
Ask HN: How do you build up your first career close to age 40? - zboox
I have under 1 year total lifetime experience with full-time work, which was in 2010. That doesn&#x27;t just include software engineering work (which is what I have done for the past several years)- that includes <i>every</i> type of job I&#x27;ve done since I started taking jobs while in high school.<p>I&#x27;ve went back and counted my jobs- at department stores, B2B clients, campus work etc. and I only found one year where I was actually a full-time employee of any kind.<p>In the meantime I fell into a holding pattern of freelance&#x2F;temp work with little to show in building my network. Many failed attempts to get hired full-time as a SWE are a cause for concern.<p>Also, I am about 2 years away from reaching 40.<p>I&#x27;m not quite the same as a spoiled kid who didn&#x27;t need to work for most of their life. I simply am a guy who has held lot of temporary jobs, but displays little &quot;career intelligence&quot;.<p>What advice would you give to an adult that is a late bloomer in professional stability and growth and wants to build a career? How do people build a network from almost zero in a post-COVID world? I might want to glean experiences of class of 2020 students too, to get an idea of network building in difficult times, since I find myself to have more in common with students than the average 30-something professional.
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Hnrobert42
My company is fully remote. When I interview people, I don’t know how old they
are, nor do I care. I look at their job history as it relates to their ability
to perform the job for which they are applying. If you were applying for an
associate or junior developer position, your lack of experience wouldn’t
really matter. I would worry that your bouncing around reflects that you can’t
be counted on to stick it out for more than a year.

To change my mind, during the interview, when I ask, you would need to explain
what is different about your approach now. Not just that you want to be
different, but what you are doing/thinking differently. If you gave a decent
answer and everything else lined up, I would take the chance.

So, my suggestion is look for small start ups. Their hiring practices aren’t
as rigid.

~~~
zboox
Hi Hnrobert42, thanks for your advice but I am not certain about limiting my
options to small startups. I already attract small startups to a high degree
and for better or for worse, they never want to hire me as W2. So I don't get
sign-in bonuses, nor a 401K nor health benefits.

What I don't know is what is so different about the approach to getting hired
as full-time employee compared to a freelancer that makes it so difficult for
me to pass. In what ways should one behave differently at a full-time job
interview compared to a contractor's interview.

Right now I'm on YouTube looking for winning tech interviews in order to see
how I should speak and things to say. It's the closest you could be to a fly
on the wall eavesdropping on an interview. Because when it comes to social
cues, I learn better by observing than by intuition.

~~~
Hnrobert42
Fair points. I don’t know if there are differences in interview responses that
would get you placed more frequently as a W2 or 1099. Usually that distinction
is already set by the time the company posts the job. So I would confirm early
in the interview that the position is full-time and not contract.

It may help to explain to the interviewer why you want a full-time position,
from their perspective. That is, emphasize that you want to build something
lasting and meaningful. You work best within a team where you all support each
other work together. You want to minimize time wasted on spin-up cycles.
Practice a 60-second explanation along those lines, so that when they ask “Why
are you looking for a full-time position,” your answer will be smooth and
thoughtful.

My other bit of advice is about self-confidence. I have observed that self-
confidence is completely unrelated to competence. That is, there are many
confident folks with who are terrible at their jobs and lots of talented
people with little self-confidence. So don’t get stuck thinking that you could
feel confident if you just had xyz experience or skills. You can feel that
confidence right now. So while you are youtubeing, consider studying how to
improve your self-confidence.

I say all this not really knowing anything about you. I may be totally wrong.
I don’t many an offense. I only want to help. Best of luck.

------
mcv
You can build up a very fine career as a freelance software engineer. My
career really took off the moment I quit my job and became a freelancer at age
37.

Of course as a freelancer, working on our network is probably more important
than otherwise; you need to be able to find interesting projects, and you need
recruiters and hiring managers to be able to find you. I think I've still
neglected this aspect a bit too much; I mostly trust recruiters to be able to
find my outdated CV on Linkedin, but another freelancer I know makes sure he
connects on linkedin with hiring managers of interesting companies. It enables
him to get hired more directly, without recruiters getting in the way.

Do polish your CV. Put the focus on the most interesting projects you worked
on. Make sure you describe what you worked on, what the broader purpose of the
project was, what (interesting) technologies you worked with, and what your
responsibilities were.

If you did personal side projects, list them too. Especially open source
projects. It's all software experience.

Don't bother listing projects that were both very short and not very
interesting, but interesting short ones and boring long ones are still worth
mentioning (but the interesting short ones more than the boring long ones: put
the focus on the stuff you want to do).

Non-software jobs can still be worth mentioning if they gave you relevant
insights or experience, like dealing with customers or other stakeholders,
logistic or administrative processes, creative work, etc.

If you look at your work experience from the right perspective, you may find
you know a lot more than you thought.

~~~
zboox
As stated before, I find freelancing to be a lonely experience. Not a lot of
developers to talk shop to, and rarely do clients follow-up with additional
work or referrals.

I finish work for clients as I get paid, and usually never hear from them
again.

I've interviewed at larger companies trying to expand my career into being a
senior among more developers but they seem to think I don't fit the bill, yet
never tell me what I need to do to improve.

Lots of other small startups contacting me all the time trying to convince me
to do a lateral move, but what's the point, I will just be the only in-house
dev, stuck and stagnant again.

TBH I find freelance career maintenance to be laborious. It's just not right
for me. I would rather move into a low maintenance software job rather than
the high maintenance world of startups and freelance. It's so easy for me to
lose my grip in freelance- I barely make enough money to stay above poverty
level (I live in the US so I'm referring to US poverty).

At the very least I want to experience both full-time and freelance to an
equal degree. Right now my experience is like 5% full-time and 95% freelance,
so trying to shift my time spent on both closer to 50/50.

~~~
mcv
That depends entirely on how you freelance. I join teams. My current project,
for a major Dutch bank, started with me developing the prototype, and later
interviewing a bunch of people (internal and external) to join the team that
I'm still part of.

At other projects, I was hired to add some external expertise to an existing
team. But it's mostly long projects in teams.

But before I ended up in these sort of big projects, I went to a lot of local
meetups to keep in touch with other freelancers. That can also be a great
source of a network, although that never amounted to much for me.

> _" Lots of other small startups contacting me all the time trying to
> convince me to do a lateral move, but what's the point, I will just be the
> only in-house dev, stuck and stagnant again."_

It can be a great way to prove to the companies you actually want to get hired
by, that you can work in a company as part of a team.

~~~
ramblerman
From the description it sounds more like you are contracting, not freelancing?

A contractor is typically on site, or sells his time (and presence), meaning
he has one client at a time.

A freelancer to me works on projects, and will take on multiple clients at the
same time.

~~~
zboox
A freelancer is usually an independent contractor, so they're a subset of
contractors.

You get a certain kind of freedom with freelancing but it does get tiring to
chase people down for your money.

------
cm2012
One issue that may be getting in the way of you getting full time work is that
you come across as being defensive/testy in response to friendly comments
here. Here's some examples below of comments that could have softer phrasing
(like first acknowledging the commenters point, then refuting it, instead of
jumping into refutation):

"Do I need to make that distinction explicit?"

"What good would a code bootcamp do for me which I can't already do self-
taught?"

"Just because that is your preferred experience, you want me to follow it? "

~~~
zboox
It's simply good to ask questions to show your interest in how others reason
about.

------
trevett
You did not follow the typical path and that's fine. Own it. As a hiring
manager, I would want to talk to an engineer who had diverse experience and
insight into a variety of businesses. Is there a particular engineering area
you want to build a career around?

I'm not sure a bootcamp is necessary but I would suggest whatever intensive
interview training you think you need to get into a good tech company. Working
at a bigger one is a solid way to bootstrap a professional network.

------
PopeDotNinja
What I did is set myself apart by going deep on Ruby. I studied for a couple
years. I learned it better than most people. Then I found a company that
really needed Ruby expertise. I got my first coding gig a few weeks after my
40th birthday.

------
sheepdog
I'm 40-ish and have been self-employed for about 5 years now. I have no plans
to go back to full-time employment. You should consider that route.

There are very few benefits to being a full-time employee that you can't
obtain yourself. Plus, having a wide portfolio of freelance clients helps
insulate you against business downturns and future age discrimination.

Granted, it's a lot of work to curate a good client list and network yourself.
But it's actually the same amount of work as jockeying for promotions and good
projects at a corporate job.

And there is some risk involved in working for yourself. But at a corporate
job there is similar risk; you are always one bad quarter away from being laid
off.

Working for yourself IS a career. Consider fortifying your position and
staying the course.

~~~
zboox
I find freelancing to be a lonely experience. I don't get to talk shop with
co-workers as well.

>I have no plans to go back to full-time employment. You should consider that
route.

Just because that is your preferred experience, you want me to follow it? Okay
but my personal goal is to be employed full-time and you seem more interested
in making me more like you, and not like who I want to be.

If you want to help me on my goal to get employed full-time, I'm all ears. But
I am not looking to be convinced to stay freelance.

~~~
sheepdog
My apologies. You have to be yourself, and there are some social benefits to
going to the office. Assuming your freelance work counts as past experience,
and that you are trying to stay in the same space, I'd offer these tips:

1\. Tell prospective employers that you were very successfully self-employed,
not unemployed. No one want to hire someone who is perceived as inexperienced,
so you've got to make it clear that your freelance work was every bit as much
"real work" as corporate projects.

2\. Build a portfolio of freelance projects that are impressive. When talking
about them, mention how you had to do "full stack" or "end to end" work. Make
it clear that you deliver awesome stuff and work independently.

3\. Sometimes getting a job is a "who you know" situation. Gently ask your
freelance clients if they are hiring, even if it's temp to perm.

4\. If you lack experience, try to get a "foot in the door" by taking a lower
position. For example, if you can't get on the dev team, can you get hired as
tier 2 support? It's not ideal, but you might be able to move to the dev team
in 6-12 months if you are a good worker. Or you can use that as a stepladder
to pivot to a competitor.

I hope this helps. Good luck!

------
s1t5
You have several years of software development experience. If that's true, you
aren't really starting your career now, you're just looking for a more stable
position. I think that the distinction is important especially in interviews
because without it you might be underselling yourself.

~~~
zboox
Do I need to make that distinction explicit? Companies are usually more
interested in hearing what the employee can do for them rather than what the
employee wants out of their career.

Underselling myself is probably also due to my lack of career intelligence. I
don't know how to take responsibility for a career. I don't know how to give
it periodic maintenance. I'm always living in the now, looking for my next
jobs under pressure. Then I become so focused on tasks at the current job that
I don't see the bigger picture (especially since I am just a temp worker).

~~~
s1t5
> Do I need to make that distinction explicit?

Yes.

> Companies are usually more interested in hearing what the employee can do
> for them rather than what the employee wants out of their career.

That's true and is in line with what I'm suggesting.

My point is that you shouldn't position yourself as "I have no continuous
experience, please hire me for my first real job". Instead it should be more
like "I'm an experienced software developer, this is the kind of work that
I've done and these are the skills that I have".

------
trilinearnz
My $0.02:

When I applied for my first fulltime job the company in question was offering
both a contract and fulltime option. I was asked, probably in addition to my
history of freelancing, why I was gunning for the fulltime option. I responded
by saying that I appreciated the steadiness of work (with freelance you are
often looking for the next opportunity), and to help contribute to the success
of a particular organisation in the long term. They seemed satisfied by this
response. I think they were coming from the point of view that you could make
more money by freelancing / contracting, so were just curious as to why I
wanted to "downgrade" (not their words, this is just my speculation).

Based on that experience (admittedly I was 23 at the time), you may find
prospective employers more open to entertaining your application than you
might think due to them having a different perception of your history.

I think given Covid you could make a pretty good case for wanting to shift to
a more stable career path. I also wouldn't belittle your own experience thus
far as not being a "career". There are many advantages of chopping and
changing between different business contexts that you now have, that someone
who only ever worked in 2-3 companies would not have.

You say you have no network. I would suggest reflecting a bit more on this, as
I'm certain you would at least have some amicable contacts / temporary
colleagues that you've made along the way, even if you wouldn't necessarily
think of them as your "network" right now. Do you have a LinkedIn profile? If
not, consider making one and connecting with some of the people you've worked
with in the past.

Popping up a GitHub profile with a simple project that demonstrates what you
think your skills are (e.g. perhaps it's a business web application that has a
well-written set of unit tests, or applies a particular design pattern in a
clear and logical way) could be a good compliment to your CV that employers
can use to verify your expertise. If you find yourself relating more to the
student crowd, then this is the sort of tack that graduates would take to
prove their ability.

------
austincheney
Here are some random things that are guaranteed to work for landing a well
paid IT job.

* get your CCNA and become a junior network engineer.

* Join the military. You can join the US military without living in the US or being a US citizen and achieve citizenship in 3 years instead of 5. If you have a 4 year university degree you can start life as a management intern as a 25A. If not you can be a 25B or if you are more ambitious and not afraid of failure a 17C or 25D.

* Learn JavaScript. When I say learn it I mean actually learn it as in writing original applications, walking the DOM, avoiding frameworks. Most people paid to write JavaScript never actually learn it and they need tremendous help from frameworks, abstractions, tools and other things that slow them down and makes for slow/shitty products. Employers generally realize the incompetence associated with this technology but they have products they need to ship. If you actually learn the technology with confidence companies will hire you just for the potential of solving problems other developers refuse to accept.

------
Jugurtha
Hi. Here's what you can do:

\- Start a company and build product for enterprise. The amount you get paid
as a company vs. as an individual is not even comparable.

\- Learn to sell more, or hire someone who can, and then learn to sell.
Someone who can ask for a price you would never ask without blushing,
blinking, sweating. Most engineers I've seen have a problem with sales and you
don't know what's valuable for clients. I was in meetings where the client
ignored features we spent weeks on, and was amazed by a feature we implemented
in a day. One colleague engineer who tagged along was just amazed: "From all
the features, they loved _that_?". Sometimes the amount of engineering you
spend on something and the value it has to someone are two independent
variables.

\- Get an attorney who'll draw your contracts and make sure your company
doesn't get abused. Clauses to protect you. To make sure you get compensated
for the opportunity cost of an exclusivity contract, and to make it
constrained in space, time, and limited to some entities. Obviously never sign
something before they read it. The contracts you're handed were probably
written by people from a legal department, so it's good to run it through
someone cut from the same cloth.

\- Amicable relations. Always deliver. Build a reputation. Repeat customers
are a thing. Recommendations are definitely a thing. This can be very
profitable.

\- Network. The energy it takes is considerable. To be able to positively
pitch your services, build relations, follow up on enquiries, spread good
vibes... Build relations, build trust... And sometimes, _sometimes_ , you
might have to do a solid to a relation in a large enterprise to get in, but
when you get in, you get in. Again, this can be profitable.

\- For hiring, surround yourself with people you can learn from, who can
complement you. Your objective is to grow the company.

\- After servicing many customers, you'll learn patterns. You can sell a
product many times over.

I'm excited for you. All the best!

------
adityarao310
I think a code bootcamp will def help you

~~~
zboox
What good would a code bootcamp do for me which I can't already do self-
taught?

