I have a friend who's just done this - after Computer Science at college, he became a business analyst; spent 10 years as a BA in Manufacturing and latterly Fin

I have a friend who's just done this - after Computer Science at college, he became a business analyst; spent 10 years as a BA in Manufacturing and latterly Finance, finally realized it was never going to get more interesting or better paid, and quit 2 months ago to join MegaCorp's graduate developer programme. So far he's loving it and really glad he made the switch. I think you have a couple of options: 1. "Write off" the last decade, and leap into a junior-level position as a developer 2. Start learning new technologies & contributing to open-source projects in your spare time. Build up your "coding muscle", and then get hired into a mixed development/management role (e.g. Engineering Manager; Lead Developer) A suggestion: don't go back into web programming. Go for a less mature, lessy clubby, better-paid, higher-growth segment, where the difference between a guru and a novice is closer to 2 years than to 5 years. Data engineering (Hadoop, Storm, R, pandas, Spark, Incanter, Pentaho, Mahout) is a great example of this. Good luck! And if you want to contribute to open source data projects, we'd love to get your help at Snowplow :-)