Ask HN: How to restart tech career from scratch at 36?

Reading your post, I get the feeling that your professional potential is probably higher now in some sense that may not yet be clear.

For example maybe the previous years weren't exactly skill -development time in the building sense, but maybe they taught you to be even more of a ninja in terms of knowing what you don't want, or won't do. So your big-picture skills may have grown.

Your writing also points at a lot of other hidden strengths, probably newly-relevant strengths as well. For example you clearly have the ability to improvise. If so, a big question moving ahead is whether you are willing to embrace the convergence of somewhat orthogonal topics like "doing the chicken thing" and "documenting it so well this time that you become a subject matter expert in at least chicken runs, but likely also the processes you want to know well."

There will be lots of other questions here too, for example your journey is clearly that of an autodidact, so should it be kept more subjective and less conventional, to accommodate more of your latent passion and attention to your own drive? This option is rarely pointed out to people with such gifts.

Just some thoughts, good luck with whatever you decide to do.

The rational decision here would be to focus on the first no matter what, as that's what most people do in the career world. Those careers exist and pay money today. You can't bank on skills that don't exist, so if you go and call yourself a real-world builder and try to improvise there, you can count on lots of headwinds just due to basic career logic.

However it's a big clue that the two points of view also form two very clear dichotomies: Real - Abstract & Emotion - Logic. This usually means you will need to find a point of reconciliation before you can feel less locked up. It probably feels like your hands are tied right now due to lack of execution.

This is all wrapped in a clear ability to keep your discussion focused on subjective factors. IMO you may not like the idea, but self-analysis is a likely learning path that would accomplish all the goals you have written.

I would also hesitate to share the path with others until you have made meaningful progress, as there will be a tendency to suck all the vitality out of the room, so emotive is your gift, and so likely strong your desire to be demonstrative here.

You may even inadvertently frame meet-ups with others as your test, or as a time to demonstrate to them what you've become. In fact this will probably get you the opposite outcome from what you want, in terms of influencing people. We could describe your life as WTF Land rn, and most people do not want friends or family to have very strong memories of this time in their life. ;-)

So, it may be that you insist on Being the Builder who Builds Real Things, and that's that, and you develop a bunch of interesting coping habits along the way like people in these shoes do. Or you find a more creative way that syncs with your clear strengths and integrates the "duh" perspective that outsiders have shared with you.

Regardless I think it ought to be an interesting journey!

https://jondouglas.dev/free-book

I talk a lot about limiting beliefs and the mindset that will make you successful in teaching yourself a hard skill like coding / data analysis / product management / etc.

Good luck!

I would start by reframing this experience away from something negative and into something positive, and re-examine the assumption that you learned very little.

Just because the startup was ultimately not successful does not mean that the experience was not valuable and that you didn't learn anything from it.

Often we dismiss or fail to realize our own abilities because they see obvious to us. The reality is that virtually nothing is obvious to everyone, and what might appear to be self-evident to you might be deeply insightful for someone else.

I would start by listing out all the ways in which you experienced failure during your startup experience, and for each of these, what you learned from that failure.

> I have good intuitive product and design sense, but have very very little in the way of effective skills, such as understanding and facilitating a product development process. Additionally, I have a very small network, if one at all.

You've already identified the areas in which you are lacking. Take a course on product design. Your lived experience will give you a much better understanding of the course material than someone without it. Go to events related to industries that interest you in order to expand your network. Reach out to people who are successful in the ways you want to be and ask them for advice.

Good luck!