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Can you start a successful tech career later in life?

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Re: Can you start a successful tech career later in life?

#41

Post by alaskamiller »

busterarm wrote: post #38
michaelochurch wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the cruelty of age discrimination. By the time you're any good, opportunities start disappearing. (At 30, you're still quite hireable, but you do start losing options. Most of the options that disappear from 22 to 30 are of horrendously low quality. I hope that is also true from 30 to 40, 40 to 50, etc.)

As someone who is changing careers from support/ops into dev at 30, age discrimination terrifies me. I'm already having problems in my current career when prospective employers google me and find out I'm building up my GitHub account. They either think I'm going to leave immediately or they think that I'm trying to backdoor my way into a dev position at their company. This happened to me twice this week and both plac…

Email? Got some answers.

Re: Can you start a successful tech career later in life?

#42

Post by larrys »

pg wrote: post #33

One of the best examples I know of is someone we hired at Viaweb, Jonathan Yedidia. http://www.disneyresearch.com/people/jonathan-yedidia/ He had a PhD in physics and then became a professional chess player (44th in the world IIRC). He hadn't done much programming, but I knew him from high school and figured someone as smart as him could learn to program pretty quickly. Which is exactly what happened. Now he's a CS r…

Disney Research is an impressive place that I never knew existed.

Re: Can you start a successful tech career later in life?

#43

Post by anuraj »

Would be difficult to say the least, especially if you do not have a STEM background. As PG says, at least 10 years hacking experience is the minimum bar. But if you are an innovator/marketing genius and can muster a tech team, you can definitely be a successful founder.

Re: Can you start a successful tech career later in life?

#44

Post by busterarm »

alaskamiller wrote: post #41
busterarm wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who is changing careers from support/ops into dev at 30, age discrimination terrifies me. I'm already having problems in my current career when prospective employers google me and find out I'm building up my GitHub account. They either think I'm going to leave immediately or they think that I'm trying to backdoor my way into a dev position at their company. This happened to me twice this week and both plac…

Email? Got some answers.

Bs2MD9cK9sbm@meltmail.com

Good for 24 hours. Let me know if that doesn't work out.

Re: Can you start a successful tech career later in life?

#45

Post by onedev »

moocowduckquack wrote: post #40
onedev wrote: post #23

I can do whatever the fuck I want and nobody is going to stop me. Seriously.

Well jolly good for you. Out of interest, do you want to do anything particularly outlandish and is anyone actually trying to stop you? Because otherwise this level of extreme seriousness may be entirely uneccessary.

I'm tired of this pseudo-intellectual banter about age and if it matters.

No it doesn't matter. Go out and do what you want!

Re: Can you start a successful tech career later in life?

#46

Post by jeremyjh »

julianpye wrote: post #17
belluchan wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I spent about 6 months in management and it was the worst experience in my career. I will never do that again. I'm back to writing code. I don't know why anyone would want to be a manager.

There is a creeping way from S/W engineering to being a staff engineer to being the software architect... Along that way you get dragged into meetings where you end up not having much competitive pressure - since the others are business people, but you end up shining and you get on the fast track. I enjoyed it very much, since I love doing tech-strategy and big picture planning. That said being a project manager - if…

This is very insightful. I never really considered the fact that I was crushing cans on the way up but it is definitely true.

I've been tacking towards "out of management" for a few years and it is not easy. Taking a "step down" is hard but only because of my own petty status-seeking and I've gotten past that. What I can't figure out is the salary problem. There are some developers who can get paid as well as I do, but not any in my industry where developers are a pure cost-center - I don't work in a software company. Changing industry with 7 year old tech skills (aside from open-source and side-projects) without taking a huge salary cut is impossible.

Re: Can you start a successful tech career later in life?

#47

Post by johnjlocke »

sillysaurus2 wrote: post #19
notastartup wrote: post #2

damn this is like the complete opposite of me. I want to get out of the whole tech game once I make enough money to not have to work a 9 to 5 job. I wrote a quick rap verse about it. Jus trying to make a quick buck get outta this tech game but still no luck need to make it before i turn thirty before i end up old and dirty

Is the implication that >30 year olds are old?

Apparently so. It's the stupidest thing I've ever heard. SV, specifically startup culture, is a large part of the tech world, but far from the only portion of it. I suspect the preference for young founders is not being able to "see the world through hacker eyes", but as was suggested earlier the willingness to burn the candle at both ends in order to make a startup succeed to the level that VCs wish. Young people are less likely to have families or an outside life.

Re: Can you start a successful tech career later in life?

#49

Post by belluchan »

jeremyjh wrote: post #46
julianpye wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a creeping way from S/W engineering to being a staff engineer to being the software architect... Along that way you get dragged into meetings where you end up not having much competitive pressure - since the others are business people, but you end up shining and you get on the fast track. I enjoyed it very much, since I love doing tech-strategy and big picture planning. That said being a project manager - if…

This is very insightful. I never really considered the fact that I was crushing cans on the way up but it is definitely true. I've been tacking towards "out of management" for a few years and it is not easy. Taking a "step down" is hard but only because of my own petty status-seeking and I've gotten past that. What I can't figure out is the salary problem. There are some developers who can get paid as well as I do, b…

Take the salary cut. Consider it paying yourself to do something you love 40 hours a week. That's your life man, that time you spend at work.

Re: Can you start a successful tech career later in life?

#50

Post by onedev »

belluchan wrote: post #39
onedev wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you expand on why you thought your experience was so bad? I'm just curious.

I was the direct manager for software engineers at a big public hosting company. Being a line manager was miserable. I thought going into management I'd have more ability to influence things but I had less. I had no time to write code, and so I wasn't taking part in technology decisions outside of approving with whatever the team decided, and they are smart people, they didn't need any hand holding. I couldn't influe…

That painted a pretty insightful picture, thank you for posting it!

I was curious because I had heard for quite a number of people who had switched tracks from engineer to management and found it unsatisfying but they didn't go into as much detail as you did in your post.

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