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When people get to do work that innately feels good to them, they will run to work each day, thrilled to give it their all. Jonathan Fields, host of one of the world's top rated podcasts, Good Life Project, calls this a “Sparketype”. It's the “DNA-level driver” of actions that most deeply fulfill us. > https://sparketype.com/sparketest/
Personally what's helped me has been to talk to people in the field and read books or watch videos where people talk about their careers. Whatever field you might be interested in, that content is out there (at least in the US) to explain what a career is about in detail.
Get a science degree. Or engineering. I did science starting age 25.
After dabbling in coding, which I fell in love with, I decided to go back to school for software development. I didn’t have the high school math grades to be a competitive applicant, so, while working full-time, I re-did all high school math over a four-month period —- finishing just days before the program’s application deadline.
A year ago, at age 34, I started the program. For the first time in my professional life, I feel I’m exactly where I should be. I couldn’t be happier with my decision.
Was it scary? Absolutely. But even scarier was the thought of looking back twenty years from now having not made the change.
If it piques your interest, go for it!
There’s not a lot of concrete advice, more of a picture of how precarious it can be at the outset. It’s really about whether you really enjoy the work, so that you’re willing to keep trying when maybe you’ve expended what feels like a lot of effort, yet your mental picture of the career/life seems both distant and dissonant with your (lack of) feeling of mastery. In the end, for me, the doors were opened by meeting & working with/for the right people, but it was a grind to get to the point(s) where I could.
Lastly, there will come a point, which is subjective and tricky to identify & act on, where you transition from “I need to take what I can get to learn and stay in the game” to “Nah, I’m not settling any more; I’ll turn down things that don’t seem like I can thrive as a result”
It might've taken me 10 years since then, but I've landed a senior SWE role.
How I would advise, is to focus on a small subset of things you like, with people/friends you like, be it music, cycling, whatever.
Focus on what you love, and as cliche as it is, something good will come out of it.
Graduated with a masters at 32 with advanced maths under my belt.
Started working at a startup at 33. Dir Eng by 35 owing to my time as a foreman in construction and remote geophysical exploration. Turns out managing people in those fields is more difficult than software and ended up being excellent preparation.
This is all years ago now but there is nothing systemic that has changed. Career switches can give you a superpower, or at least, another perspective. The key for me is honest work, tenacity and empathy. The rest is, as they say, details.
I took the first job that would hire me, moving about 1,500 miles with very little money and no family support. If I didn't have and make a good support network of friends, I would've been homeless because I was fully broke my first months.
It took about 5 years to get established enough in support roles to start making real headway, but my career since has been relatively rewarding. I'm making more money but I'm also feeling a lot happier with the work that I'm doing.
I came through that in a different time (mid/late-2000s, housing crisis, but greener fields in tech than now) and it scared the hell out of me, but the alternative fear was greater, that I'd be geographically and financially trapped.
My advice is to be open, be social, be persistent, and above all be friendly. Even when you don't want to, even when it's hard. The connections I made in my first shitty underpaid startup tech-support job have been at least a small part of how I've gotten my last three jobs in tech. This is a very tight industry and the people you know in it can be, and become, unexpectedly powerful.
It has been net positive for my life. I've ended up at a FAANG equivalent company (i.e. big company and big salary), I'd describe my outcome as better than average.
Advice is hard to give without knowing your situation. When I entered the industry it wasn't that hard to get a junior position. This is not true today and so trying to enter is much riskier. I regularly help people enter the industry and have seen the barrier to entry raise over time.
I generally see six patterns of success:
1. The person has a network that will take a chance on them because they are a high caliber person (assumes some minimum level of skill)
2. The person has strong IT skills and uses their position within an IT org to gradually acquire coding and cloud (e.g. AWS) skills. They then get a dev job that is primarily cloud related.
3. The person has some other valuable skillset (e.g. accounting) and agrees to work at a startup splitting their time between coding and their existing skillset. Sometimes people need to accept reduced pay even relative to startup salaries to make this work.
4. The person goes back to school then gets a job as a fresh grad. This works fairly well but is expensive in both time and money.
5. The person self-teaches and makes one or more truly impressive projects. I've only seen one person do this successfully. They dove deep into a multi-user collaborative editing program, it showed really great technical chops.
6. The person goes to a coding bootcamp and makes some small projects. The success rate of this seems to drop every year and I don't think I can recommend it. In many ways this is not different from self-teaching except that most people lack the tools to successfully self-teach.