
Ask HN: Change career at age 30 in 2018? - throwaway1988
I am 30 years old. I am working in a call center at very low pay. I am not interested in that job at all. I love building new stuff, like website. I want to learn coding and start career in web development. What tech stack should I learn? What are good resources to learning web development?<p>If you were in position, what would you have done?
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thcsa
I started coding when I was 28. Knew nothing about it, didn't even know what a
compiler was. I'm 30 now and self employed, built a profitable algorithmic
trading system in Kotlin. There are so many free quality resources to learn
programming, it's ridiculous. And all the software you need is free, OS, IDE
etc... This is pretty much unique to the field of software engineering. Try to
become a doctor by yourself, good luck.

Tips to start: The most important part is to just start coding as quickly as
possible and learn as you go. A personal project can really help to maximize
motivation and actual hours spent coding. As for the language, I don't think
it matters what you pick and everybody suggests something different. I didn't
like coding in python at all. Personally, I prefer languages with static
typing, especially when you start out (so the IDE can help you). For me, that
perfect beginner language was Java, since it's simple, structured and you can
completely forget about memory management.

Just don't spend too much time thinking whether you should start or not. I
wasted years with that mindset. Just do it.

EDIT: Sorry I didn't really answer your questions, I just don't know enough
about web development to help you in that regard. Consider this a motivational
comment that gets you started.

~~~
srednalfden
Can you expand on the algorithm trading system you developed? How did you go
from zero to that?

~~~
thcsa
Trading the right instruments is crucial. Pick highly leveraged instruments
with low competition and liquidity. Trading big instruments like USDEUR is
pointless unless 1) you have the right infrastructure or 2) you are a genius,
since competition is incredibly high there. But there are small instruments
out there where I (not a genius) easily make a 1500% annual return on $10k.
However, give me $100m and I'll make less than 0.25% a year, because liquidity
is low and orderbooks are thin.

Considering the trading system itself, I think what makes my system pretty
neat is that I can backtest on Level 2 data. Level 2 data basically means
information about the order book (and not just the top bid/ask). I collected
L2 data for specific instruments for months. So if someone posted a limit buy
order on instrument X with amount Y 0.54% below the top bid on October 15th,
21:01:13.746Z and canceled it 4287 milliseconds later - I have that
information. Now the cool thing is that I can 'replay' everything, which
basically allows me to know how the structure of the whole order book was at
any time. This allows you to do pretty accurate backtesting, since you know
the exact execution price of your market orders (market orders = orders that
take liquidity from the book). Coding that was probably the hardest challenge,
since performance matters for backtesting (for trading, it depends on the
instrument and the strategy - for me, it doesn't matter a lot). You need to
have a good design. Gladly, Kotlin makes concurrency a breeze with coroutines,
so I basically have one routine for each instrument (which has to process
order book messages sequentially for obvious reasons).

I am currently working on a machine learning approach to detect buy and sell
pressure based on changes in the order book structure. Order placement
(depending on the instrument) involves a lot of 'playing games', so people
bait, people spoof, people try to push the orderbook down or up etc. I naively
threw some pre-engineered features on a couple of LSTM layers, but results
were not outstanding. But I think that this approach has some potential if
executed properly.

EDIT: Obviously this is not my first coding project. My first 'project' was
about autocompleting words. I used a trie structure for that, every node
(letter) had a treemap of its child nodes, sorted by the occurences. So in the
end I was reading a huge data set into my program, which had millions of
hashmaps and other objects floating around, eating up 9 gigs of RAM :D. This
was on desktop for obvious reasons, I never had plans to code a app. Fun
times.

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RikNieu
I did it at 33. Changed from animation and VFX to front-end development.

Here's what I did exactly;

* Quit and lived like a beggar for 6 months. It was tough, I burned through all the little savings I had and ended up having to borrow money to pay the bills(Don't do this, keep your job, work like hell at night and weekends)

* I started with HarvardX CS50, a free online course that will help you out immensely initially. I knew very little about coding when I started it. (Do this)

* Build websites and apply for jobs. Junior Jobs. Very, very low paying jobs. I landed one and started getting experience. (Do this)

* Go to coding and tech meetups. (I didn't do this, but should have)

When you have experience doors start opening up for you. Good Luck!

~~~
troycarlson
I think the intro level courses from Harvard, MIT Open Courseware, etc. are
excellent resources for people just getting started. Instead of watching that
3rd episode of TV on Netflix...just watch an MIT lecture. Then watch it again
next week and see how much you remember. And the week after that. Throw it on
while you’re cooking or doing laundry or something.

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tboyd47
If I was learning web development NOW, I would learn HTML, CSS, and JS, very,
very well.

In-depth HTML, JS, and CSS knowledge do not differentiate you in the
application/interview process but they do give you an advantage once you start
working. You will impress not just the stakeholders, but the other developers
as well, whose knowledge will be mostly limited to the specific framework
they're using.

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zapperdapper
Career change at 30, or after, is very possible. I've had several big ones
over the years and am just going through another transition at the tender age
of 55!

You are probably about where my son is now, although he's a few years younger
than you. He is moving from electronics / HVAC into a career in web
design/development and is already getting decent gigs on a freelance basis and
has had several interviews for jobs that pay what I could only have dreamed of
as a struggling FE lecturer when I was his age. You could follow his Instagram
at 'countryside.coder' and maybe pick up some tips - he has various
friends/followers that are doing the same thing. Getting into the Google
scholarship program has been a big help to him. In terms of skills: the usual
- Python, JavaScript, HTML, CSS. He is now learning PHP as he's picking up
work that requires it (Wordpress, Drupal). Good luck to you!

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JSeymourATL
You might find of interest this book on Designing Your Life by two Stanford
professors-

Here's a podcast interview with the authors, to give you a flavor of what it's
about > [http://thedianerehmshow.org/shows/2016-10-03/using-design-
th...](http://thedianerehmshow.org/shows/2016-10-03/using-design-theory-to-
build-a-better-life)

Also, NY Times review > [https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/18/fashion/design-
thinking-s...](https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/18/fashion/design-thinking-
stanford-silicon-valley.html?_r=0)

And - Goodreads reviews here >
[http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/26046333-designing-
your-l...](http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/26046333-designing-your-life)

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nxsynonym
There's a lot of really great, free, resources available online right now.

If you want to go the self-study route, I'd recommend something like Odin
Project, freecodecamp, or a a-la-carte program using coursera/edx/treehouse
etc.

Javascript is a fine language to start with, if you want something a little
more robust or transferable, check out python. But in all reality once you
learn how to learn a language picking up new ones is a lot easier than
starting from scratch.

Just like a diet, the best program is the one you can stick to. Pick a program
and set a deadline for your self. Push as hard as you can until then, and then
evaluate and change things up as you see fit.

Personally I would stay away from boot camps and "job ready programs". They
seem to work for quite a few people, and if you have the resources (money) to
do one, it wouldn't hurt - but for the average person it's tough to swing 8-12
weeks of no income + paying for lessons that can be learned for free, albeit
at a slower pace.

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jason_slack
I am 40 and working to change careers now. I don't think this change will even
be my last career. I have a few more that I am interested in, including:
getting an M.D., translating books and materials, teaching modern language and
lastly owning a small soup and sandwich place.

I guess I'm saying you are never to old. Start learning and embrace the
change.

~~~
idoh
Just curious - what are you doing now and what are you changing into?

~~~
jason_slack
I am working in games now and I want to switch to being a linguist or
translator. Something to use my language skills.

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sharemywin
1\. go to job boards find tech local companies are looking for

2\. look for online to something like this:
[https://code4startup.com/projects/airalien-clone-airbnb-
with...](https://code4startup.com/projects/airalien-clone-airbnb-with-ruby-on-
rails-bootstrap-jquery-and-paypal)

with the tech your looking for. do a couple of these kinds of sites to get a
feel for it.

3\. go to freelancer or upwork and get some projects no matter the pay.

4\. once you've got some "professional experience" work with a recruiter to
find a job.

5\. look for interview questions for those technologies.

6\. talk with confidence about how you love xyz tech. and explain how you'll
pick up there environment with no problem.

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john_jake
Hi, nice choice to start coding! I would suggest to learn about javascript
frameworks, such as Angular JS, acquiring full knowledge about User Interface
and Interaction, then concentrate on a simply and lightweight server side
environment such as Flask (a microframework written in python), You could
learn basic concepts about web programming in a really fast way!

The web is so wide..starts with some Googling about those topics, I also would
suggest some free course on Udacity Platform.

Bye!

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aennyta
If you are into coding, I would say give it a go. You can learn in your spare
time and see if you really like it and want to make a career out of it.

Stacks, huh, it is a tough one. It is really individual, I personally have
started with C, but didn't like it, than moved to Java and now JavaScript and
Node.

You can maybe try with this
[https://javascript30.com/](https://javascript30.com/) and see how it goes.

Best of luck!

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potta_coffee
I will be 34 soon. I made the transition to development after 3-4 years of
self-study and building things. You can do it.

My personal opinion is to start with a language like Python for programming.
Learn the fundamentals and then start with web development after that. There
are many other ways to go about it depending on what you want to do.

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SirLJ
Check my previous posts about stock trading robots, you can start in your
spare time, no money required in the beginning while learning and
experimenting...

