marketing sides), and always get excited about my skillset...However, on paper, people eyes don't light up...Its like recruiters and the HR filters want specialists (pigeon-holed into the exact job duties without any deviation what so ever) at least per so many job descriptions that I have seen...But then when you are in an interview with the hiring manager, what they actually, really want are generalists who can have at least one specialty in whatever specific role they need. I'v gone on enough interviews in my time, and while maybe not 100%, this scenario plays out well over 90% of the time. Maybe its my resume, but it seems so odd; there are roles out there not being filled, but plenty of people who can likely satisfy them...Again, it could be my resume, but it seems the candidates know what they want or what they can do, and the hiring manager knows what they need...but the folks in the middle just can't get the relevant parties to meet each other...I wonder if the initial vetting process for hiring is broken nowadays...?

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

#58

Post by mxuribe » Tue, Jan 31, 2017, 3:11 PM UTC

SyneRyder wrote: post #45

sundvor wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stay at it, get as much learning in as you can. E.g. do a very simple project that you can expose on github, publish to a cloud server somewhere .. this will let you show them what you can do. Perhaps also look at supporting stacks like Angular1/2, at least down here the demand is through the roof for them. I went from Coldfusion/Php for decades to C# / Asp.net after redundancy and it was not easy. Got there in the e…

> I reckon fitness could become a factor in interviews Interesting. Another HN post a while ago mentioned they fought any ageism by being physically fitter than those younger than them - racing the younger ones up the stairs of the building without breaking a sweat. Actually, here's the blog post, On Getting Old(er) In Tech by Don Denoncourt: http://corgibytes.com/blog/2016/12/06/getting-old-er-in-tech... "A year or…

I remember this post, and thoroughly enjoyed it, especially that part about racing the younger ones up the stairs...Basically beating them young ones at "their own game". ;-)

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

#59

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Jan 31, 2017, 3:14 PM UTC

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…

[deleted]

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

#60

Post by privateprofile » Tue, Jan 31, 2017, 3:17 PM UTC

vvvv wrote: post #15

mikekchar wrote: post #10

If you were in the same industry (potentially the same company) for 12 years, you may be getting tagged with a bit of a "career employee" stigma. I'm 49 now and took 5 years out between the ages of 39-44 to teach English in Japan. I'm back in the industry now. It took me about a month to get a job when I came back. The key is really flexibility. If you have a a very narrow focus, you will have difficulty getting work…

>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.

TL;DR: That's me, but I can't understand how a presales specialist with broad experience and a demonstrated skillset can't get anything other than offers for "developer" or "project manager" or more presales.

This is something that I have given a lot of thought in recent years.

I'm in my early 30s and have a CS degree, ~11 years of experience in business intelligence and analytics, and I worked my way through consulting roles that ranged from developer, technical lead, project manager and presales. My CV also includes a startup and a senior advisory role.

I excel at presales because I have a broad technical skillset and it's easy for me to understand diferent industry problems and advise/communicate with people on any step of the corporate ladder.

However, the feeling I get is that presales only lead to more presales roles, where most of your time is spent meeting clients and producing countless presentations to get to an eventual prototype...and there's more presales to do, so your involvement on most projects (even those you sell) is marginal at best, and that makes it harder to move to other roles.

This is a problem when I apply to roles other than "consulting", because even though I have designed and planned (and sometimes delivered) technology solutions for basically any business problem that has been thrown at me, I didn't actually have a hand in delivering most of them, even though I excelled when I did.

My experience with recruiters is that most of them disregard (or don't understand) the knowledge and skills necessary to designing and planning business solutions, in detriment of actually implementing the technology, and this makes it hard for them to consider you knowledgeable on a specific domain.

The depressing thing is that, where I work (small EU country), the industry is dominated by numerous middlemen ("consulting" firms), so hiring is mostly for outsourced "developer" and "project manager" positions where you are basically "in the grind" of projects that are most often poorly planned or managed, and thus turn into a nightmare for the teams.

What baffles me is that my skills and experience seem to be of great value for Clients I've worked for in different industries, yet those same Clients prefer to recruit people with a more limited scope (both in terms of tech and business knowledge). It's either "developer" or "project manager".

I'm describing my experience applying for roles...fortunately, I get considered for positions that actually require my skills, but never through traditional recruitment processes (that just seem to get worse).