Being a middle-aged junior
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Probably the three biggest takeaways I have from my own experience:
If the company is big enough to have an HR department, it is going to be hard to get hired as a non-standard applicant. Too many people would have to agree to take the risk, and HR is NOT about risk taking.
Some type of personal connection is extremely important. Meeting someone at a job fair/meetup/hackathon/whatever is going to get much better results than emailing a resume.
Recruiters are probably not going to be of much help. Companies do not want to pay recruiters commissions for jr devs.
> ...HR is NOT about risk taking.
If non-traditional applicants go "through the front door" by applying/submitting their resume through the usual channels at a big corp, they'll get nowhere.
HR job-applicant pipelines are DESIGNED to screen out, ruthlessly, as many applicants as possible. Anyone who has even a mildly deviant career trajectory is not going to make it to a phone interview by "uploading" their resume.
HOWEVER, if such applicants can get their foot in the door by exercising their professional network or by carefully messaging and persuading the right people, they can get through to an interview.
We all only have about two years of experience with whatever the hot new language is before it changes to something else.
Those kind of resumes where you have like 18 years of work experience in 9 different language, but you were essentially not much more than a junior dev in any one of them, are very unimpressive.
That is the typical career story and that's why a lot of people struggle to find dev jobs when they get older because they weren't managing their career and were just riding the technology churn with all the other 23 year olds.
You should think of your career progression as every couple of years you are making a jump up to either more responsibility, or a more difficult domain, or working on systems with more load etc ...
If you don't make these forward progressions you will be judged harshly as an older person, because it's very difficult for people to NOT think, "well why didn't this person make any progress in their career? They must suck."
The technologies used is a side detail, it's never the "meat" of your work experience.
You don't get responsibility. You take responsibility.
Of course this is harder in large companies, but it's equally important.
Underrated advice, right here. It's not always easy or gratifying, but it's served me well over the past 20 years.
this actually isn't bad advice
> companies will not give you more responsibility or more difficult things to do
i find this is true only in large corporate enterprises. or a lack of initiative on the employee themself. you won't find this in startups / younger / tech focused companies
> If you want something higher then you have to be an expert in a domain
yes generally if you want higher responsibility you need to be able to execute on those responsibilities...
If there is a path of progression for you in terms of responsibility and difficulty of work, then by all means stay at a company for several years.
Within this framework it doesn't mean you'll necessarily be moving companies every 2 years.
They can write readable maintainable code. They can clearly communicate to the non-technical people to get the business requirements out, knowing how to cut to the chase.
They should also able to help other developers get up to speed and pick up (the gist at least) of new frameworks and understand the abstractions they use.
I regularly work with developers like this and it's thoroughly enjoyable.
It is slowly changing in our world but very very slowly ... Javascript is actually being mentioned at conferences now.
Its hard, but doable. Just make sure you are constantly practicing for when you get the interview. Build things to show off what you can do.
Looking back, would you advise to stay in, or experience other lifestyles instead?
Nicest part was being able to leave work at the office, it hit 5 o'clock and I was gone. I got to enjoy personal and family time.
I worked for a very large company when I got out which I had not done before and I learned how political things can be. I also got to interact with non-technical co workers which was a nice change of pace.
I do regret the years lost from a software career perspective but when I got out I was fried so I may not have been that far ahead anyway if I stayed in.
I would probably do it again if I had to, it was good to see what else is out there. A career is a long time and I wanted to be sure.
This is the sort of thing I enjoy. If you work as a regular programmer, you're usually walled off from the effects of your work, and you can spend months on a big project and then it all gets scrapped or becomes pointless for reasons outside of your control. And there are innumerable cogs between you and the customer/client. Your managers and PMs don't truly know what they want either. But helping someone that you interact with daily is tremendously more rewarding, regardless of how cool the technology is or isn't to the cognoscenti.
Up to that point, I had been in healthcare analytics doing everything from custom ETL, database design, to ad-hoc reports. Writing code and solving problems related to data was one of my favorite things.
Well the kids grew up and my engineering brain stayed active. Except, between age and the various non-traditional choices I had made in life my self-confidence was shot regarding employment.
Six weeks ago I accepted an offer for a data and business analyst position in healthcare at age 52. The pay is modest, the people are great, and I feel in many ways like I am starting all over. It is easy to regret lost time and opportunity. I sure have at times. Really I traded one opportunity set for another.
Now I see I am well suited for a new kind of role which uses my technical and non-technical strengths. In fact I was told being able to bridge technical and non-technical areas of the organization was a primary reason to offer me the position. I still get to write small bits of software to automate processes my new employer didn't realize could be automated. My favorite type of software to write.
Ironically, I have more fields in and out of tech I want to explore than I did 20 years ago. Yet, my life is over halfway to the finish line!
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I really feel that for devs coming from unusual backgrounds, you just need a positive recent work entry on your resume. That's all you need to break through.
College internships aren't available, he's not a student. Still, he or she needs one recent dev job on his resume, that will unlock further job opportunities. I think going to recruiting events in person and talking to devs and recruiters in person is one way to make that personal connection that could put you over the hump. Go to an event related to your area of biggest interest, try to make a personal connection.
I'm halfway through the 2 years it will take me to get a bachelors in CS from my original University. Im still working full time and thus I won't have any industry internships when I finish. I'll be 33 then.
Is this going to severely limit my opportunties for a first development job? Should I play down my previous experience to reduce the middle aged junior problem? Any advice will be appreciated.
So far, I feel conspicuously older than most folks in my group, and I’ve effectively rebooted my career so I don’t have the same seniority and professional network I had in civil service. I worked around the middle-aged junior problem by taking small contract remote work at below my normal pay rate to bank some experience. I’m still comparatively inexperienced (and the offers I get reflect that), but I’m not being paid like a new grad or anything, so I feel like I have time to work up.
How did you go about getting the contract work? A service like upwork or similar?
I'll be finishing my degree this fall and will be 31. I work in Finance now in a sort of 'tech-adjacent' systems analyst and business intelligence position.
If I remember, I'll follow up this post in a few months with how my job search is going. I'll begin searching around June in the Philadelphia area.
I had a few interviews last year and have gone to one or two tech meet-ups, and I'm reasonably optimistic that my age won't be much of a deterrent. Most people I've spoken with like the diversity of my background and the obvious passion I have for CS. In a sense, going back to school while working full time is an "actions speak louder than words" situation. It takes a lot of effort to get through a second degree while working full-time, and I think that speaks for itself in terms of work ethic and interest in the topic (though it doesn't hurt to highlight as well).
That being said, I still have the nagging fear of ageism affecting my job prospects. I think my work experience will lend itself well, but I'm going about this without ego. I know I'm trying to break into a field competing with many other people, so it's probably going to be a numbers game in terms of applying. I'm also a little concerned about the Philadelphia tech scene as it's not as robust as one would expect for a city this size.
I know this isn't advice, as I can't offer much, but I can commiserate in having similar feelings and concerns. My guess is that your background will ultimately assist your search (though obviously not everywhere). The one piece of advice I can offer is to start applying early, if only to get interviewing experience and knock off the rust. You said you've been in your current role for 10 years -- has it also been 10 years since you've had a proper job interview?
If you want to chat further or even just bounce ideas around, I'm happy to chat further. What city are you based out of?
You would think that it would be more of a plus than a negative, but the stories of ageism are pretty frequent. We may not be experienced devs, but we are experienced workers. We know how to work in professional teams and deliver to deadlines. And as you said, going to school and working full time is not trivial.
Applying early and often is definitely good advice. I'm on r/cscareerquestions a lot, but it tends to be very new traditional new grad focused. We need a community for potential and current middle aged juniors!
If you're looking for a job at a FANG company or similar, start preparing for job interviews by practicing algorithm and data structures interview questions. Solve problems with a pen and paper, or better yet, at a whiteboard. Practice walking through your solutions out loud. It's all a bit silly, but if you can do this well, you'll find a job in today's market.