Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: starting a career in software dev in my thirties, am I nuts?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 85 posts

Re: Ask HN: starting a career in software dev in my thirties, am I nuts?

#51

Post by adw »

tptacek wrote: post #43
patio11 wrote: post #5

I don't have enough experience to get started, and I can't get started without experience. Horsepuckey. Can you FizzBuzz? If so, you're experienced enough to get a job as a developer. What you need to work on is not your programming ability -- that is what professional experience is for -- but your competence at marketing yourself. You will probably not be hired to fill a hole labeled "I need a developer who does RoR…

I'd go a step further than you on #3: forget about job postings altogether. Instead, make a list of companies you'd like to work for and for whom you think you'd made a good fit. Eliminate all game companies from that list. Then, make a project of finding people in that company to contact and ask if you can stop by and talk about how you can help. Then, don't let up. Nobody you'd ever want to work for is going to say…

Just another data point, but my experience and tptacek's line up pretty much exactly. None of our first three hires came through job ads. One developer, one product person, one bizdev person (we're peculiarly partnership-heavy and the founders are all technical), so it's not even developer-specific thing.

Two came from emailing the contact address on our website; one through a referral from a mutual friend.

Actually; one of them came from a conversation about whether their company and ours could work together, which weirdly morphed into us offering him a job. Thank goodness for no NDAs/non-competes!

Re: Ask HN: starting a career in software dev in my thirties, am I nuts?

#52

Post by thirdstation »

I did a similar thing when I was your your age.

Try to get a programming job in the industry you worked in. Domain experience matters.

Don't correlate your age with where you think you should be in life.

When I finished grad school I subtracted 10 years from my chronological age and declared it my career age. I picked 10 b/c that's the difference in years between my graduate and undergraduate degrees.

Nowadays, when I get hung up on where I think I should be in life (office, better salary, etc), I think how I'd feel if I were my career age. From that perspective, I always come out ahead.

Re: Ask HN: starting a career in software dev in my thirties, am I nuts?

#53

Post by benmccann »

kyro wrote: post #19
patio11 wrote: post #5

I don't have enough experience to get started, and I can't get started without experience. Horsepuckey. Can you FizzBuzz? If so, you're experienced enough to get a job as a developer. What you need to work on is not your programming ability -- that is what professional experience is for -- but your competence at marketing yourself. You will probably not be hired to fill a hole labeled "I need a developer who does RoR…

Can you FizzBuzz? If so, you're experienced enough to get a job as a developer. I am always so surprised when I hear that, and have a difficult time believing that's true. With only an extremely beginner's level understanding of Python, I can solve FizzBuzz. Can I get a dev job?

It's surprising how bad many developers are. We had a candidate in the other day who was struggling with a problem, so we kept making it easier until finally we asked him to "write some code to tell me if the input string consists only of the letter 'a'". When he got that wrong, the interview was over. Not to pick too much on this guy, because I really enjoyed talking with him, but it was a good reminder of how the rest of the world worked before I got a job with people that actually care about and are good at their craft.

Re: Ask HN: starting a career in software dev in my thirties, am I nuts?

#54

Post by JangoSteve »

You are never too inexperienced to get started. In fact I think that's probably the greatest obstacle to more people being experts at something, the fear of not being good enough before they even dive in.

I also came from a technical background, Mech. and Elec. Eng, and didn't really start programming until about 6.5 years ago. But I was deadly serious about it and about being the best, even if I didn't have a CS degree. I immersed myself.

About 2 years ago, I was able to quit engineering and go full-time. Now I run a web development consultancy that has a great team, and I'm writing articles that even get picked up by Ruby Inside (thanks perterc!). I'm even in the process of contributing back to both Rails and jQuery core.

I talk to a lot of people looking to dive into software development because they can't find technical cofounders. I think this is the right approach, but they all seem to have this mindset that they'll never be a real programmer, in that they ask me how in the world they can get started and simply not suck. Not sucking is one thing, but being great is where it's at. Do the latter, and you'll always land on your feet.

Re: Ask HN: starting a career in software dev in my thirties, am I nuts?

#55

Post by paulnelligan »

klochner wrote: post #33
zackola wrote: post #15

If you are located in NYC send me your resume. The company I work for is looking for someone whose experience matches yours.

ditto for me in San Francisco

Thanks a lot guys, that's encouraging, and I would be willing to move, but I'm in Ireland, and visa could be an issue.

Re: Ask HN: starting a career in software dev in my thirties, am I nuts?

#57

Post by Todd »

The most successful people do something they love. If you love something, you will spend more time doing it. If you spend more time doing it, you will inevitably become good at it.

Sure, it's easier to pick things up when you're younger. Yes, you remember more of what you learned in your teens vs. 20s and 20s vs 30s. That's just the way the mind ages. But people learn new things at every decade of life. Your 30s are still a great time to learn. You'll be an expert by the time you're 40 if you stay with it.

Re: Ask HN: starting a career in software dev in my thirties, am I nuts?

#58

Post by ryanwaggoner »

benmccann wrote: post #53
kyro wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you FizzBuzz? If so, you're experienced enough to get a job as a developer. I am always so surprised when I hear that, and have a difficult time believing that's true. With only an extremely beginner's level understanding of Python, I can solve FizzBuzz. Can I get a dev job?

It's surprising how bad many developers are. We had a candidate in the other day who was struggling with a problem, so we kept making it easier until finally we asked him to "write some code to tell me if the input string consists only of the letter 'a'". When he got that wrong, the interview was over. Not to pick too much on this guy, because I really enjoyed talking with him, but it was a good reminder of how the r…

What?! Wait, was this an interview for Google? How did this guy get to this stage? I've always assumed I probably couldn't get an interview at Google, but geez...

Re: Ask HN: starting a career in software dev in my thirties, am I nuts?

#59

Post by BrandonM »

patio11 wrote: post #29
SHOwnsYou wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've always wondered -- is the reason people can't do fizzbuzz because a lack of understanding of modulus or because they can't comprehend the problem? I know modulus isn't necessary, but I can see someone not doing the problem if the solution they are turning in is in a less elegant way.

FizzBuzz comes from a game for six to eight year olds, who also don't understand modulus. That's part of the reason it is such a great problem: they fact that you realize "Hey, this is a whole lot easier with modulus" demonstrates that you can reason abstractly. You certainly don't need a mod operator to make it work -- if you're capable of writing a function, you can write divides_evenly_by_3(int number) using facts…

> write a program which calculates the sum of all numbers between 1 and 1,000 whose digits sum up to 7

My Python answer:

  sum(x for x in xrange(2, 1000) if sum(int(y) for y in str(x)) == 7)
  # 9324
Anyone have improvements on that?

(I used the range (1, 1000) as opposed to [1, 1000], but it doesn't make a difference since the edge values don't have digits that sum to 7.)

Post reply on HN