4 ms·

After 20 years doing a mix of embedded and application development, I spent 5 years teaching English. I went back into IT at the age of 45. My first interview

After 20 years doing a mix of embedded and application development, I spent 5 years teaching English. I went back into IT at the age of 45. My first interview was absolutely horrible (sorry about that if you are reading ;-) ). After that I was fine. I ended up getting a web development position without much prior experience in the area (just whatever I had hacked around on in my own time). Of course with 20 years of development experience and 5 years of teaching experience, I had a lot of other things to sell as well. I certainly had no lack of interest and had positions to choose from. I did take a fairly healthy cut in salary, which seemed reasonable to me since the company that hired me was taking a risk. I was careful to pick a position that would work well for me and I did not take the highest offer. I definitely feel that the investment I made at the beginning was definitely worth it. I think as an older person moving into a different area you have to be able to convince people that you will pick things up quickly and that your other attributes are worth it while they wait for your technical skills to come up to par. If you are careful to build the kinds of skills that will be valuable throughout your career, you will have relatively no problem in my experience. The people who have trouble are the ones that were just scraping by in their original positions, or people who had a laser focus on a particular skill set that is no longer valuable.

vonmoltke 11y ago
The trick is getting the opportunity to sell yourself that way. If you can't get the interview in the first place, how well you can sell yourself is irrelevant. This begs the question: how did you manage to get those interviews?
- mikekchar 11y ago
  My guess: http://jldrill.rubyforge.org/ http://jldrill.rubyforge.org/ If anyone looks at the code, it's pretty crap, but it shows that I like to write code. Also, because I knew I was going back into IT, I built: http://mikekchar.github.io/portfolio/ http://mikekchar.github.io/portfolio/ It contains a bunch of egotistical musings about software. It shows that I probably think too highly of myself, but that I know how to write English fairly well ;-) Also, after I moved to London, I made a point of attending events where I could make contacts. My return to IT was complicated by the fact that most of my career was in Ottawa, Canada. Since my family was moving to the UK, my contacts were useless to me. I got 3 interviews in as many weeks from simply meeting people at the pub. As far as I'm concerned, these activities are "selling myself". The fact that I also enjoy them is beside the point (especially drinking beer and chatting with other developers ;-) ). Lately I've been working on trying to allocate time to my side projects. As you can see, I haven't updated my previous projects in a very long time. However, it is vitally important. In the end, the job I ended up accepting was through a head hunter. No idea how he got my name. Probably should have asked him ;-).

vonmoltke 11y ago

The trick is getting the opportunity to sell yourself that way. If you can't get the interview in the first place, how well you can sell yourself is irrelevant. This begs the question: how did you manage to get those interviews?

mikekchar 11y ago
My guess: http://jldrill.rubyforge.org/ http://jldrill.rubyforge.org/ If anyone looks at the code, it's pretty crap, but it shows that I like to write code. Also, because I knew I was going back into IT, I built: http://mikekchar.github.io/portfolio/ http://mikekchar.github.io/portfolio/ It contains a bunch of egotistical musings about software. It shows that I probably think too highly of myself, but that I know how to write English fairly well ;-) Also, after I moved to London, I made a point of attending events where I could make contacts. My return to IT was complicated by the fact that most of my career was in Ottawa, Canada. Since my family was moving to the UK, my contacts were useless to me. I got 3 interviews in as many weeks from simply meeting people at the pub. As far as I'm concerned, these activities are "selling myself". The fact that I also enjoy them is beside the point (especially drinking beer and chatting with other developers ;-) ). Lately I've been working on trying to allocate time to my side projects. As you can see, I haven't updated my previous projects in a very long time. However, it is vitally important. In the end, the job I ended up accepting was through a head hunter. No idea how he got my name. Probably should have asked him ;-).