Ask HN: DevOps Career Advice for an Oldy

Late 30s? You're not old, kiddo. :-)

Joking aside, as others have mentioned, you'll need to differentiate yourself, and for each person, that's different. For me, I found that I took really well to Docker and using Python to talk to APIs and AWS. I then started showing the world how well I knew those things by building a series of open source projects which leverage that technology. And--this is the fun part--each project was an iteration that built upon some of the things which I learned in the last project. For example, I built these over the course of several months:

- https://github.com/dmuth/splunk-network-health-check (Uses Docker and Splunk to graph your network quality)

- https://github.com/dmuth/twitter-sentiment-analysis (Uses Docker, Splunk, and AWS to graph Twitter sentiment)

- https://github.com/dmuth/splunk-lab (Uses Docker and Splunk to stand up a generic log ingestion platform which is highly configurable)

So maybe Splunk isn't your thing and Twitter isn't your thing. Maybe you're more a fan of ELK and the Facebook API. That's fine. The trick is to carve out some kind of interesting problem to solve, solve it, and publish your results upon GitHub. Don't worry if others have solved this before, it's more about YOU solving it, and showing the world that you can solve it. Then take it into an interview and show it off--people will LOVE that, especially if you have a README with really slick looking screenshots (presentation matters).

My email is my username AT my username DOT org. Feel free to hit me up if you'd like to chat further, OP. (Or anyone else in a similar position)

I would do two things.

First, I would get credentialed. Credentials are a time-proven barrier against unfair discrimination whether on sex, race, age, or sexual orientation. The AWS Dev Ops Engineer Professional credential certainly says that you have areasonably up to date, reasonably modern knowledge base that fits well into the AWS stack. It answer the competency question without it even be asked.

Second, I would definitely improve your strength at marketing. In any job, at some point you will be judged on your ability to drive the bottom line growth of the firm (yours, others, etc.). Showing that you can bring in business for yourselves, others, etc. is more compelling than being able to execute at a low cost point.

And in particular as a late 30's devops fellow becomes a late 50's practitioner, being able to generate your own income becomes important to your survival. Divert extra cash from the next job on learning how to tell your story and create value for customers / partners/ employers on both revenue and cost side.

No one fires someone who beats quota every year.

Didn't see your email there.

I'm in my 40s with 20 years experience in NYC. Applied to a handful of positions, but was politely turned away. I suspect age is a factor, but of course no way to prove it. I'm considering shaving 10 years off my resume and see how that goes. I've done management successfully but it was stressful, and I went back to development.

To beef up my list of skills, I'm starting to expand into areas that are natural progressions from my current set. For example, I use C# and Asp.Net for backend work, so I began using .Net Core; I use React on the front end, will add Redux; MySql/SqlServer for the database, will start working with Postgres; AWS for the cloud, will research Azure.

I'm not sure if I should be adding a whole new bullet point, such as learning Erlang/Elixir, Python/Django, Ruby/Rails, or something completely different.

I share your sentiment, my experience exactly, hence I've steered towards architecture and (team) management roles instead since there experience is highly valued over age or better yet, you get positive discrimination because of the age. The funny part is that I get to lead DevOps teams now who are surprised I know as much as they do or most of the times more than them.

I wasn't hired for my legal skills or experience and the companies I worked at had their own outside counsel that they paid for. I was sometimes asked to get involved in legal issues but that was less than 1% of my work. The founders understood that my value was far higher on technical and product than on legal. But I also tried hard to set myself apart and to bring a different mindset to product and tech that might have been influenced by my time in law.

The main point is still to leverage experience and skills that are valuable outside of technical ability that might be out of fashion in a few years. It doesn't matter if that experience is in teaching, legal or just being an extremely likable person.

I routinely see a lot of articles that are over 10 years old making it to the front page of Hacker News. Do this mental exercise: Imagine writing a long form blog article about what you are currently working on / improving about yourself. Imagine posting that blog article on Hacker News in 10 years time. Would it get a good amount of upvotes?