Can you start a successful tech career later in life?

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/currency/2014/01/can-you-start-a-successful-tech-career-later-in-life.html

by kunle • 13 years ago

42 51 13 years 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

aeontech2• 13 years ago

So what do you want to do instead?

onedev5• 13 years 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.

sillysaurus22• 13 years ago

Is the implication that >30 year olds are old?

johnjlocke• 13 years 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• 13 years ago

Later in life? You mean like after 18?

smtddr• 13 years 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.

alaskamiller2• 13 years ago

30 is when you finally get it though.

michaelochurch4• 13 years 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• 13 years 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.

busterarm3• 13 years 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.

eegilbert• 13 years ago

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

marktangotango2• 13 years 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 :)

julianpye4• 13 years 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.

belluchan3• 13 years 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.

onedev5• 13 years ago

Can you expand on why you thought your experience was so bad? I'm just curious.

julianpye4• 13 years ago

There is a creeping way from S/W engineering to being a staff engineer to being the software architect... Along that way you get dragged into meetings where you end up not having much competitive pressure - since the others are business people, but you end up shining and you get on the fast track. I enjoyed it very much, since I love doing tech-strategy and big picture planning. That said being a project manager - if this is what you mean - is not creative and unsatisfying.

michaelochurch4• 13 years ago

Many companies have a "manage or be managed" environment, in the sense that you're either on a narrowly-defined team doing drone work, or you're a boss man.

The appeal of being a manager to an engineer is the ability to allocate projects and work on the interesting stuff. Of course, very few managers get to actually do that-- it might be the 5 percent who have managerial titles but few or no reports, all of whom are pretty self-motivated.

samscrazy• 13 years ago

I'm in a similar situation to yours. Although I did start programming at around 13 (BASIC and Z80 assembly on a Sinclair ZX Spectrum), I moved into product management and marketing (in the technology industry) around a decade ago. I've always been a programmer though. I have CS degrees both undergrad and at grad school and even as a marketer I would write code at home to explore technology and as means of recreation -- just not for work.

I recently quit my job to run my own business, and I returned to programming for a living once again. Some observations on the differences between the 22 year old me in grad school and the 41 year old me as a programmer:

In terms of raw stamina to power though writing code, 22 year old me won hands down. I recall taking about 45-90 days to churn out a 35KLOC piece of Java code, One sprint during those 90 days was a 48-hour non-stop effort. I still have that code, and although it still works (with some changes) it's not the best code I've written. 41 year old me can barely manage 10 hours a day of coding before being too tired to continue. But I'm an order of magnitude more effective in getting the job done. And several orders of magnitude better at estimating how long a programming task will take. This happens because I've developed an intuition over the years for avoiding design and coding paths that are 'risky' -- no threads in my code, for example.

To address your point of perception of others that you are moving downwards, there certainly seems to be a perception of it. Early in my business endeavors, I'd pitch my services directly as a contract programmer, and I found that folks would be very reluctant to hire me - especially as the resume had several years of marketing and product management on it. I also suspect they may have inferred that I was expensive. Not true. But that was the perception.

I changed tactics a little later. I would pitch similar services as a firm (with me as founder), and sales process went swimmingly! Now the resume, with a decade of experience in management at large tech companies and the MBA, would open the door to the CEO/SVP level.

In addition, many of my early referrals came from folks in my network who knew me as a 22-year old and were in CEO/VP positions themselves, and were glad to refer me to their colleagues.

So, my advice to you, would be to not handicap yourself by competing on the same playing field as your younger competitors. Simply competing on pure programming prowess, even if you're good, would take away your strengths. Just change the game. Use the management experience you have to your advantage.

julianpye4• 13 years ago

Thank you, very good advice. I actually had success in a similar way, by tying engineering work in the form of prototyping and proof of concepts to my management consultancy projects. I am just trying to increase the engineering side of it all :)

mixmastamyk• 13 years ago

Sounds more prestigious if you call it software engineering rather than programming. The first is analogous to architect, the second brick-layer.

callmeed• 13 years 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 ...

sillysaurus22• 13 years 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• 13 years 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• 13 years 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• 13 years ago

Wanting and requiring are quite different. Very few companies actually have many of the kind of people you describe.

marktangotango2• 13 years 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.

snowwrestler• 13 years 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.

onedev5• 13 years ago

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

moocowduckquack• 13 years 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.

onedev5• 13 years 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• 13 years 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• 13 years 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.

julianpye4• 13 years 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• 13 years 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• 13 years ago

One of the best examples I know of is someone we hired at Viaweb, 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• 13 years ago

Disney Research is an impressive place that I never knew existed.

michaelochurch4• 13 years ago

The age discrimination culture (see here: 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• 13 years 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.

gab008• 13 years 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.

Can you start a successful tech career later in life?

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