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Ask HN: starting a career in software dev in my thirties, am I nuts?

• mgkimsal 16y ago
  Life begins at 40, dude :) Never too late, and frankly I think you've done good getting grounded in things like BDD/TDD. There are people I know with 10-15 years of development experience that don't know about TDD, much less use it. It's not a silver bullet, but I think demonstrates a lot of forward thinking. Have you considered just being an independent service provider? Looking for 'employment' isn't going to necessarily get you all that much more than you'd get if you got your own short term contracts. At the same time, different people have different needs - perhaps you have some need for 'employment' in the traditional sense? I'm sensing some independence though - travelling for years, went back to school - jumping in to a new arena - etc. You may not fit well in most traditional employment situations. How are you making money right now? How are you getting by? Are you doing any web work for hire? Could you do more? Does that not appeal to you?
• dmillar 16y ago
  You're not nuts, if that's what you want to do, then do it. However, the truth is 30 is not young for an entry level developer. Most 30 year-olds are accustom to a higher income than a 22 year-old CS grad, and this might make some employers adverse. Keep pounding the pavement. With your engineering background you should be able to find a good job. It might take some time in this job market, but keep at it, and try to pickup some freelance to pad your resume.
  • patio11 16y ago
    Most 30 year-olds are accustom to a higher income than a 22 year-old CS grad Having some familiarity with both fields, entry level programmers in the United States routinely make twice (or more) what L1 tech support workers get.
• slantyyz 16y ago
  One thing you might have to do is price yourself to sell to get some sellable experience at which point you can start charging more.
• patio11 16y ago
  I don't have enough experience to get started, and I can't get started without experience. Horsepuckey. Can you FizzBuzz? If so, you're experienced enough to get a job as a developer. What you need to work on is not your programming ability -- that is what professional experience is for -- but your competence at marketing yourself. You will probably not be hired to fill a hole labeled "I need a developer who does RoR, jQuery, Rspec, and Cucumber." First, most of the people who need exactly that skillset don't have the budget to hire anybody. (No offense to present company who may use exactly that skillset.) Second, most developers start with semi-relevant experience and gradually learn more about the stack their current job (or project at the job) involves. I was a Big Freaking Java Web Apps dev for 3 years and I started not knowing SQL, Spring, etc etc. That was fine -- it just meant my first several months involved doing an awful lot of iterating over hashmaps (java.util.* is my second home) when not reading code and tutorials. Now, in terms of marketing yourself: 1) Make stuff you can show off. This distinguishes you from the 90 out of 100 candidates who are incapable of making stuff. Making stuff is the core developer competency. (Actually, it might be #2 after communication skills.) 2) Polish your communication skills. See #1. 3) Start networking. "Send a resume and pray" is jobseeking for people who enjoy unemployment. Know the decisionmaker beforehand. There are a variety of ways you can get started on this today -- for example, start writing a blog about the kinds of problems you have solved or will eventually solve for the kinds of people who will hire you. This gives you something to talk about. Alternatively, talk about what other people are writing in the same field. This has a long payoff timescale but the rewards can be fantastic. Also, don't neglect traditional networking: business cards, meeting people face-to-face in your local community, etc etc.
  • noodle 16y ago
    i agree with everything, but i especially agree with this: > Make stuff you can show off. if you have a good portfolio and can convince someone to look at it, they will care much less about your experience, grades, etc..
    • julsonl 16y ago
      If you could also show some open source work, it would be a tremendous help. I have been job hunting for well around 2 weeks already, and from what I have noticed is that half of the companies I'm getting interviews with placed a huge emphasis on my open source contributions (however paltry those are). I'm just quite unlucky that my kryptonite has been the combination of a.) These shops all use RoR while I'm a Java guy (currently remedying that), and b.) My SQL experience (or the apparent lack of it, no pun intended, quickly remedying that too).
• elliottcarlson 16y ago
  I don't think you are nuts, but be realistic in your expectations for your first job in the industry. There will be plenty of competition out there that could have a lot more experience - you just need to focus on showing why you are passionate about starting in this field and that you are not only capable but also willing to learn anything required to improve your potential within their companies. If I saw this kind of drive I would (and have in the past) overlooked people's actual experience. Someone with a go-to attitude and very eager to increase their skills will always do well in an interview with me. Good luck and don't let the current job market bring you down - it'll happen sooner than later.
• wyclif 16y ago
  You're not nuts. I'm doing it and I'm over 40, I spent a decade or two in civil engineering as a land surveyor and then as a cartographer. That whole industry collapsed, and since I had learned BASIC and C in high school and did some sysadmin UNIX stuff decades ago, I'm getting back up to speed thanks to Python. My advice would be to get a related job in a shop that uses a similar set of technologies and has programmers on staff. Keep working on your skill set, and get some mentoring from an experienced programmer. Another avenue I would recommend is to work on a high-quality open source project to get some experience under your belt.
• thor79 16y ago
  I'm going through a very similar situation, though I never finished my degree the first time around. I dropped out, and spent most of my 20's working in various dead end tech support jobs. Then 3 years ago I went back and finished my degree. I graduated in June of 2009. I took a job I now hate because I was trying to get in to get experience and to be able to pay off my student loans. I'm going through the motions in this job, but trying to work my way into the field I want to be in, web development. Bottom line for me is, if you don't enjoy what you do for a living, you don't find it engaging, then you shouldn't be in that job. Find the job you want to work in. I realize it's more difficult as a person who is looking and not currently employed full time, but keep at it. Just keep racking up experience where you can, and eventually you'll get the job you want to be in. Trust me, I've wasted a year in this job, and if I could go back a year, I wouldn't have taken this position.
• grannyg00se 16y ago
  How did you end up spending 5 years in tech support after gaining an electrical engineering degree? Shouldn't you have been working as an electrical engineer? The question may seem unhelpful, but I suspect that in the answer may lie a problem that is going to persist throughout any type of career change that you attempt.
• ig1 16y ago
  How far are you getting, are you not getting interviews or are you getting stuck at the interview stage ?
• gexla 16y ago
  Sounds like you are already there if you are making money building Wordpress sites. Just keep doing that and scale up to a point where you are able to make a living from it. When you feel comfortable, expand into taking freelance Ruby / Rails work as well as your Wordpress work. Keep going along this track until someone offers you a full time gig, by then maybe you don't even care to take one.
• zackola 16y ago
  If you are located in NYC send me your resume. The company I work for is looking for someone whose experience matches yours.
  • klochner 16y ago
    ditto for me in San Francisco
    • paulnelligan 16y ago
      Thanks a lot guys, that's encouraging, and I would be willing to move, but I'm in Ireland, and visa could be an issue.
• iworkforthem 16y ago
  I suggest you contribute to an open source project, if people like your work there, freelance project is a possibility. Also it looks good in your CV. But seriously, if you intend to be a s/w engineer, why build an app and sell it yourself? With Android, iPhone and Ruby on Rails, it is easy to make something and sell.
• davidamcclain 16y ago
  >> I don't have enough experience to get started, and I can't get started without experience. Sounds to me like you probably have bucket loads of experience compared against a recent grad. You've held down a job, traveled, went to school twice. Your current skill-set includes a lot of soft skills (people skills) that many experienced developers lack. I'd suggest putting that foot forward.
• jamesteow 16y ago
  I know of people who enter med school in their late 30s/early 40s. So no, you are not nuts. Life isn't a race.
• deleted 16y ago
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• mkr-hn 16y ago
  If you're a success before 30, you probably haven't failed enough to make the success meaningful. I'm well on my way to having a nice portfolio of failures before I hit 30, and it's looking like I'll find success at < 40. I've learned too much from my failures at 26 to think that you could get a good sampling before 30. Humans live too long to worry about rushing it.
• whyme 16y ago
  The people who are nuts are the one's that don't have any other aspirations than a paycheck. You sir, are not. As I see it you have a few options: 1. Create something meaningful, on your own, and publish it. Having some applications even when they do not generate revenue, can act as your experience. It will certainly help in marketing yourself. 2. Consider starting in another role in a software company, like Quality Assurance, then try to moving into a developer role for the company.
• jwecker 16y ago
  Ignore the age. In 10 more years you'll be 10 years older no matter what. You could be a world-class programmer and product designer at that point. Or you could be wishing you had started 10 years earlier. I seriously doubt you'll have starved to death by then unless you make some destructive life choices... I could come up with plenty of examples of people who didn't start their life's work until 33 (and much older)- but it's irrelevant- a distraction at best. Having said that, I think we have an innate tendency to... acclimatize as we get older. We start to expect that things should come easier. You'll need to counter that if you continue this path. Expect it to be very hard- on the learning side and the self-marketing side and the delivering value to your employer or own business...- and deal with that reality instead of assuming that the difficulty is somehow related to your age or self confidence or how long it took before you got whatever degree etc. etc. Step up.
  • dolphenstein 16y ago
    Right on! Today is the first day of the rest of your life!
• iuguy 16y ago
  No, you're not nuts at all. Fellow 30-something here, you should run with it, if it's what you want to do. Like with start ups, persistence is key. As other people have said, put some stuff up to showcase what you're capable of. If you work on a side project that you can demonstrate to people and possibly get some revenue (or at least public recognition) from it'll help improve your personal brand, which in turn will make it easier for you to get hired, providing the jobs are around in your area.
• eccp 16y ago
  I had a workmate on a J2EE team who had a Physics degree but couldn't work find anything on his field here in Chile. He moved into computer programming around his mid/late 30s and now he works in the largest bank, but he's always hacking small proyects. I'm 34, and have a job with Java technologies that pays the bills, but I can't help to hack small projects after hours. I often feel that I need to escape that 'sinking' feeling, so I'm trying to build my own small business right now. If you review other posts here on HN, you will notice a pattern of people which feel on a crisis around our age. It's common. But it's not the end of the world. You are not old, and you've proven to have the will to keep going forward, so just keep trying. Best wishes!
• geebee 16y ago
  First, you aren't too old at all. We recently hired a programmer in his late 50s, and man are we glad we did (and btw, age was never a consideration in the first place). He's great, and we're probably going to use much of his work as a reference point for future apps. As for getting into it... glad to hear you've had some success with interviews. My biggest bit of advice to you is to get your hands on a good data structures and algorithms book (Java is fine), and learn the crap out of it. Since you like programming, you'll enjoy this, and it'll help you in interviews and as a programmer. In particular, make sure you know: linked lists binary trees (be able to code insert, traverse, find on the spot; read about delete but don't worry so much about keeping it all in your head) sorting (quicksort, mergesort, maybe a few others) read about balanced trees, b-trees, etc, follow and try out the code, but don't worry about keeping it in your head Hashmaps (what's a hashing function, how to keep good performance) Graphs are fun, and once you can code trees, you have all the tech skills, but the algorithms in graphs are very interesting... and now and then does come up in an interview. SQL - I still get asked about this a lot... know the basic stuff (select, conditions, joins) cold, and also make sure you know some of the grouping functions (HAVING) and how outer joins work. Anything more elaborate will get you points, but probably won't hurt you if you don't know the answer. Personally, I find it slightly obnoxious that interviewers rely so heavily on this stuff, but it is actually kind of fun. I always review this carefully before an interview. It can make the difference (in fact, I'm pretty sure I missed out on a job because I let it get stale and fumbled around too much... it's a shame, if I'd spent my usual 8 hours preparing, I probably would have rocked it). It's a lot to learn, but it sounds like you enjoy this anyway. One other thing... to get experience, try taking on a small software project for your current employer. Once you've done it, you'll have "official" experience. Sounds like I started in a similar spot to you (math major with some CS coursework), so I had to work a little harder to convince employers I could write code. I think EE would probably put you in a pretty good spot, so you really just need to convince them of this thorough those technical screens (which is why I so strongly recommend you read up on data structures).
  • ardit33 16y ago
    This is good advice. Also to the OP: this book is good, and a must read. It will help you a lot on the fundamentals of CS. http://www.amazon.com/Algorithm-Design-Manual-Steve-Skiena/dp/0387948600 http://www.amazon.com/Algorithm-Design-Manual-Steve-Skiena/d...
• shareme 16y ago
  Paul, build something..no I am not joking.. what got me back into programming..my A.A.S. 2 year degree is in accounting and Computer Science..my time at Purdue University was in Molecular Biology was that I started building computer applications while at Purdue University. Once you get something built and start showing it to people..someone shows up sooner or later with a job offer. also what helps ..show off your projects here at HN.. Your are not nuts. So Paul if you could build any Ruby on Rails Application what RoR application would you build? Side Note: In fact all my successful interviews involved me showing something that I built.
• lkrubner 16y ago
  I did the same as you. I did not get into programming till I was in my early 30s. I think I was 34 years old when I first started identifying as "a computer programmer" (I mean, when I would meet people and they would ask me what I did for a living). I've had a great time doing software work, but the first year or 2 I was doing it were frustrating for the number of things I still did not know how to do. It is a little bit amazing how many different things you have to know to be good at it. Anyway, my own experience is that it can be done. Of course, 2010 is a tough time to be starting in any career at all. You did not mention which country you are in, but from the way you talk about your schooling, I assume you are in the USA. The recession has been intense in the USA, see this chart: http://calculatedriskimages.blogspot.com/2010/07/employment-recessions-june-2010.html http://calculatedriskimages.blogspot.com/2010/07/employment-... One change I've noticed in the tech industry since 2005 is there is a much bigger interest in knowing frameworks, rather than simply a computer language. Maybe 10 years ago a person could say "I know Java" or "I know PHP" but nowadays its more like "I know Spring, Hibernate, Grails" or "I know Symfony, CodeIgniter, Drupal". So my advice is to pick a specialty.
• addywaddy 16y ago
  Hi Paul, you're not nuts :) I studied Civil Engineering at university, and then faffed around for the next 10 years because I didn't know what I wanted to do. I discovered my passion for programming at the age of 32 through the initial Ruby on Rails podcast. Unfortunately I couldn't program at all at the time, had never knowingly used unix and so spent the next 2 years teaching myself most evenings after putting the kids to bed. The key thing for me actually landing a job was through meeting up with a local programmer. I'd discovered his blog, realised he was local and arranged to meet up with him for a beer. He told me that there was a Ruby User Group in town and so I plucked up the courage and went to the next meeting - it was great! At the third or fourth meeting heard through a fellow attendee that the company he worked at was looking for rails programmers. Two interviews later and I was employed. I'm not a world class programmer. But I consider myself very fortunate to have discovered my passion at what seemed to me at the time so late in life. Many people never do. And getting a paycheck as a result of that passion is better than a kick in the teeth ;) All the best mate.
• thinkingeric 16y ago
  As a manager I can tell you that I am looking for any clues I can find to mitigate the risk of bringing on a new person. "Experience' means very little if I have no way of assessing what a prospective employee/contractor did in those previous jobs. You need 'evidence' more than you need experience; evidence of your language and problem solving skills; evidence of your communication skills; evidence of your motivation and interests. Eric
• deleted 16y ago
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• natch 16y ago
  You'll meet a lot of ageists in your career. Ignore the objections from all of them, including yourself.
• murgatroyd 16y ago
  I'm 30 and just got my first job in Software Engineering. I just recently graduated with a degree in CS and I started at the company as an intern - they hired me within a month.
• moron4hire 16y ago
  #1 most important thing to understand: programming will consume your life, if you let it. And if you want to be good, you need to let it. #2 most important thing to understand: people-networking is important, though you probably know that by now. The rub is that #1 has a tendency to prevent #2. It's good to work hard and program and make stuff, but don't neglect to tell people about it and find other people who share your interests. Without them, you'll never learn about the good jobs because you'll be lost in the sea of recruiters and contract jobs.
• thirdstation 16y ago
  I did a similar thing when I was your your age. Try to get a programming job in the industry you worked in. Domain experience matters. Don't correlate your age with where you think you should be in life. When I finished grad school I subtracted 10 years from my chronological age and declared it my career age. I picked 10 b/c that's the difference in years between my graduate and undergraduate degrees. Nowadays, when I get hung up on where I think I should be in life (office, better salary, etc), I think how I'd feel if I were my career age. From that perspective, I always come out ahead.
• JangoSteve 16y ago
  You are never too inexperienced to get started. In fact I think that's probably the greatest obstacle to more people being experts at something, the fear of not being good enough before they even dive in. I also came from a technical background, Mech. and Elec. Eng, and didn't really start programming until about 6.5 years ago. But I was deadly serious about it and about being the best, even if I didn't have a CS degree. I immersed myself. About 2 years ago, I was able to quit engineering and go full-time. Now I run a web development consultancy that has a great team, and I'm writing articles that even get picked up by Ruby Inside (thanks perterc!). I'm even in the process of contributing back to both Rails and jQuery core. I talk to a lot of people looking to dive into software development because they can't find technical cofounders. I think this is the right approach, but they all seem to have this mindset that they'll never be a real programmer, in that they ask me how in the world they can get started and simply not suck. Not sucking is one thing, but being great is where it's at. Do the latter, and you'll always land on your feet.
• T_S_ 16y ago
  You are nuts. Wait until your forties, like I did.
• Todd 16y ago
  The most successful people do something they love. If you love something, you will spend more time doing it. If you spend more time doing it, you will inevitably become good at it. Sure, it's easier to pick things up when you're younger. Yes, you remember more of what you learned in your teens vs. 20s and 20s vs 30s. That's just the way the mind ages. But people learn new things at every decade of life. Your 30s are still a great time to learn. You'll be an expert by the time you're 40 if you stay with it.
• mannicken 16y ago
  No, you are not nuts. Here is an example of nuts: thinking that you have a telepathic connection with your ex-girlfriend, who wasn't actually your girlfriend. You are normal. Go for it.
• bitwize 16y ago
  You're nuts. I'm also 33 years old, and let me tell you, getting a break in this business at 33 with not much professional experience is very, very difficult. By 33 you're expected to have around ten years experience in the relevant technologies/application domains. At least 3 or 4 are pretty much requird for even a so-called "entry level" position. Companies are willing to cut you a break if you're fresh out of college, less so if you're not. Your best bet is to move to either the SF Bay area or the Boston area. There you are more likely to find hiring managers who don't care about the bullshit HR filters and do care about what you can actually do and what your interests and motivations are. Outside of that, good luck to you.
• greyman 16y ago
  "and I can't get started without experience" No, no..that's not universally true. Don't let yourself to be affected by this concept. You can get employed without formal experience, some bigger companies also hire newbies. You will just get lower salary.
• udfalkso 16y ago
  Apply for unpaid internships. I'm sure most companies would rather have you than some young kid. Take the hit for a little while, and then turn it into a real job in a few months.
• keokilee 16y ago
  I got worried while reading the headline because I'll be 30 when I get my master's in CS. The supportive comments in this thread at least alleviated my concerns.
• flacon 16y ago
  "Build it and it will come." That was my strategy. I had no career and a degree in Philosophy that was taking me nowhere. Out of the blue I jumped into Web development and started building websites for anybody that needed them, for free. Once I had a portfolio of 10 or so I got a few part time position doing web development at a university. This gave me more experience and at the same time I started hacking on more technical aspects like OO PHP, Mysql, Ruby on Rails etc. I hacked on a few things and had some examples to show. This led to one fulltime job doing mostly PHP. I then hacked a bit more with Ruby and landed another job doing that fulltime. Now I am hacking on IOS and Macruby hoping to make a jump into the fields. See the pattern? Get a development job doing whatever you can. Hack on stuff, build it, then try to move up. Key is, Web Based software, IMO, is a show and tell type profession. Like carpentry the emphasis is on what you can do, what projects you have built, rather then degrees, age etc ...hope that helps...
  • paulnelligan 16y ago
    Yes, it does, thank you
• gherque 16y ago
  There are no jobs in this field unfortunately, especially not these days. I have 15 yrs experience in SW dev, and can't find a job now that I am suddenly unemployed. Sad truth.