Ask HN: For older devs, do you feel like you have missed your prime time?

I am 27 years old. Did my bachelor's in CS in 2018. Worked in a non tech role for SAAS product for 3.5 years. Moved back to engineering last year. I am now working on a PHP backend and React on the front.

I go through various forums and find that people DID A LOT of cool stuff while I was busy playing with Arduinos and OpenCV. I did learn about the kernel a bit but that's about it.The amount of development that I see people have gone through in the the last 5 years is insane. Sure, there is a lot of sugar coating but I still feel the amount of compute and resources that are available now might mark the point of no return. I hope I am making sense here.

Absolutely not - there is no point of no return for curious guys like you and you will find your self-learning experience that you gained invaluable at some point in the future for sure.

Keep coding!

At 28, I feel the same way for slowly meandering around Cybersecurity engineering --> AppSec --> Software Engineering...

I feel like I am a master of none and it really fuels the impostor syndrome.

I think some may be missing the point here that your brain sort of starts to go downhill at this point in terms of fluid intelligence. I feel your pain and hope that we have somewhere to go.

To follow up in a less morose way... is there anything right now that particularly gets you excited? Are you enjoying any side projects? I think that can really help push people in our position.

I can’t second this advice enough. It’s never been this easy to have an idea and also resources to execute on your thoughts.

I have an older(60s) coworker that I’ve been showing the pros and cons of gpt. She’s gained so much confidence from it. She uses it all the time to figure out excel formulas and help with writing emails. She’s bilingual, so it really helps her figure the grammar of her thoughts.