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During interviews I make a point about flexibility due to not having my own family, and can also dedicate significantly more time to learning outside of work th

During interviews I make a point about flexibility due to not having my own family, and can also dedicate significantly more time to learning outside of work that perhaps many candidates of a similar age (40-45 bracket) are unable to. I have the same "free time" as a junior dev in their 20s... but with 20yrs Ops experience on top. It does pay off though and I am delighted when colleagues approach me with a difficult problem to crack. I never take on formal ownership of the problem though, but if I do crack it, my input is well documented (and bonus points: I learned something new). Cracking some hard problems has earned me a good reputation among the senior engineers & engineering management, and hopefully my future career will benefit from these relationships.

JustExAWS 1y ago
That is the last tactic I would take at 51 - “I have grown children so I can work crazy hours and do side projects to keep up to date on technology.” My value proposition is the “Joel Spolsky” value play “I’m smart and get things done” and I can talk them through my history of doing so. That can be either supporting sales by flying out to a customer site or being on a zoom call, leading a large cross discipline implementation, hands on keyboard going from an empty AWS account to a full architecture, deployment pipeline, and an ETL or online backend process with hands on development. They get professionalism not passion. Don’t get me wrong, I am up to date on the latest back end tech in my niche, Gen AI and know when to use traditional machine learning techniques even though I’m going to defer to the specialists for ML implementations that can’t be done with managed services. But what I am not going to do is work crazy hours.
- comprev 1y ago
  To clarify, I'm not working "crazy hours". I don't have a huge backlog of work that needs to finished. I enjoy researching, building and solving interesting problems out of personal curiosity. There has never been any pressure on me to find a solution - many of the challenges are sometimes years old and teams just lived with the discomfort. Sharing a possible way to remove this discomfort is often welcomed by the long-timer engineers out of curiosity to learn more - it's been a thorn in their side for ages!

JustExAWS 1y ago

That is the last tactic I would take at 51 - “I have grown children so I can work crazy hours and do side projects to keep up to date on technology.” My value proposition is the “Joel Spolsky” value play “I’m smart and get things done” and I can talk them through my history of doing so. That can be either supporting sales by flying out to a customer site or being on a zoom call, leading a large cross discipline implementation, hands on keyboard going from an empty AWS account to a full architecture, deployment pipeline, and an ETL or online backend process with hands on development. They get professionalism not passion. Don’t get me wrong, I am up to date on the latest back end tech in my niche, Gen AI and know when to use traditional machine learning techniques even though I’m going to defer to the specialists for ML implementations that can’t be done with managed services. But what I am not going to do is work crazy hours.

comprev 1y ago
To clarify, I'm not working "crazy hours". I don't have a huge backlog of work that needs to finished. I enjoy researching, building and solving interesting problems out of personal curiosity. There has never been any pressure on me to find a solution - many of the challenges are sometimes years old and teams just lived with the discomfort. Sharing a possible way to remove this discomfort is often welcomed by the long-timer engineers out of curiosity to learn more - it's been a thorn in their side for ages!