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Comment by chx | Hacker News Reader

I am now preparing for a small-ish pivot. For the last 12 or years I have been a Drupal / PHP consultant, architected a few very large sites, including one at the time being in the Quantcast Top 100. I am now trying to branch out to Elixir or Go and can't really find a part time job doing either. I think this would be necessary to build up some experience before completely jumping the Drupal ship.

I am 42.

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Stay at it, get as much learning in as you can. E.g. do a very simple project that you can expose on github, publish to a cloud server somewhere .. this will let you show them what you can do. Perhaps also look at supporting stacks like Angular1/2, at least down here the demand is through the roof for them.

I went from Coldfusion/Php for decades to C# / Asp.net after redundancy and it was not easy. Got there in the end though, but I was fairly frustrated for a while.

I'm 43 / straight / white male with a child. Fwiw, I regret not spending more time on my physical fitness during my time off, but I'm back at it now. Just a gut feel (no pun intended), but I reckon fitness could become a factor in interviews; it certainly helps with sustaining focus though.

> I reckon fitness could become a factor in interviews

Interesting. Another HN post a while ago mentioned they fought any ageism by being physically fitter than those younger than them - racing the younger ones up the stairs of the building without breaking a sweat.

Actually, here's the blog post, On Getting Old(er) In Tech by Don Denoncourt: http://corgibytes.com/blog/2016/12/06/getting-old-er-in-tech...

"A year or so ago, I was attending a two-week training session with about a dozen 20- or 30-something developers. The training was on the 22nd floor and, every day after we came back from group lunches, I’d always take the stairs. The first day or two, one or two of the kids would join me, but I got no repeats. It’s pretty hard to be considered a has-been when they can’t keep up with you."

I remember this post, and thoroughly enjoyed it, especially that part about racing the younger ones up the stairs...Basically beating them young ones at "their own game". ;-)

Thanks, that's a great HN post! Very inspirational too. Better keep lifting those weights and doing those rides. :)

(Also I agree with his statement that 20 years of experience could very well be one year repeated twenty times; very true.)

Gosh, reading what you just typed hits home real hard. Replacing all the technologies, companies and achievements with my own and I can relate word for word. And i am almost a decade younger!

I won't be much help since I am in the same boat as you but all I can say is keep your chin up mate and hope you pull through and find something!

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