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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?

#71

Post by sundvor »

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…

Thanks, that's a great HN post! Very inspirational too. Better keep lifting those weights and doing those rides. :)

(Also I agree with his statement that 20 years of experience could very well be one year repeated twenty times; very true.)

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

#72

Post by innomansland »

abpavel wrote: post #56
zeptomu wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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,…

Hey Pavel, not sure if you reply was for zeptomu or myself but i just checked out ipfabric and it looks really interesting! I hope it is ok if I send you an email about this?

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

#74

Post by webmaven »

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…

"Culture fit" can indeed be code for ageism and sometimes sexism, but more often it is just superficial cultural signifiers, such as dressing too formally / not formally enough, the wrong sort of facial hair, too much / not enough makeup, being the wrong kind of health fanatic, too many / too few positions in your job history, a percieved difference in appetite for financial risk, and so on.

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

#75

Post by RUG3Y »

murrayb wrote: post #30

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 f…

That's an encouraging story. I'm currently transitioning to a different type of role and having a lot of self doubt about my choices, but it helps to hear stories like yours.
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