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

Tldr; I'm an architect (in a niche industry) trying to get a job in another industry but find myself constantly rejected for either having not enough experience for a similar architect/lead role or being overqualified for a lower role (i.e. dev, support, etc).

I've been in the telco industry for 12 years where I started as a systems tester, became a support engineer, got into a lead role for a team of support engineers (i built the team from scratch at a startup!) and eventually ended up as an architect for a vendor (think Cisco) where I do pre-sales, architecture design and lead the onshore/offshore teams to deliver client projects.

Early last year, I noticed a big shift in my industry to Managed Services and knew that it is a space I need to get myself involved in if I were to stay relevant for the next few years. Unfortunately, the company I am with is neither in this space nor have any plans in the future to be in it hence I started to look around for jobs at other companies in this space. After 3 months in, I'm now feeling utterly perplexed.

I tried applying for lead/architect roles and was rejected (without even going to the interview stage) being told that I don't have enough experience or expertise. Fair point I guess since I'm in a niche industry thus I started looking at roles that allow me to start at the bottom (i.e. dev, support/operations, customer success). Even then, I keep getting rejected with the common trope that I don't have enough experience or I am either overqualified and/or will not be a good fit for the team!

I asked my professional network for some inputs on the matter and I've been told that I'm in an age group (30-40) where companies are not that keen to hire cause I'm considered too old (ageism). Is this possible? I'm barely in my early 30s so I find that very strange cause I don't consider myself old at all.

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

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 (software development, software testing, marketing, sales, support, devops, technical documentation, talking-with-humans, teaching, ...) you would like to spend most of your work time onto.

If you have clear answers to these questions it might be simpler to find potential work employees and companies and you can also make a more specialized cold-email application.

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 obvious, you can't do anything if you don't code. But even when there is no obvious hard skill that you can learn, I think you should try doing this way. Study, practice and create a portfolio of projects that demonstrate you are really knowledgeable about the topic. Don't expect any potential employer to trust that your skills are transferable and the new skills you will learn "on the job". Try to be as ready as possible to perform at the new role, not be hired as a promise.

Also, I don't believe 3 months is that long time to be discouraged and draw conclusions about why you are unemployable. Keep trying to check if that is actually the reality.

That said, I don't discard ageism or other reasons not related to performance to influence all the dismissions. It is possibly (probably?) part of the reason, but one you can't control. Except having some thoughtful arguments on why your age shouldn't be a problem, maybe even an advantage.

Good luck!

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.