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Can you start a successful tech career later in life?
21–30 of 56 posts
Re: Can you start a successful tech career later in life?
#22The answer is certainly yes. There are many people working in the tech industry who are older than 35, 45, or even 55.
Tech is not any different from other professional fields like law, medicine, engineering, etc., other than being a much younger industry.
Being a much younger industry, it is easy for the young people in tech to believe that one must be young to succeed in tech. But in reality it's a sort of "anthropic principle"--obviously a young industry will be filled with young people in its early days.
But, those days are over, and the industry it maturing. With each passing year it gets easier and easier for older folks to break into tech.
Can they become dynamic founders of aggressive, entrepreneurial, successful companies? The answer is still yes, to the extent that anyone can do that. That type of talent is very rare generally, so it will also be very rare in older workers. But certainly there are examples of older workers who start hot tech companies. Marc Benioff was 35 when he started Salesforce. Martin Eberhard was 43 when he started Tesla.
Re: Can you start a successful tech career later in life?
#23I can do whatever the fuck I want and nobody is going to stop me. Seriously.
Re: Can you start a successful tech career later in life?
#24"Tech companies don’t require their engineers to be coding wunderkinds" - really? What tech companies advertise for mediocre, non rock star devs who can muddle through some tutorials?
Wanting and requiring are quite different. Very few companies actually have many of the kind of people you describe.
Re: Can you start a successful tech career later in life?
#25I recently interviewed for a Sr Dev position at a large 200+ Los Angeles based consulting firm. Before the Interview I decided to check out the people who work there on LinkedIn. Of the 30 or so developers I found only 5 had a CS/CIS/EE/CE/Math degree. The rest where 30 somethings with degrees in English, Music, and other under utilized fields. Most of them had attended one of those 1 year coding school programs. Some where holding Senior positions with less than 3 years of development experience and no formal degree.
Obviously a top tier company’s roster doesn’t look like this. But it was interesting to see how much the job market for developers has changed. This is my first time looking for a new job in 7 years. Clearly the demand for tech has changed the landscape and made lots of opportunities for middle aged people with little to no experience.
Re: Can you start a successful tech career later in life?
#26Yes. In a few years, it will be seen as a silly question as affordable healthcare options allow creative folks to leave their corporate drone jobs.
Re: Can you start a successful tech career later in life?
#27Another important point is that for older techies, there is a different mental mindset when it comes to making code public. Of the best S/W engineers that I know, no one has a Github account. They give talks in small groups, give lots of personal advice, some are champions of pair programming, but they don't put their code in public. It makes it harder to network and gain attention.
Re: Can you start a successful tech career later in life?
#28Something completely unstated here is the practical demands required of startup employees and founders and entry level tech workers. Most of those demands conflict with someone who has kids and other responsibilities, such as long and odd hours with a high pace. Statistically older people will come with more baggage and are much less willing to put up with harsh and in some cases ridiculous work schedules that are required of interns and new hires.
This is the same for any high competition job and I think Wall Street is a perfect example for this because it is very similar in practice.
There are way more parallels between Wall Street and Silicon Valley than I think either group would care to admit.
Re: Can you start a successful tech career later in life?
#29"Tech companies don’t require their engineers to be coding wunderkinds" - really? What tech companies advertise for mediocre, non rock star devs who can muddle through some tutorials?
Wanting and requiring are quite different. Very few companies actually have many of the kind of people you describe.
At my current company the old timers consider themselves to be rockstars, and they've written the biggest pile of crap I've seen yet. There are two we (the newer guys) have decided should never be allowed to code again, and tell mgmt this.
Re: Can you start a successful tech career later in life?
#30I think there is an additional question here, which is if you can return to a tech career that you started early on but abandoned when you forayed into management. But one day you realize that your hobby of programming is so much more satisfying. I am trying this right now, but it's not easy, especially since people think that you are moving downwards if you're going back into tech.
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