35 Over 35
theamericanscholar.org
theamericanscholar.org
I'm turning 28 this month and I feel like I'm quite far ahead compared to my peers, yet feel like I'm absolutely still fumbling through life. And when speaking to friends older than me, the majority seem to still be fumbling through as well.
Every rotation around the sun my opinion is solidified that we're all just wingin' it, no matter the age and success can happen whenever.
NB Regarding the "fumbling through" feeling, I'm 53 and I think one of the comforting things about getting older is realising that it's not just you but that, in general, everyone is pretty much making life up as they go along :-)
This has also been my observation at 30. I've worked with people all ages and people of all statures and most people are just doing what they think is right and not much is based on facts. Even high ranking people at fortune 500 companies are just doing what feels right to them and often their success is more related to people below them working their asses off than their leadership. The only difference between people who are in control and people who don't, is often that the former don't have a realistic view of why they're successful.
And, as a nuance, there are of course people who are really good at what they do and that have a lot of knowledge. A lot of people, however, just were really lucky (or really good at networking) to get where they are. Even some Nobel Prize winners just got lucky:
In my early 20's I was in college. Graduated in 2008 in to the recession and was lucky to have _any_ job. Spent all of my nights learning coding.
In my mid-late 20's, starting in 2011, I finally got a crappy job with a pay cut in tech (sort of) doing ad operations. I worked hard and spent the evenings getting better at Java so I could use the Dart For Publishers SDK to automate things I hated doing at work (inadvertently helped the company make about a million extra bucks that year, I later realized).
In my early 30's, I got married, changed countries, became a Technical Account Manager, studied Python and German in my free time, and eventually became a dev for a video game company.
In my (our, now) mid-30's, we had a kid, and now I spend my free time on that and house repair, etc. I still like coding but after dinner, bath, bedtime stories, maybe 15 minutes chatting with the spouse, and then other chores, I'm going to bed (before anyone asks, I watch 0 TV and do very little by way of social networks).
I have a colleague who's in his late 20's, no kids, and he's on Slack all. the. time. He talks about stuff he worked on (for work, not for hobbies) over the weekend. I don't think I produce as much as him, to be honest. Makes me a bit anxious about where I stand - hard to compare my 40 hours to effectively his whole life.
I think I need a plan B.
(Related discussion - and the article is 10 years old so the young'uns then are getting in to their 30's now) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9361580
Depends on the area though, I guess. Video game companies seem to have a preference for working people into the ground.
The colleague you described who has no life except work rings very familiarly with my time there.
In my experience, wherever I went, there was always a no-lifer on the team(no kids/wife/girlfriend, no sports/hobbies) who used to answer emails after midnight and push to git on a Sunday hoping to get that pat on the back from the managers. Career advancements were difficult as at your performance review he would be used as the benchmark.
I live in Ireland, which was one of the easier places re: visa, cultural integration, language, etc. and it's been pretty good to me all things considered.
(I'm a CS prof.)
Anyone I know that wanted a tenure-track position did get one (and had options). I graduated from an unranked department and had a positive experience on the market.
In regards to this article, I would not be at all surprised if the average age of first publishing for successful authors was well above 35. Is apparently around 45, for successful startup founders.
'Research: The Average Age of a Successful Startup Founder Is 45' - https://hbr.org/2018/07/research-the-average-age-of-a-succes...
This list is about some of the most popular writers who were over the age of 35 when they became famous. But I was talking to a successful writer on Reddit. They weren't super famous, but they made a good living from writing and selling some YA and fiction. They weren't overnight millionaires, but they did end up starting a small publishing company. They made a solid living, and they were able to raise a family and save for retirement. I don't think they made it to the top of any bestseller lists, but I would still call them a very successful writer.
This is also one of the reasons why I like the Indie Hackers community [1], and also the SaaS podcast [2]. I really like reading stories about people who are building SaaS products that eventually make it $100k per year in revenue. I find these stories much more interesting and relevant than reading about huge fundraising rounds, or the history of Uber and Facebook. You have a much greater chance of success with a smaller sustainable company instead of a crazy moonshot. But you won't get featured in TechCrunch, and you won't make it onto any of these 30 under 30 lists.
With reasons ranging from too risky in terms of expected cost/benefit, to you can't learn as quickly, to family obligations won't give you the time or energy required.
I personally think the learning speed one is bunk -- even if your brain slows down a little (debatable), it seems more than made up for by experience in how you learn most efficiently, on top of general life experience.
So lists like this help remind you that you still can, if you're so inclined. For more inspiration in the creative direction (e.g. writing like in this list), see particularly the well-known book The Artist's Way by Julia Cameron. [1]
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Artists-Way-25th-Anniversary/dp/01431...
And if you are not? Let's say you got to med school, and let's say everything goes PERFECTLY. You are still 47 with $200,000 in student loan debt, what was the point?
Or you to the army because you always wanted to be a Green Beret, now you are 41 with your career dead and a path into management.
You can still take risks, like starting a business, but now the cost is very real. The question of "When do I start living. What's the grind actually for?" starts to become very real.
I also think that success is too broad a term to characterize generally, but if you think about different opportunities and pressures in each logical window of time in an average person's life then it should be apparent that different varieties of success are more probable for each timeframe, even if chance contributes on an equal basis with any other personal attribute.
In any case, being comfortable with wingin' it is probably itself a favored characteristic.
-- https://hbr.org/2018/07/research-the-average-age-of-a-succes...
Have you not noticed the constant barrage of stories like "21-year-old sells billion-dollar company!" or "Teenager discovers new medical breakthrough!"? Or the dozens of "30 under 30" lists?
This seems to be a response to that.
I’m floating along okay, but I’m deathly afraid of dev jobs and employers locking me out for being too old or not having some TED talk in my field.
Possibly. For instance, Einstein was essentially done by his 30s.
By Western Society norms, yes. But there's no reason to take notice of what other people around you expect you to be doing at a given age. If you feel the need to learn something new, or branch out in a different direction - do it! Or at least start planning to do it.
I'm currently on my 5th career - some may see that as a failure to commit, irresponsible even. I consider it a welcome challenge - a chance to prove myself (again) and an opportunity to grow while having some fun along the way.
> And when speaking to friends older than me, the majority seem to still be fumbling through as well.
This information is only released to people after they pass their 40th birthday; leaking such information to younger people is strictly forbidden!
If you look into the biographies of successful people, "winging it" is very much not an apt description.
One of the most impactful realizations I've had in my entire life is that, with _incredibly_ few exceptions, everyone is fumbling. All the time. Regardless of age. Some people are just better at hiding it than others.
After I was able to fully internalize that, life got easier. I stopped putting so much pressure on myself. It became "okay" if I didn't know how to deal with a situation, or felt completely overwhelmed. I'm still fumbling, but I've come to terms with it and I feel much better as a result.
If I ever feel really confident I've "figured out" life, that's when I'll get really worried.
He lost everything after the 1882 market crash and eventually moved to Tahiti to pursue the allure of the 'free-spirited and noble savage'. Whilst there he took three teenage brides and infected them with syphilis, from which he himself eventually died.
You might also want to point out that by the time he became a full time painter sale of paintings was also super low so it wasn't that the decision was purely because stock brokering was a less desirable outcome. He knew he was choosing a life of poverty.
Also I didn't realize it was going to be "those that started after 35 & then achieved success" which is a great idea.
What does come into it (and why this bias continues) is that perhaps a highly percent of older IT workers are behind the times or irrelevant - some people simply stop wanting to learn and grow.
They are more likely to have one of those pesky families that get in the way of absolute, total devotion to the company.
They might even be so "uncommitted" to the work that they go home by 6pm.
Often older IT people will recognise a dead-end idea that they have tried before which failed and are hesitant for good reason.
When you are young you want to dazzle people with your own projects, when you get old you want to have money enough that you get time to dazzle people.
But in the end we never really dazzle people like we did when coding young, because we want to make younglings to feel encouragement, especially before college.
https://news.northeastern.edu/2016/11/03/new-study-success-c...
The "I'm 30, so I'm to old" syndrome is a consequence of very natural social phenomenon - society wants one to be well defined and established, easy to predict.
Most Australians would tell you if you asked them that you can achieve something extraordinary, or begin something new after the age of 35. But I think people are just trying to say the right thing. They know it's true in their heads, but I am not sure that their hearts know.
I am under the age of 25, so well under 35, and I am hoping to live out this advice, and spend my early years learning to learn, and constantly try out new stuff. But there are very few role models that I can look to in my life who have really kicked off their work at 30 or 35. I suspect this is true for a lot of people (regardless of age). Grandmothers getting degrees is still a quaint, publishable news-story.
I would love to hear from any people in the hacker news crowd that have changed careers 'late,' or intentionally spent their early years taking career/skill risks.
I fumbled for a few years before worming my way into a middle-ranked graduate department of Neuroscience. Learned how to work an MRI and how to hack scripts in Matlab. Realized I could think in maths/stats even though none of my transcripts suggested I could (my only undergrad math course was calculus, I took it twice, and the second time I got a 67). I went to a conference in 2012 and saw a Harvard Business Review article on big data in the airport on my way home. I thought to myself "no one is going to care about my MRI research but I bet I can become a data scientist without a PhD".
So I found a lab-tech job post-MSc for a bit and then I became a "research methods specialist" and worked in a research hospital for 4 years. I learned a lot about high-performance computing, the kinds of models used for pre-clinical trials, and methods development for clinical research. I ended up on a lot of papers. My CV now rivals many PhD grads I know.
Then through some networking and persistence, I find myself at the tail end of a professional MSc in computer science at a top-ranked machine learning institute. I have successfully survived both core CS coursework and graduate courses in reinforcement learning and deep learning. I'm currently working on multiple deep learning research projects and getting to know some really interesting people doing biomedical startups.
10 years ago I was living in my dad's basement, a psych grad who couldn't math and showed pretty much zero aptitude for these kinds of endeavors. I never would have believed that I would be in the kind of program I am in now. I'm only 32, and my story isn't done, but I'm sure if I make it onto any list, it will be one for people over the age of 35.
Great to see you being an ace though! I hope you keep moving forward.
If you want to get involved in research projects (which I do think helps you land more creative jobs) I would suggest working your hard-core software dev background when you pitch potential collaborators. You would be very surprised to see the quality of code coming out of some researchers because there is little incentive to be a good software engineer in academia. The normal way to participate in research is to be in a PhD program but there are many other ways so long as you can work closely with people who come from a more traditional research trajectory.
Are companies in geospatial or government aerospace groups hiring people with your skills? Might be a first step?
At my school, I was required to take algos and data structures in addition to the program requirements. This was to make up for the fact that I wasn't already a CS grad. Way less time effort and money than a full CS degree! So maybe you can find a similar arrangement?
From my experience, if you're going to pay for more school, you should try to get a masters. A prof once gave me the same advice "it's more work (i.e., a BSc is typically 3-4 years) and in the end you will just have another bachelors". The nice thing about MSc programs is they tend to be more project-based and focus on higher-level concepts so you learn more useful / high-level stuff than in undergrad IMHO.
Good luck! There's always an alternate path :)
You'll like his work if you enjoy literary fiction with a formalist and philosophical bent. Fairly calm and airy.
What exactly are you hoping to hear? Because, among other things, I walked away from a National Merit Scholarship. I think I did the right thing and I think I'm doing important stuff, but the world still sees me as a big fat nobody.
So what exactly are you looking for? "Life advice"? Only to hear from people with some kind of substantial public recognition who got started late?
Also from Australia, and we are a pretty optimistic bunch in polite company. My opinion is that people are increasingly more likely to settle for the life they have already, so they don't try big things, not that they get less likely to succeed at them.
As someone else pointed out though, we aren't in the silicon valley rat race. We have a much less turbulent and ephemeral economy to work in. I think if you take on real problems you can see long term success here, it's just not going to be a billion dollar venture funded exit.
My degrees were in economics and arts, which I swapped to from CS explicitly because i wanted to learn things I didn't know, not get good grades on things I did. I worked security night shift during uni which let me read and study whatever I wanted while being paid for it.
From there I took an relatively unskilled level job doing order processing with a legal publishing firm. What i consider my first 'real' program was written there. We did all our processing through this crappy slow manual interface with manual data entry, menu selection, and second long pauses between menus and pages. I hypothesized you could map out each menu and form in the entire application via unique pixel patterns grabbed from each screen and wrote a program that could get from any place in the software to any other and knew where in the menu system it was. Then I wrote a simple spreadsheet interface with some simple memory (since I observed huge portions of our entry was the same data/orders from the same customers, so why do we re-enter the same details multiple times?). I hooked it all together and could thus spend the first hour or two of the day filling out the data spreadsheet: the program could then read the spreadsheet and essentially do my job for me. It new how to interface with my workstation, knew where it was, where to go for every order type, didn't get bored or make mistakes and entered everything infinitely faster than a human typist. I have a real soft spot for that program, watching it zoom the mouse around the screen and do everything automatically still makes me feel proud.
From there I moved to a performance manager job where I implemented algorithms to try to back-engineer government rating systems and use our sample of the market to offer predictions before government sources were published.
Then I moved into a research/policy position.
I used this to get work at the national stats bureau: where I volunteered to work on the hard programming problems no one else wanted. I then transferred into the analytics specialist section therein where I started my work and research on data linking.
Then I used that to move cities and got employed by a bank as an analytics specialist.
Then I left there and am now with my current employer.
I'm just over 35, live where I want to live, never stopped learning either programming or my other fields, haven't had to work for any job I consider unethical, have almost paid off my home, started a young family, and am gainfully employed with experience in philosophy, economics, stats, analytics, computer science, security, and publishing :p
I had failed grades and often barely handed in assignments for uni, and now I'm relatively confident I could run circles around most academics.
Anyone who says your best work happens in your 20s is an ignorant fool. Knowledge compounds. I was relatively smart during my 20s, but I was nothing compared to what I am now in my 30s.
I expect my 40s will be even better...
Before the switch, I was used to working insane hours, and I had little money (due the failed restaurant). So I was hungry, no family to support, and in a perfect situation to go for broke.
Today? I could never make the same changes. Supporting a family, and a wife with a career of her own. A mortgage, and retirement in a decade. All these things limit the amount of change you can (or are willing to) take. So I put my curiosity into hobbies etc.
Are you 35 and want to become a doctor? An architect? An engineer? An actor? Go back to school and you’ll get there by 42.
The problem is that most people either have financial commitments or too much pride to go back to the start again.
What do people in Silicon Valley plan to do once they are over 35 since most will neither make it big nor move up the management chain of command?
https://www.quora.com/What-do-people-in-Silicon-Valley-plan-...
It takes a lot of discipline to keep the right state of mind.
"Good enough" is an all encompassing set of criteria. You can be the most brilliant person in the world, but if you are unable or unwilling to take the necessary risks to achieve X, then you re not good enough. If you're too risk taking, that's also not good enough. Everything plays into that.
Like a former F1 driver whose name I can't remember said in a podcast once: "Yeah I was good. I was really good. On my best days I was faster than Schumacher, Senna, Prost, and all of them" ... "So why weren't you champion?" ... "Well that's the thing. I was amazing on my good days. The real champions, the ones that make history, they don't have bad days or good days. They're _always_ at their best."
The other realization: You play the cards you've got, not the cards you wish you had. Wherever you are right now, whatever you've got in terms of skill, assets, connections, etc ... that's what you've got to work with. Focus on playing the hand you have the best way you can.
Surely some material success needs to be accomplished but it is proven that above a certain level the returns of it in term of happiness diminish.
You can also forget about goals that younger you imposed on you. I am sure that even younger you imposed even sillier goals that you just outgrew. Maybe you aspired to be the best in Counter-Strike, date the most popular girl/guy in high school or becoming a great PHP developer who works for Yahoo? Who knows but nobody cares anymore.
You can outgrow the current ones too.
Opportunities and aspirations come and go as we grow, age, get sick or well, poorer or richer. Don't stick to the old ones and explore the ones that are appropriate to your situation.
I'll see what lasts longer, me or my failures. :)
Borrowed elements of proposed solution from adjacent spaces.
Currently in pre-seed stage, so still a lot of work to do.
Unfortunately all failures have their own nuances. In some cases it was the issue with market dynamics, in others I think the idea itself was not good enough. I think we always underestimate the inertia of a market, healthcare and anything to do with government are prime examples of that. Of course I'm sure I also lack something but I try to make it up with tenacity. Disclosure, some of the attempts were side projects while I was willing to full time, which, while financially better, had its own issues.
Regarding your situation, I'll say take a look at two things, your financial situation and what idea you have.
Not sure if that's what you're looking for but I'd be happy to shoot you an email to chat offline.
I'm over 35 and my productivity and capacity to learn new things has only continued to grow over time.
It's true that many exceptional artifacts have been produced by people when they're relatively young. I think this is more a byproduct of ignorance (i.e., seeing the world with a fresh pair of eyes). But as this list shows, maybe age isn't the critical factor -- maybe it's about diving into something new and unfamiliar.
Maybe our industry just grinds the greatness out of you by 25 or 30 unless you actively fight it.
Part of that 20 years' experience, of course, is learning to ignore 'best practices' that actually aren't 'best' at all (or more likely, are 'best' for some situation you're not actually in).
Maybe people just get tired of churning out CRUD apps after 10 years and want to do something else. A lot of stuff loses its charm after you see behind the curtain.
I also remember someone bringing up a good point (it might have been here or something I watched, I can’t remember) that software engineers don’t actually get that many ‘attempts’ at doing a full software system from scratch. How often does the average software engineer get to design a system from requirements, build a system from scratch, take it through production and then into maintenance in that length of time?
I'm still just as productive as I was in my 20's, but now I've got decades more experience than my peers and can see things that the hubris and arrogance of youth never let me see before - like, how important it is to be able to work with others, not hold onto projects selfishly .. how important it is to check oneself before one wrecks oneself, and so on.
If I had a way, there'd be so much advice I'd give to my younger self...
To get back on track though, I’ve know people who switched careers as they got older and excelled where they ended up. My mother in law got her PHD after 55, and is currently using it vividly to influence and teach around the country. She was a high-school teacher for 20 years before she got into research. If you look beyond anecdotes though, research has shown that the most successful company founders are 40-49[1]. I’m sure a lot of those people have been trying since they were in their 20ies. As I’ve said I think experience is usually an advantage, but that doesn’t mean it’s a requirement. I don’t think it’s ever too late to go for it, I mean, you probably won’t win the Tour de France in your 50ies, but you don’t have to be successful. There are a few Danish authors who are successful that started late, that you’ve never heard of because they aren’t successful enough to make it on a list like this. They make a living doing what they love though.
[1] https://hbr.org/2018/07/research-the-average-age-of-a-succes...
I have no connections to the book. Just recently came across it and it addresses many of the topics in this thread.
"We live in a society where kids and parents are obsessed with early achievement, from getting perfect scores on SATs to getting into Ivy League colleges to landing an amazing job at Google or Facebook–or even better, creating a startup with the potential to be the next Google or Facebook or Uber. We see software coders becoming millionaires or even billionaires before age 30 and feel we are failing if we are not one of them.
But there is good news. A lot of us–most of us–do not explode out of the gates in life. That was true for author Rich Karlgaard, who had a mediocre academic career at Stanford (which he got into by a fluke), and after graduating, worked as a dishwasher, night watchman, and typing temp before finally finding the inner motivation and drive that ultimately led him to start up a high-tech magazine in Silicon Valley, and eventually to become the publisher of Forbes magazine. There is a scientific explanation for why so many of us bloom later in life. The executive function of our brains don’t mature until age 25–and later for some. In fact, our brain’s capabilities peak at different ages. We actually enjoy multiple periods of blooming in our lives.
Based on several years of research, personal experience, and interviews with neuroscientists and psychologists, and countless people at different stages of their careers, Late Bloomers reveals how and when we achieve full potential–and why an algorithmic acuity in math is such an anomaly in terms of career success."
But, when these people we're mentioned to have published after 35, it kinda tells me that these people have been writing for quite some time
Another list that I would like to see is people, who just started writing extensively after 35 and getting published after 35 : )
That being said, I do suspect there will be a much greater number of people emerging at older ages over the next few decades as more people opt to not go down the typical path of obligations and more flexible work situations allow for more time to focus on passions (for those who can afford to not be working all the time)
He was one of the world best novelists. Good things need time. Many even thought he is Thomas Pynchon, but his style is imho much better than Pynchon's. No comparison.
Yes, Lampedusa had been dead for a year when his book was published--but how old was he when he wrote it? U.S. Grant was otherwise occupied for much of the time before he began his memoir, wasn't he? Burgess's Little Wilson and Big God shows that he did quite a bit of writing before he got Time for a Tiger published.
I didn't even start making technical video courses until I was 35 which involved writing close to 1 million words in a few years. That would be roughly 4,000 pages of content in book form.
Come to think of it, 35 is when I started writing a blog too.
"These writers got their start after age 35"
"crop of “Best 35 Writers Under 35,” "
What about the actual 35 year olds?