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Ask HN: How can an older worker going back to CS after a break find a position?
47 points by exaltation on May 6, 2021 | hide | past | favorite | 49 comments
I recently spoke to a woman in her 40s or 50s who would like to go back to work after two decades of not being in the workforce. She worked for the US army as a programmer before she had kids, but took a long time off to raise them. Just talking to her I could tell she was quick, conscientious, and would learn fast, but she doesn't know current frameworks in depth. (For reference, she learned COBOL in college.) She's also looking for flexible or part-time hours, so that she can be home for her kids.

I think there are a lot of companies that would like to hire people like this - not FAANG perhaps, but smaller companies who would want someone smart and with life experience, and are willing to train a new employee in their specific technologies. She'd be happy to do a trial period or internship first. But we weren't sure how to reach such companies. Does anyone have experience finding jobs that would fit this profile? Where would you look?

(If you would like to hire such a worker in the NY area or remotely, PM me!)




In this case her Army experience is going to be the thing to focus on. She could look for small government contractors who need tech work (because they’re government, the tech lags cutting edge which is good for her) and subject matter expert work. If she can do both it’s a big win.


I used to work for AEPCO a federal contractor. It was US Army contract work at an Army base for logistics. It was 1996 and they used all kinds of legacy systems. I was in the US Army ROTC which helped learn military terms. But I upsized databases from DBase Lotus 123 Clipper to MS Access and SQL Server and Oracle PL SQL. This skill of converting data from legacy systems to modern ones pays a lot.


I'd agree, but for reason that some HR organizations are set up to hire military veterans.

You can do a Google search for "companies hiring ex military", and Google will pop up a job search based on military occupation codes. Or you can look around websites dedicated to it.


IIRC this is usually some condition of applying for federal contracts, and federal spending is no drop in the bucket.


I agree. Defense contractors.


Or a smaller company that ether supplies defense contractors or takes subcontracts. A lot of these very small companies are robustly staffed with ex military already and may not exhibit the ageism you’ll find in the average tech company.


Big government contractors are more than willing to hire also.


Seconding this. A security clearance in particular would be very useful.


(Not speaking on behalf of my employer)

IBM has offered “reentry” (my term, probably not the official or correct ones, my apologies) positions in the past for women who want to reenter the tech workforce. I don’t know the details or whether the program is currently active, but I recall seeing it and thinking “that’s a really smart and thoughtful thing to do”


Returnships are another common term, as a spin on internships. Many big name tech companies have an active program, including Apple, Amazon, etc.


She may be able to get a job based on her past experience, but 20 years is a long time ago. I imagine the thing that would most convince hiring managers is a recent project (in a technology that she wants to work with) that shows that she still knows her stuff. I'd recommend she take a couple of weeks (or a couple of months depending on how urgent it is that she gets a job) to build such a project.


Don't want to sound negative, but there needs to be at least some value proposition. An employer isn't going to be super impressed if the pitch is "I'd like flex hours, training, open to anything, gimme gimme gimme". Everyone is "willing to learn"; the difference is who talks the talk and who walks the walk. She needs to have some sort of target role and be at least able to demonstrate passing familiarity with some popular technology.

As for cold networking, two options are:

- talking to recruiting agencies, which often have a pool of employers that they have relationships with and can help open doors

- good ol' cold calling - research companies that you feel are good matches and are hiring, send a resume and go from there

A third potential option is to do freelance w/ local mom-and-pop shops, at least temporarily, to build up a small portfolio, dust off tech chops and getting the google-fu up to speed.

Often times, non-tech companies have less strict/technically challenging hiring processes. These are good companies to aim for.

For her old experience specifically, I hear that there is demand for COBOL in some government niches. Might be worth looking into.


> ...there needs to be at least some value proposition.

This is spot on.

I'd recommend signing up and completing a relatively well-known coding bootcamp.

Edit to add, in 20 years a lot has changed outside of just specific CS skills:

Cloud collaborative suites, conferencing systems, Slack/MSFT Teams, JIRA, git, just to name a few.

20 years ago, I was at my first role out of college--we used Outlook, MSFT VC++ 6.0, VSS, and AOL Instant Messenger.


MSFT Teams -- my condolences.


I see this sentiment online, but using MS Teams at work, I have a great experience. 2-n way chat threads and video calls, team bulletin boards, and integrated apps like sharepoint, excel, custom internal software, etc.

I use slack, zoom, and discord for a mix of school and personal use, and appreciate what each of these offer, but wouldn’t wish to switch off of Teams for work. I do wish you could message yourself on Teams like slack. That’s a nice quick reference utility.

Why do you offer condolences for MS Teams though?


it's a lot better than using nothing, I'll give you that much. I think great is a stretch though.

However, the product is really rough around the edges and lacks the quality you'd find in other products (well, the other product, but there are also open source alternatives* that are worth looking at as well imo).

* https://www.reddit.com/r/opensource/comments/fokrr7/opensour...


My friend's father works with COBOL. Apparently it's quite lucrative. It isn't used much, but it's also hard to hire people for those jobs so they tend to be well paid.


Yeah, I read about some roles paying upwards of $200k, but I think they were in California (OP is asking about NY, which I don't know much about)


I am sure there are COBOL jobs in NY; plenty of old firms (banks and the like) have headquarters there. A quick Google search seems to confirm this.


Dust off those COBOL books, Even in 2021 there's demand. In that regard, her age wouldn't even be a factor; in fact it may even be an advantage.


Seconding this. There's been a resurgence in demand for Cold Fusion programmers too. Not quite the same era, but there's a market for out-of-favor flavors.


> (If you would like to hire such a worker in the NY area or remotely, PM me!)

Your profile is empty and Hacker News doesn't have a native PM function.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5186475


read Steve Dalton's "2 hour job search" (abridged version: http://career-prospectors.com/pdf/CP-Part2-2HJS-28Jul2020.pd...)

This lays out a process which works counter to the conventional wisdom of applying to open positions on job boards (a "Satisficing" approach). I'm trying it now, because I'm in a similar position.


Does she want to use her COBOL experience? There's a lot of COBOL consulting work with government and banking clients, and it's common for those consultants to be older. Her military experience will help here. I've know some COBOL consultants who found it to be quite flexible, too.

Unless she's particularly interested in learning new frameworks, I wouldn't suggest trying to do internships as she'd be starting from zero, competing against young coders.


I left programming for about six years to do grad school in Classics. I came back because programming was way more fun. The writing was on the wall when I started writing scripts to scan dactylic hexameter and convert L'Année philologique entries to bibtex. :-)

I spent six months doing a (failed) startup with a student from the biz school, and then I started taking freelance gigs. I got a few job offers, but I was enjoying self-employment so much, I wound up just sticking with freelancing. Today I'm making more than I would as a non-FAANG employee. I'm 44 and haven't felt any age discrimination.

Ironically, getting contract work is way easier than getting an FTE offer. You have a 30-minute call with one programmer and another with the owner/manager, and you're hired. No leetcode, day-long on-site visits away from home, or unpaid trial projects.

While your rates are still low, you can also find a lot of work by reaching out to web design firms and presenting yourself as an expert in X. For example if they mostly have PHP employees but you do Rails or D3, they will be happy to bring you on. Even with expensive rates, I still get subcontracting work when people need a Postgres expert.

In my case I was still very comfortable building web applications, but the six months at my own startup let me learn Rails & Heroku and gain confidence that I could still get things done. If she can also spend half a year learning and building something that proves her skills, I think she will de-risk herself for lots of employers.

Or she may be able to find a lot of Cobol opportunities immediately. I know someone who was at a bank doing sales, and they gave him paid on-the-job training to switch to Cobol work. (I'm happy to talk with her and make a connection if she is interested.) Now he's applying at IBM. So it seems like there is plenty of work out there still.


I’m not sure how helpful this is but I worked Tech Support before applying to be a developer. If she wants good hands on training in sysadmin and programming there are support jobs (especially at startups) that are terrific for launching (or relaunching) a dev career.


Tech support jobs are good for bootstrapping when you don't have dev or sysadmin experience. For the OP's friend, though, who has programming experience, this would likely be an unnecessary detour.


Look for unglamorous "tech enabled service" companies. Companies who's main thing is the problem domain they are in, supported by the their special-sauce automation. They are more likely to need people who can do more than program, have a broader set of life skills, and aren't in the game of competing for hungry young coders who really want to get to FAANG. I have assessed many of these for my work in private equity acquisitions, and some of the most niche, unglamorous companies can be making boat loads of money. They are willing to pay well to hang on to their people, the technical bar is lower so you are more likely to be able to be a solid contributor early in a tech career, and they usually have an older and more broad-backgrounded staff. Many of them also seem like very nice places to work, where people go home at 5pm and don't have pager duty... :-)

From my conversations with them, a lot of them hire in non-traditional areas too, because they know they can't compete with FAANG. So look broadly for their posts.


Have her check out Path Forward

https://www.pathforward.org/

https://www.pathforward.org/return-work-programs-around-us/

They specifically help people who left the industry for caregiving roles reenter the industry.


FWIW, I went from building single board computer and learning COBOL in high school, to lots of personal / freelance projects, to lots of menial jobs, to the Navy, to C/C++ programming in 2000-2007, to tier 2 tech support until about two years ago, and I'm now working for a DoD contractor supporting a legacy Java app and learning C# as the language of the rewrite.

53 now. It's been a weird ride, my own faults contributed a lot to not progressing anywhere near as fast as others that I feel I could code as well as... but I'm having fun with this and if life turns out that way this job will be a good solid stepping stone to any other Sr Engineer position.


I successfully helped a woman in a similar situation a few years ago. We thought what would help the most was to become familiar with the parts of a modern framework (controllers, ORMs, etc). She used _Agile_Web_Development_With_Rails to build a sample site, and then built another site with jhipster, studying the generated artifacts. This took about 4 months, and we met every other week so that she could ask questions and we could plot out where she should concentrate her efforts.

After that effort, she was able to get a job with a large stable company.


IIRC, Google had a program that originally targeted this demographic and has since broadened their scope. If the acquaintance talks to a recruiter there, ask about "engineering residency".


This targets "early-career" folks: https://careers.google.com/programs/eng-res/


Check out https://themomproject.com/ no affiliation juts heard good things and I respect their mission.


As an Army vet, she may qualify for Microsoft’s Software and Systems academy, a free boot camp for transition veterans. No idea if they’d take someone who has been separated for so long, but no harm in asking

https://military.microsoft.com/programs/microsoft-software-s...


I think all of the FAANGs have some form on “non-traditional hires” apprentice things, though it’s probably pretty tough to get in. I know someone who changed careers later in life by attending a boot camp type class and applying after that. Example from LinkedIn: https://careers.linkedin.com/reach


Is she a disabled Veteran? Because if so, she might be able to apply for a non-competitive job appointment in the Federal government


Hmm. For at least the G in FAANG, experience with "frameworks" is utterly irrelevant. Apply.


Best thing to do is survey the job boards to determine what's in demand and come up with a short list of platforms/frameworks to learn. It's the platforms/frameworks programmers really use, not the language, as you imply from your post.

Good luck!


Not to ask the obvious but she took 20 years off to raise her kids and now wants to be home for her kids? How much longer will her kids be at home? That being said, coding is coding. Just needs to do a sample project.


Kids typically leave home at 18 or 19 years old, and there tends to be a 2-5 year gap between children. Someone who left the workforce 20 years ago could have a 19 year old in their first year of college, a 16-year old in high school, and a 12-year old in middle school.

Teenagers need parental attention just as much as younger children—more, in some ways, because while they don't need constant attention like young children do, when they do need help, it tends to be more serious.


Well said. If you don't spend the time looking after your kids when they're younger you'll end up spending a lot more time sorting out problems when they're older.


I have a similar question, someone I know in their early 50s who has 20 years experience teaching computing at HS level.

How viable is it to get into software?

The main issue is that there is no option for them to stop working to learn full time.


flex hours may be challenging, however if she still remembers the basics there are still not so sexy jobs maintaining legacy software in languages that did not change that much in the past two decades.


https://www.indeed.com/jobs?q=Cobol&l=New+York%2C+NY


I have interviewed and hired older workers and have worked with older workers in all of my previous companies. Age discriminatin is a real thing, and yet someone hired those older workers, so it's not an insurmountable thing. You often hear things like "well, you need to keep constantly learning new things", which is true, but older workers don't need to pretend to be younger workers as they have their own advantages and disadvantages, and are better off pushing their advantages than insisting they don't have disadvantages. The advantages of older workers are: * better judgement, more emotionally mature, more likely to see projects through to completion, more likely to stay at the firm longer. Play up to the advantages. Assuming these are, in fact, actual advantages of this person.

Also, be aware of the overall climate. She should be able to land a dev job in the current climate where standards are being so dramatically lowered and people are getting promotions/raises merely because of the tightness of the labor market. This is a seller's market - just the right time to jump in, regardless of your age.

My main advice would be the same advice I give to everyone else:

* Don't lie on your resume. It's OK to say "I can pick up skill X because it's similar to skill Y which I already have" or "I didn't use X at my last job, but it is similar to Y and I've been brushing up on this as more people need it" (assuming you have been learning X on your own time). But don't say you know skill X if you don't. Don't wing stuff.

* Read the requirements of the job posting and spend some time trying to understand this problem space and company. Really think about the things they need, and then study up on and practice these things.

* Adopt the attitude that you are there to help them solve problems in exchange for money. So try to be helpful and have appropriate expectations of compensation commensurate with the value you add. Do not adopt the attitude that this is some kind of courtship and they need to woo you, or if they turn you down that you have been personally rejected, or that you have a career arc and they are there to boost you along the arc. The job will not give you meaning, it will not save your soul, it is an exchange of your problem solving skills for money. It may well help your career arc, but that's not going to land you the job.

* Do not hop from job to job, and be prepared to have a good explantion if you did. Be aware that it is a red flag to see a sequence of 4 one year positions at different places, because you start being really productive at the end of that first year. If that's when you look for greener pastures, the firm hiring you should dramatically downgrade the estimate of value a rental will provide as you will be leaving before the time invested in training you starts to pay off. Similarly, don't say "I really want to be a manager, and I thought this dev role was a good way to get into that". Apply for a manager job if that's what you want to do. If a firm is looking for a rental, they'll let you know. Usually they are not looking for rentals but people who will learn the tech stack and then deliver a stream of value rather than dissapearing.


> Do not hop from job to job

I disagree 100%. If you take a job and it's not a good fit, leave. You're not doing anyone any favors by sticking around & being miserable. Don't take a job w/ the intention of leaving, but certainly don't stay only because you feel guilty. The benefit of leaving a job you don't like if you relieve the company of retaining a bad fit, and you reward the new company w/ the experience you got at the old company. LIfe's too short to stick around when you're miserable.


You shouldn’t be afraid to leave a bad job, but if you are in your 3rd job in as many years and are thinking of leaving the problem starts looking like you rather than your employers.

I can buy I’d you move once or twice quickly, if are clearly showing progression, or have some explanation (those were contracts, my source kept getting relocated, etc) but I agree with GP that regularly flitting between companies/positions in less than a year isn’t great look without an alternative narrative.


>> Read the requirements of the job posting and spend some time trying to understand this problem space and company

You can do this for some positions, but pair this with rapidly applying as fast as you can. There were 160 applications to a SWE role at my company a month ago. Modern systems make it easy to apply and if you are looking break back into the business I think “quantity has a quality all of its own”




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