Ask HN: Ageism in Tech and Career Moves

[ditados]

I'm pushing 50 (although I don't look or act like it) and I am trying to get out of the consulting/sales rat race and back into actual engineering after a long stint working with enterprise IT customers and trying to get them to move to modern devops/SRE/data services in the cloud -- it was gratifying in many regards, but intensely frustrating from a management/ownership standpoint, since you're often thrice removed from the actual decision making and technology choices.

I considered going solo or starting a small company with a couple of friends, but I need a very steady pay check (even if smaller) and contract work is belittled in my neck of the woods (Southern Europe), so I'm currently running what passes for the tech interview gauntlet these days, with uneven results--I am either passed over solely due to perception (age, current role, etc.) or go through the entire pipeline.

Explaining that I'm not afraid of (re-)learning anything (and even with a portfolio of stuff and good references) and having a decades-old MSc seems to be looked down upon by fresh PhDs, and expectations towards specific areas of expertise seem to be unrealistically high sometimes, but I usually get through those and am eventually excused away because I'm too senior (often more senior than the interviewers or future managers, which I'm OK with but clearly raises a few eyebrows and I suspect is the main reason I'm turned away, followed by the "sales" thing).

I know there are a lot of folk like me around--how did you succeed in getting rid of the "customer facing" taint and doing a career move _back_ to Engineering?

[mooreds]

Have you explored options within your current company, or companies where former co-workers work? In my experience, the former is the easiest way to make a career shift, because they already know you. The latter is second best because they knew you. This has worked for me in the past.

Other things I would suggest (all assume you still have a job and can play the long game):

- start blogging with a focus on where you want to be (engineering? That's a broad topic). Niche down. Is there a domain or tech that you want to work with?

- pick an open source project and start contributing. Docs are a great place to start.

- take a moonlighting gig or a week off and code something. You may be looking back with rose colored glasses. Coding is great, but nothing is without its warts.

[jmheinkle]

Generic advice, but can you make a project that is interesting for which you can share code with hiring managers?

This would seem to cut through the challenges that you described:

It demonstrates your ability to code, solve technical challenges, and work from the perspective of the “users/business” (in the context of your project). It also gives you something to talk about. Building rapport helps to bridge gaps in culture.

[wnkrshm]

I wonder whether the lack of replies is due to lacking first-hand experience of the HN community or if it is due to the difficulty of making that jump.

Nevertheless, I also would be interested in any anecdata surrounding this.