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After 20 years doing a mix of embedded and application development, I spent 5 years teaching English. I went back into IT at the age of 45. My first interview was absolutely horrible (sorry about that if you are reading ;-) ). After that I was fine. I ended up getting a web development position without much prior experience in the area (just whatever I had hacked around on in my own time).

Of course with 20 years of development experience and 5 years of teaching experience, I had a lot of other things to sell as well. I certainly had no lack of interest and had positions to choose from. I did take a fairly healthy cut in salary, which seemed reasonable to me since the company that hired me was taking a risk. I was careful to pick a position that would work well for me and I did not take the highest offer. I definitely feel that the investment I made at the beginning was definitely worth it.

I think as an older person moving into a different area you have to be able to convince people that you will pick things up quickly and that your other attributes are worth it while they wait for your technical skills to come up to par. If you are careful to build the kinds of skills that will be valuable throughout your career, you will have relatively no problem in my experience. The people who have trouble are the ones that were just scraping by in their original positions, or people who had a laser focus on a particular skill set that is no longer valuable.

The trick is getting the opportunity to sell yourself that way. If you can't get the interview in the first place, how well you can sell yourself is irrelevant.

This begs the question: how did you manage to get those interviews?

My guess: http://jldrill.rubyforge.org/

If anyone looks at the code, it's pretty crap, but it shows that I like to write code.

Also, because I knew I was going back into IT, I built: http://mikekchar.github.io/portfolio/

It contains a bunch of egotistical musings about software. It shows that I probably think too highly of myself, but that I know how to write English fairly well ;-)

Also, after I moved to London, I made a point of attending events where I could make contacts. My return to IT was complicated by the fact that most of my career was in Ottawa, Canada. Since my family was moving to the UK, my contacts were useless to me. I got 3 interviews in as many weeks from simply meeting people at the pub.

As far as I'm concerned, these activities are "selling myself". The fact that I also enjoy them is beside the point (especially drinking beer and chatting with other developers ;-) ).

Lately I've been working on trying to allocate time to my side projects. As you can see, I haven't updated my previous projects in a very long time. However, it is vitally important.

In the end, the job I ended up accepting was through a head hunter. No idea how he got my name. Probably should have asked him ;-).

As someone who has gone the other way I would say no. Getting to the forefront in biotech is a 10 year full time journey. I have met a few developers who have tried to learn, but they have all struggled.

Having said this don’t worry, if you think the job prospects are bad for old developers they are far worse for old scientists.

Biotech also pays a lot less.

If you look at current jobs such as "bioinformatics programmer", the salaries are somewhere between a biologist and a software engineer even though it requires more knowledge than either. Remember, biologists start off at around 35-50k/yr on jr. level, while SEs start at ~100k+.

Basically, it is better to be a junior level SE than a super senior bioinformatician.

This is certainly true. The reason why is most of the "bioinformatics programmers” come from a biology background and switch over to development. It is far quicker to go from biology -> cs than cs -> biology.

The real problem with biology is the salaries don’t rise as fast you become more more senior. Biotech is certainly not the easy way to wealth.

The time to market difference is huge in regular software than research. Also, the risks of failure are very high. So incomes are cut, except with blockbusters where the rewards flow to the top.

One reason I am glad I got out of biotech.

I'm in biotech now, thinking of leaving due to generally poor pay conditions in the industry. Have any other reasons to share?

I flat out had a tough time finding a job in biotech. I landed one and the pay was 30% less than what a regular tech company was offering. I still want to be in science, but now it is a hobby rather than my sole source of income.

Ah, I also had a hard time finding a job in biotech, despite having some solid referrals and awful offers. Settled for a mediocre offer as a result.

Anyways, thanks for sharing.

Biomedical informatics is often better compensated and has more potential for venture opportunities, but it also often requires a CS PhD, an MD, an ability to code and entreprenurialness in the same person... That's at least a decade and a $300k+ investment.

In think it might take you a tad longer than 10 years to get both a CS PhD and an MD.

It seems biotech is sorta where software was in the 80s (AFAIK dev salaries weren't so great till at least the mid 90s). I suspect in a couple more decades it will be quite a lucrative profession.

"even though it requires more knowledge than either"

It doesn't usually require more knowledge. The majority of bioinformaticians that I know are pretty poor coders, and know just enough Perl or Python to count some stuff up an do some stats on it or plot a graph. They have no idea how to set up a server, write maintanable code, design a database well or keep a website secure. Obviosuly there are exceptions, but the majority that I have worked with are junior level programmers with knowledge of biology.

"knowledge of biology"

I am not sure you fully appreciate what " knowledge of biology" means. As a programmer who did a lot of molecular biology in the past - doing molecular biology is not simple. The learning curve for a lot of biological topics - especially the ones that get close to organic chemistry is really steep.

This is something that I have seen people with a CS or EE background really underestimate. The amount of biology information you need to keep in your head is huge. There is not a core of day-to-day knowledge that you can use and look up the rest when you need, you need to keep all of it in your head just to get the most basic things done.

Its the same everywhere.

Programmers underestimating the value/knowledge of accountants/lawyers.

Businessman assuming tech work is simple.

People by default assume what looks simple for someone to do must be simple - even if they spent 10,000+ hours practicing it.

I have a batchelors in Molecular Biology, so I have a reasonable idea.

Depends on the person. Basically, to be good at both is a lot harder than writing a web app.

A lot of bioinformatics is implementing elaborate algorithms in a memory efficient way.

Things like

- approximate string search using modified suffix trees

- some new variation of the EM algo using a new optimization strategy

- the whole protein folding field where many implement the simulations on a huge array of GPUs. Here you not only have to know how to write efficient code on GPUs, but also be an expert in parallel algorithms if the algorithm you are implementing is not embarrassingly parallel.

However, these algos will be thrown out in a month so they don't care about maintainability or uptime.

I'm 44. I got my first 'real developer' job at 40 :)

Cool! Where you in IT before you started your dev job, or did you change career completely?

I was in tech but not directly IT, managing a video and event production team, got burnt out, got the coding bug, spent 6 months bootstrapping myself by making toy projects, and started interveiwing for jobs.

> And who wants to hire a 45 year old junior web developer?

That sounds pretty awesome, actually. Who wouldn't want to add that wealth of experience to their web repo?

But the kiddies often want an expert in MongoDb to solve their relational problems for them.

You said: "And who wants to hire a 45 year old junior web developer?"

That smacks of pure ageism to me. Just recast it to a racial context to see:

"And who wants to hire a black junior web developer?"

Not so: the word "junior" implies that they're new to web development and need close supervision. If they're 45 and still a junior web dev, they're either incapable of moving forward in their career (bad), or have just done a radical mid-life career shift (not necessarily bad, but probably warrants some extra scrutiny).

Why would a person's above-average age when they begin web development warrant "extra scrutiny"? I'm baffled. This is ageism writ large, and there's no reason for it. Judge the quality of the employee's work, not his or her age.

Yes, that's the problem. Our society fortunately no longer tolerates overt discrimination by race, sex or religion, but unfortunately still tolerates discrimination by age, overt at the low end and thinly veiled at the high end. We need to put an end to that.

Biotech is even worse, because the sub-specialties take so long to learn that picking the wrong one is a career killer. Ask any bio postdoc.

You can solve this to some extent by learning a few different specialties, the real problem is all the tacit knowledge you need. There are a lot of areas I know all the theory, but I would not be able to get an experiment working as I just don’t have the experience at the bench in those areas.

Not everyone is in it because they love it. If you are then there's no reason not to be able to continue at it well into the "golden years." It's not like we have to swing a pick or tote a bale. I think the work itself keeps your mind young.

We had ~40 junior web dev recently in our company and he was pretty good.