6 ms·

Can you start a successful tech career later in life?

42 points by kunle 13y ago

notastartup 13y ago
damn this is like the complete opposite of me. I want to get out of the whole tech game once I make enough money to not have to work a 9 to 5 job. I wrote a quick rap verse about it. Jus trying to make a quick buck get outta this tech game but still no luck need to make it before i turn thirty before i end up old and dirty
- aeontech 13y ago
  So what do you want to do instead?
  - onedev 13y ago
    There are other things besides tech out there. I think too many people get caught up in the bubble. I'd love to be able to make hip hop beats, or learn music production, or travel, or learn how to play the guitar. Those are all things that I think are more beautiful than programming or tech startups.
    - aeontech 13y ago
      Why does it have to be a binary choice though? I'd think programming can be integrated in all of those things as well. It's just another tool in your mental toolkit.
- sillysaurus2 13y ago
  Is the implication that >30 year olds are old?
  - johnjlocke 13y ago
    Apparently so. It's the stupidest thing I've ever heard. SV, specifically startup culture, is a large part of the tech world, but far from the only portion of it. I suspect the preference for young founders is not being able to "see the world through hacker eyes", but as was suggested earlier the willingness to burn the candle at both ends in order to make a startup succeed to the level that VCs wish. Young people are less likely to have families or an outside life.
bayesianhorse 13y ago
Later in life? You mean like after 18?
smtddr 13y ago
Absolutely, but because of ageism you'll probably have to prove yourself in some way a little more than others. I suspect someone in their 20s can get by without having some github and/or webapps on their LinkedIn but if you're ...say...40+ with no tech-work to show anyone, you're going to have a tougher time. You really ought to have something that shows what you can do. I'd argue that just about anyone, regardless of age, gender or race would do well to have some URLs showing some kind of work they've done. I know the door-opener for all my jobs beyond my first one(AT&T) was because of all the hacking & coding on my blog and youtube channel that I linked to on my LinkedIn. I know this because they told me in the interview and/or the email when they first reach out to me. The material tells them, at the minimum, that they're not completely wasting their time evaluating me. Or, based on the content maybe they know immediately I'm not qualified and never contact me. For the record, besides AT&T I've never used my social-network to get a job. All of them since have been cold-calls from them based on my public-LinkedIn, or me sending a company I'm interested in my LinkedIn profile... then I cross my fingers.
alaskamiller 13y ago
30 is when you finally get it though.
- michaelochurch 13y ago
  That's the cruelty of age discrimination. By the time you're any good, opportunities start disappearing. (At 30, you're still quite hireable, but you do start losing options. Most of the options that disappear from 22 to 30 are of horrendously low quality. I hope that is also true from 30 to 40, 40 to 50, etc.)
  - vehementi 13y ago
    Come on, you're not losing options, you just maybe have a lower % chance on average. Like any of these discrimination situations you're just at a disadvantage. Unfortunate and needs fixing but easily beatable.
  - busterarm 13y ago
    As someone who is changing careers from support/ops into dev at 30, age discrimination terrifies me. I'm already having problems in my current career when prospective employers google me and find out I'm building up my GitHub account. They either think I'm going to leave immediately or they think that I'm trying to backdoor my way into a dev position at their company. This happened to me twice this week and both places decided I was doing this before even asking me about what my goals were. I was laid off two weeks ago and really need some work, but it seems that right now I'm unhirable.
    - alaskamiller 13y ago
      Email? Got some answers.
      - busterarm 13y ago
        Bs2MD9cK9sbm@meltmail.com Good for 24 hours. Let me know if that doesn't work out.
eegilbert 13y ago
When did longform start discussing things posted 5 hours ago? This, more than anything, makes me feel old.
marktangotango 13y ago
I was 32 when I got my first programming gig. I had programmed a lot as a teen then did other things in my 20's. Went back to school and got a BS. I think my grad date being 10 years after a pipeline students makes people assume i'm younger than I am :)
julianpye 13y ago
I think there is an additional question here, which is if you can return to a tech career that you started early on but abandoned when you forayed into management. But one day you realize that your hobby of programming is so much more satisfying. I am trying this right now, but it's not easy, especially since people think that you are moving downwards if you're going back into tech.
- belluchan 13y ago
  I spent about 6 months in management and it was the worst experience in my career. I will never do that again. I'm back to writing code. I don't know why anyone would want to be a manager.
  - onedev 13y ago
    Can you expand on why you thought your experience was so bad? I'm just curious.
    - nanidin 13y ago
      It's popular to hate on being a manager! It's similar to how you'll hear people in academia refer to "industry." It's a popular thing to put down.
      - jaredsohn 13y ago
        I don't think your comment is appropriate in this context. The GGP said that he was a manager for awhile but didn't like it. I doubt that the reason he didn't like it was because of some meme about not liking it. The typical reasons why a developer might not like management are because you're spending more time with people instead of code, you're looking at the product at a higher level rather than dealing with the details of coding, you have to deal with more politics, and you might not have the tools to be successful (i.e. current set of employees were hired before you, not enough budget, other business decisions aren't compatible with success, etc.)
    - 13y ago
deleted 13y ago
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callmeed 13y ago
I've been hacking since childhood but my formal education took longer than normal (becoming a teen parent meant I had to work full-time and go to school part-time). I had 2 technology jobs before starting my own companies. I've had my own startups/businesses since 2000 and I'm now in my late 30s. My biggest fear career-wise is that, should my company go under or sell for non-FU money, I am basically un-hireable. I feel like I am a founder until death or retirement now. Most of me is fine with that because I love it, but part of me would like having the other option. I even wonder if being an older founder makes it hard to hire young talent or raise money. Dave McClure even said on TWiS that they don't even want founders over 40 in their accelerator. Fortunately, I've got plenty of skills, experience and I look younger than I am (I pluck the gray hairs out of my beard). We shall see ...
- sillysaurus2 13y ago
  You'd be fine. The most important thing is whether you have a portfolio to demonstrate that you can get stuff done. You do.
alien3d 13y ago
im in 30 and gonna lunch own accounting software middle or end of the year.got also few friend accountant in their 40 expert in excel macro and function.ain't to late
konop 13y ago
"Tech companies don’t require their engineers to be coding wunderkinds" - really? What tech companies advertise for mediocre, non rock star devs who can muddle through some tutorials?
- thirsteh 13y ago
  Wanting and requiring are quite different. Very few companies actually have many of the kind of people you describe.
  - marktangotango 13y ago
    At my current company the old timers consider themselves to be rockstars, and they've written the biggest pile of crap I've seen yet. There are two we (the newer guys) have decided should never be allowed to code again, and tell mgmt this.
deleted 13y ago
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snowwrestler 13y ago
The answer is certainly yes. There are many people working in the tech industry who are older than 35, 45, or even 55. Tech is not any different from other professional fields like law, medicine, engineering, etc., other than being a much younger industry. Being a much younger industry, it is easy for the young people in tech to believe that one must be young to succeed in tech. But in reality it's a sort of "anthropic principle"--obviously a young industry will be filled with young people in its early days. But, those days are over, and the industry it maturing. With each passing year it gets easier and easier for older folks to break into tech. Can they become dynamic founders of aggressive, entrepreneurial, successful companies? The answer is still yes, to the extent that anyone can do that. That type of talent is very rare generally, so it will also be very rare in older workers. But certainly there are examples of older workers who start hot tech companies. Marc Benioff was 35 when he started Salesforce. Martin Eberhard was 43 when he started Tesla.
onedev 13y ago
I can do whatever the fuck I want and nobody is going to stop me. Seriously.
- moocowduckquack 13y ago
  Well jolly good for you. Out of interest, do you want to do anything particularly outlandish and is anyone actually trying to stop you? Because otherwise this level of extreme seriousness may be entirely uneccessary.
  - onedev 13y ago
    I'm tired of this pseudo-intellectual banter about age and if it matters. No it doesn't matter. Go out and do what you want!
Sindrome 13y ago
I recently interviewed for a Sr Dev position at a large 200+ Los Angeles based consulting firm. Before the Interview I decided to check out the people who work there on LinkedIn. Of the 30 or so developers I found only 5 had a CS/CIS/EE/CE/Math degree. The rest where 30 somethings with degrees in English, Music, and other under utilized fields. Most of them had attended one of those 1 year coding school programs. Some where holding Senior positions with less than 3 years of development experience and no formal degree. Obviously a top tier company’s roster doesn’t look like this. But it was interesting to see how much the job market for developers has changed. This is my first time looking for a new job in 7 years. Clearly the demand for tech has changed the landscape and made lots of opportunities for middle aged people with little to no experience.
hindsightbias 13y ago
Yes. In a few years, it will be seen as a silly question as affordable healthcare options allow creative folks to leave their corporate drone jobs.
julianpye 13y ago
Another important point is that for older techies, there is a different mental mindset when it comes to making code public. Of the best S/W engineers that I know, no one has a Github account. They give talks in small groups, give lots of personal advice, some are champions of pair programming, but they don't put their code in public. It makes it harder to network and gain attention.
AndrewKemendo 13y ago
Something completely unstated here is the practical demands required of startup employees and founders and entry level tech workers. Most of those demands conflict with someone who has kids and other responsibilities, such as long and odd hours with a high pace. Statistically older people will come with more baggage and are much less willing to put up with harsh and in some cases ridiculous work schedules that are required of interns and new hires. This is the same for any high competition job and I think Wall Street is a perfect example for this because it is very similar in practice. There are way more parallels between Wall Street and Silicon Valley than I think either group would care to admit.
pg 13y ago
One of the best examples I know of is someone we hired at Viaweb, Jonathan Yedidia. http://www.disneyresearch.com/people/jonathan-yedidia/ http://www.disneyresearch.com/people/jonathan-yedidia/ He had a PhD in physics and then became a professional chess player (44th in the world IIRC). He hadn't done much programming, but I knew him from high school and figured someone as smart as him could learn to program pretty quickly. Which is exactly what happened. Now he's a CS researcher.
- larrys 13y ago
  Disney Research is an impressive place that I never knew existed.
michaelochurch 13y ago
The age discrimination culture (see here: http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2013/12/14/vc-istan-6-the-isms-of-venture-funded-technology/ http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2013/12/14/vc-istan-6-th... ) is an artifact of a few bad-apple VCs with some really ugly intentions. It's there to put this shitty time pressure on people so they act like their careers are going to last 4 years-- and sprint, making unhealthy sacrifices that aren't sustainable-- instead of 40. If people feel like getting to 35 and not being CEO will ruin their lives, they're more inclined to play into the degenerate risk-taking that VCs want them to do with their careers (since it leads them naturally into get-big-or-die business strategies that enrich the VCs). The danger is that it might become a reality. VCs are the analogue of the last generation's Hollywood entertainment executives and Hollywood's age discrimination culture is horrific. (As a writer, you're done by 50.) If we end up with the ageism problem that Hollywood has, when I am that age, I plan on shanking the parties responsible with dental tools.
anuraj 13y ago
Would be difficult to say the least, especially if you do not have a STEM background. As PG says, at least 10 years hacking experience is the minimum bar. But if you are an innovator/marketing genius and can muster a tech team, you can definitely be a successful founder.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
gab008 13y ago
I am attending Network Security and Compliance courses and I have in class a 50 and something guy. At first everyone kind of smiled, but then smiles disappeared, as it turned out he was much better than most in class. Additionally he had a better job than the rest in the class as well. So I agree, the answer is yes -I guess.

42 points by kunle 13y ago

damn this is like the complete opposite of me. I want to get out of the whole tech game once I make enough money to not have to work a 9 to 5 job. I wrote a quick rap verse about it. Jus trying to make a quick buck get outta this tech game but still no luck need to make it before i turn thirty before i end up old and dirty

aeontech 13y ago
So what do you want to do instead?
- onedev 13y ago
  There are other things besides tech out there. I think too many people get caught up in the bubble. I'd love to be able to make hip hop beats, or learn music production, or travel, or learn how to play the guitar. Those are all things that I think are more beautiful than programming or tech startups.
  - aeontech 13y ago
    Why does it have to be a binary choice though? I'd think programming can be integrated in all of those things as well. It's just another tool in your mental toolkit.
sillysaurus2 13y ago
Is the implication that >30 year olds are old?
- johnjlocke 13y ago
  Apparently so. It's the stupidest thing I've ever heard. SV, specifically startup culture, is a large part of the tech world, but far from the only portion of it. I suspect the preference for young founders is not being able to "see the world through hacker eyes", but as was suggested earlier the willingness to burn the candle at both ends in order to make a startup succeed to the level that VCs wish. Young people are less likely to have families or an outside life.

bayesianhorse 13y ago

Later in life? You mean like after 18?

smtddr 13y ago

Absolutely, but because of ageism you'll probably have to prove yourself in some way a little more than others. I suspect someone in their 20s can get by without having some github and/or webapps on their LinkedIn but if you're ...say...40+ with no tech-work to show anyone, you're going to have a tougher time. You really ought to have something that shows what you can do. I'd argue that just about anyone, regardless of age, gender or race would do well to have some URLs showing some kind of work they've done. I know the door-opener for all my jobs beyond my first one(AT&T) was because of all the hacking & coding on my blog and youtube channel that I linked to on my LinkedIn. I know this because they told me in the interview and/or the email when they first reach out to me. The material tells them, at the minimum, that they're not completely wasting their time evaluating me. Or, based on the content maybe they know immediately I'm not qualified and never contact me. For the record, besides AT&T I've never used my social-network to get a job. All of them since have been cold-calls from them based on my public-LinkedIn, or me sending a company I'm interested in my LinkedIn profile... then I cross my fingers.

alaskamiller 13y ago

30 is when you finally get it though.

michaelochurch 13y ago
That's the cruelty of age discrimination. By the time you're any good, opportunities start disappearing. (At 30, you're still quite hireable, but you do start losing options. Most of the options that disappear from 22 to 30 are of horrendously low quality. I hope that is also true from 30 to 40, 40 to 50, etc.)
- vehementi 13y ago
  Come on, you're not losing options, you just maybe have a lower % chance on average. Like any of these discrimination situations you're just at a disadvantage. Unfortunate and needs fixing but easily beatable.
- busterarm 13y ago
  As someone who is changing careers from support/ops into dev at 30, age discrimination terrifies me. I'm already having problems in my current career when prospective employers google me and find out I'm building up my GitHub account. They either think I'm going to leave immediately or they think that I'm trying to backdoor my way into a dev position at their company. This happened to me twice this week and both places decided I was doing this before even asking me about what my goals were. I was laid off two weeks ago and really need some work, but it seems that right now I'm unhirable.
  - alaskamiller 13y ago
    Email? Got some answers.
    - busterarm 13y ago
      Bs2MD9cK9sbm@meltmail.com Good for 24 hours. Let me know if that doesn't work out.

eegilbert 13y ago

When did longform start discussing things posted 5 hours ago? This, more than anything, makes me feel old.

marktangotango 13y ago

I was 32 when I got my first programming gig. I had programmed a lot as a teen then did other things in my 20's. Went back to school and got a BS. I think my grad date being 10 years after a pipeline students makes people assume i'm younger than I am :)

julianpye 13y ago

I think there is an additional question here, which is if you can return to a tech career that you started early on but abandoned when you forayed into management. But one day you realize that your hobby of programming is so much more satisfying. I am trying this right now, but it's not easy, especially since people think that you are moving downwards if you're going back into tech.

belluchan 13y ago
I spent about 6 months in management and it was the worst experience in my career. I will never do that again. I'm back to writing code. I don't know why anyone would want to be a manager.
- onedev 13y ago
  Can you expand on why you thought your experience was so bad? I'm just curious.
  - nanidin 13y ago
    It's popular to hate on being a manager! It's similar to how you'll hear people in academia refer to "industry." It's a popular thing to put down.
    - jaredsohn 13y ago
      I don't think your comment is appropriate in this context. The GGP said that he was a manager for awhile but didn't like it. I doubt that the reason he didn't like it was because of some meme about not liking it. The typical reasons why a developer might not like management are because you're spending more time with people instead of code, you're looking at the product at a higher level rather than dealing with the details of coding, you have to deal with more politics, and you might not have the tools to be successful (i.e. current set of employees were hired before you, not enough budget, other business decisions aren't compatible with success, etc.)
  - 13y ago

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

callmeed 13y ago

I've been hacking since childhood but my formal education took longer than normal (becoming a teen parent meant I had to work full-time and go to school part-time). I had 2 technology jobs before starting my own companies. I've had my own startups/businesses since 2000 and I'm now in my late 30s. My biggest fear career-wise is that, should my company go under or sell for non-FU money, I am basically un-hireable. I feel like I am a founder until death or retirement now. Most of me is fine with that because I love it, but part of me would like having the other option. I even wonder if being an older founder makes it hard to hire young talent or raise money. Dave McClure even said on TWiS that they don't even want founders over 40 in their accelerator. Fortunately, I've got plenty of skills, experience and I look younger than I am (I pluck the gray hairs out of my beard). We shall see ...

sillysaurus2 13y ago
You'd be fine. The most important thing is whether you have a portfolio to demonstrate that you can get stuff done. You do.

alien3d 13y ago

im in 30 and gonna lunch own accounting software middle or end of the year.got also few friend accountant in their 40 expert in excel macro and function.ain't to late

konop 13y ago

"Tech companies don’t require their engineers to be coding wunderkinds" - really? What tech companies advertise for mediocre, non rock star devs who can muddle through some tutorials?

thirsteh 13y ago
Wanting and requiring are quite different. Very few companies actually have many of the kind of people you describe.
- marktangotango 13y ago
  At my current company the old timers consider themselves to be rockstars, and they've written the biggest pile of crap I've seen yet. There are two we (the newer guys) have decided should never be allowed to code again, and tell mgmt this.

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

snowwrestler 13y ago

The answer is certainly yes. There are many people working in the tech industry who are older than 35, 45, or even 55. Tech is not any different from other professional fields like law, medicine, engineering, etc., other than being a much younger industry. Being a much younger industry, it is easy for the young people in tech to believe that one must be young to succeed in tech. But in reality it's a sort of "anthropic principle"--obviously a young industry will be filled with young people in its early days. But, those days are over, and the industry it maturing. With each passing year it gets easier and easier for older folks to break into tech. Can they become dynamic founders of aggressive, entrepreneurial, successful companies? The answer is still yes, to the extent that anyone can do that. That type of talent is very rare generally, so it will also be very rare in older workers. But certainly there are examples of older workers who start hot tech companies. Marc Benioff was 35 when he started Salesforce. Martin Eberhard was 43 when he started Tesla.

onedev 13y ago

I can do whatever the fuck I want and nobody is going to stop me. Seriously.

moocowduckquack 13y ago
Well jolly good for you. Out of interest, do you want to do anything particularly outlandish and is anyone actually trying to stop you? Because otherwise this level of extreme seriousness may be entirely uneccessary.
- onedev 13y ago
  I'm tired of this pseudo-intellectual banter about age and if it matters. No it doesn't matter. Go out and do what you want!

Sindrome 13y ago

I recently interviewed for a Sr Dev position at a large 200+ Los Angeles based consulting firm. Before the Interview I decided to check out the people who work there on LinkedIn. Of the 30 or so developers I found only 5 had a CS/CIS/EE/CE/Math degree. The rest where 30 somethings with degrees in English, Music, and other under utilized fields. Most of them had attended one of those 1 year coding school programs. Some where holding Senior positions with less than 3 years of development experience and no formal degree. Obviously a top tier company’s roster doesn’t look like this. But it was interesting to see how much the job market for developers has changed. This is my first time looking for a new job in 7 years. Clearly the demand for tech has changed the landscape and made lots of opportunities for middle aged people with little to no experience.

hindsightbias 13y ago

Yes. In a few years, it will be seen as a silly question as affordable healthcare options allow creative folks to leave their corporate drone jobs.

julianpye 13y ago

Another important point is that for older techies, there is a different mental mindset when it comes to making code public. Of the best S/W engineers that I know, no one has a Github account. They give talks in small groups, give lots of personal advice, some are champions of pair programming, but they don't put their code in public. It makes it harder to network and gain attention.

AndrewKemendo 13y ago

Something completely unstated here is the practical demands required of startup employees and founders and entry level tech workers. Most of those demands conflict with someone who has kids and other responsibilities, such as long and odd hours with a high pace. Statistically older people will come with more baggage and are much less willing to put up with harsh and in some cases ridiculous work schedules that are required of interns and new hires. This is the same for any high competition job and I think Wall Street is a perfect example for this because it is very similar in practice. There are way more parallels between Wall Street and Silicon Valley than I think either group would care to admit.

pg 13y ago

One of the best examples I know of is someone we hired at Viaweb, Jonathan Yedidia. http://www.disneyresearch.com/people/jonathan-yedidia/ http://www.disneyresearch.com/people/jonathan-yedidia/ He had a PhD in physics and then became a professional chess player (44th in the world IIRC). He hadn't done much programming, but I knew him from high school and figured someone as smart as him could learn to program pretty quickly. Which is exactly what happened. Now he's a CS researcher.

larrys 13y ago
Disney Research is an impressive place that I never knew existed.

michaelochurch 13y ago

The age discrimination culture (see here: http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2013/12/14/vc-istan-6-the-isms-of-venture-funded-technology/ http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2013/12/14/vc-istan-6-th... ) is an artifact of a few bad-apple VCs with some really ugly intentions. It's there to put this shitty time pressure on people so they act like their careers are going to last 4 years-- and sprint, making unhealthy sacrifices that aren't sustainable-- instead of 40. If people feel like getting to 35 and not being CEO will ruin their lives, they're more inclined to play into the degenerate risk-taking that VCs want them to do with their careers (since it leads them naturally into get-big-or-die business strategies that enrich the VCs). The danger is that it might become a reality. VCs are the analogue of the last generation's Hollywood entertainment executives and Hollywood's age discrimination culture is horrific. (As a writer, you're done by 50.) If we end up with the ageism problem that Hollywood has, when I am that age, I plan on shanking the parties responsible with dental tools.

anuraj 13y ago

Would be difficult to say the least, especially if you do not have a STEM background. As PG says, at least 10 years hacking experience is the minimum bar. But if you are an innovator/marketing genius and can muster a tech team, you can definitely be a successful founder.

deleted 13y ago
[deleted]

gab008 13y ago

I am attending Network Security and Compliance courses and I have in class a 50 and something guy. At first everyone kind of smiled, but then smiles disappeared, as it turned out he was much better than most in class. Additionally he had a better job than the rest in the class as well. So I agree, the answer is yes -I guess.