
Ask HN: Ageism in Tech and Career Moves - ditados
I&#x27;m pushing 50 (although I don&#x27;t look or act like it) and I am trying to get out of the consulting&#x2F;sales rat race and back into actual engineering after a long stint working with enterprise IT customers and trying to get them to move to modern devops&#x2F;SRE&#x2F;data services in the cloud -- it was gratifying in many regards, but intensely frustrating from a management&#x2F;ownership standpoint, since you&#x27;re often thrice removed from the actual decision making and technology choices.<p>I considered going solo or starting a small company with a couple of friends, but I need a very steady pay check (even if smaller) and contract work is belittled in my neck of the woods (Southern Europe), so I&#x27;m currently running what passes for the tech interview gauntlet these days, with uneven results--I am either passed over solely due to perception (age, current role, etc.) or go through the entire pipeline.<p>Explaining that I&#x27;m not afraid of (re-)learning anything (and even with a portfolio of stuff and good references) and having a decades-old MSc seems to be looked down upon by fresh PhDs, and expectations towards specific areas of expertise seem to be unrealistically high sometimes, but I usually get through those and am eventually excused away because I&#x27;m too senior (often more senior than the interviewers or future managers, which I&#x27;m OK with but clearly raises a few eyebrows and I suspect is the main reason I&#x27;m turned away, followed by the &quot;sales&quot; thing).<p>I know there are a lot of folk like me around--how did you succeed in getting rid of the &quot;customer facing&quot; taint and doing a career move _back_ to Engineering?
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mooreds
Have you explored options within your current company, or companies where
former co-workers work? In my experience, the former is the easiest way to
make a career shift, because they already know you. The latter is second best
because they knew you. This has worked for me in the past.

Other things I would suggest (all assume you still have a job and can play the
long game):

\- start blogging with a focus on where you want to be (engineering? That's a
broad topic). Niche down. Is there a domain or tech that you want to work
with?

\- pick an open source project and start contributing. Docs are a great place
to start.

\- take a moonlighting gig or a week off and code something. You may be
looking back with rose colored glasses. Coding is great, but nothing is
without its warts.

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jmheinkle
Generic advice, but can you make a project that is interesting for which you
can share code with hiring managers?

This would seem to cut through the challenges that you described:

It demonstrates your ability to code, solve technical challenges, and work
from the perspective of the “users/business” (in the context of your project).
It also gives you something to talk about. Building rapport helps to bridge
gaps in culture.

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wnkrshm
I wonder whether the lack of replies is due to lacking first-hand experience
of the HN community or if it is due to the difficulty of making that jump.

Nevertheless, I also would be interested in any anecdata surrounding this.

