

Ask HN: Any mid-life career change hackers out there? - KevinEldon

I'm a 31-year old who has just started professionally developing.  I taught myself to write code when I was 14 (MBasic on KayPro), but I'm not a seasoned developer (meaning I learned about arrays when I was 17).  I've got a degree in business and have worked in the IT industry since I was 18, but software development has never been my primary job.  My career up to this point has been mostly technical project management in a Fortune 500 technology company.  Is there anyone else out there who has started developing as a 2nd (or 3rd, 4th) career?  Did you start in an established company or in your own startup?
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steveb
I am 41, and recently moved from management into a development role within the
same company (a large Fortune 500 company).

I managed a team of UNIX SA's and was doing a decreasing amount of technical
work over the past few years. I was trying to learn new technologies with a
long-term goal of starting my own firm, but my coding skills were not
improving fast enough as I didn't have time to hack at work or at home.

So I found another group within the same company that needed strong UNIX
skills in a development role for an Grid application. I basically do whatever
they need, whether it is making Windows MSI packages, tying systems together
with python or working on the C++ codebase and feeling my head turn to mush.

Sometimes it feels like I do a Google search for every line of code I write,
but I get a little better and faster every day. Last week I found myself
porting some newer libraries back to python 2.4.

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wmboy
26 years old, quit my job managing a technical support department (also
invovled in project mamagment). I'm doing a few freelance contracts and
working 30 hours a week at a web design company.

Previously learn some VB.NET, PHP and HTML/CSS. Now I've properly learned
HTML/CSS and starting to learn Python.

~~~
KevinEldon
Awesome! Man, the idea of leaving a paying gig for freelance is both
terrifying and exhilarating. Glad to see you're making it work. Best of luck
to you.

~~~
wmboy
Thanks, here are a couple of articles for anyone wondering whether it's worth
it or not...

[http://www.conversiondoctor.com/conversion-blog/jobs-are-
fil...](http://www.conversiondoctor.com/conversion-blog/jobs-are-filthy-
habits)

<http://www.mikemahler.com/articles/hatejob.html>

