

Career change advice - samflo

Hi all, i am in my mid 30&#x27;s with nearly 10 years experience as a systems engineer but don&#x27;t find it very fulfilling anymore. for the past year I have been attracted to the idea of moving into web development but not sure how. I already finished an online bootcamp on Ruby on Rails and I am in general at ease with web technologies. My main blocker in actively pursuing a change is that my lack of previous experience in combination with my age will be a showstopper for someone to hire me.
Any advice from you wise people on how should I approach this and maybe what kind of positions I should be looking for?
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akg_67
As other two comments mentioned you have two options, create a github
repository of your code and/or create a web app for hiring managers to see and
review.

I believe ageism is prevalent in this industry. Most shops that have people in
early 20s at junior positions in web development most likely will make excuses
and not hire you in those roles.

You might be able to break in web development after joining a company in
system engineering or devOps role and showing your web dev chops by using it
to solve your and your colleagues itch in system engineering. In my last job,
a colleague made the same transition by doing things for example creating an
internal web site for system engineering group for weekly status report,
storing online important customer configuration files, indexing documents for
search etc. things that were annoying to people in his group and he made them
suck less. Soon, he was asked to join our intranet development group, it was a
lateral move for him instead of starting from bottom.

Another avenue will be to do freelance. Nobody cares about your age as long as
you can deliver the work requested by client.

Personally, I made a similar move from system engineering in my mid-40s to
webdev/analytics. It was clear during the transition while interviewing for
webdev/analytics role that no one will hire me in such roles due to age as
well as elementary quality of the code that I write.

But then something magical happened, I created a web app to scratch my own
itch using the same quality of code that hiring managers were not impressed
with. I guess thousands of others had the same itch and now I have 1,700
users, both individuals and businesses. Suddenly, I was being considered
expert not in webdev but the industry vertical my web app targeted. I now
consult in that industry vertical at rates much higher than what any webdev
job would have paid.

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jasonkester
The big reason you see so many self-taught developers in this industry is that
it's so easy to demonstrate that you're good at what you do. No $200k degree
required. Just $7 for a domain name and a bit of time building something
impressive to put there.

You can't do that with, say, doctoring or lawyering. There, you'd actually
need a piece of paper saying you're good at what you do. Here, all you need is
to be good.

Go build something cool. Optionally stick the source online someplace, but
definitely put the end product someplace you can point to. Then point
potential employers to it.

Incidentally, you're not old, and even if you were it would not matter. I went
10 years at one point never meeting a client in person. I could have been 112
and they would have had no way of knowing. Ignore people complaining about age
bias. If you're good at what you do, people will want you to do it for them.

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nowarninglabel
I have not encountered this age-ism that you speak of, especially not against
someone in their mid 30's. So, you should probably stop worrying about that.

Skill-wise if you've done a bootcamp and you feel comfortable coding then do a
couple of example projects to put on your Github and get involved with an
open-source project or two to make some contributions where hiring managers
can see that you are actively coding. In this market, that should get you far
enough. And don't be afraid to apply for positions you feel under-qualified
for, because a lot of hiring involves looking for someone who is capable and
able to ramp up skills as needed rather than relying on a very exacting skill
history (and anyone who relies on such is probably doing it wrong anyways).
You miss all the chances that you don't take!

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S4M
If you have time outside of work, can you build a web app that does something
for you and see how it goes, and how you like it?

