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Comment by hydrox24 | Hacker News Reader

What a good list.

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.

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I didn't do any of this intentionally. I studied psychology in undergrad and graduated the year of the great financial crisis. Also had a bad GPA, 3.0. I had lots of ideas but there was always a big skills gap between what I wanted to do and what I knew how to do (and what my degree said I could do). I am obsessed with fixing problems in medical decision making (back then it was specific to diagnosis, now I'm more general).

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.

Oh god, I was hoping you'd say 42 or something. I'm 32 myself and you gave me some relief from my sense of urgency until you mentioned your age.

Great to see you being an ace though! I hope you keep moving forward.

Thank you! I shouldn't have put a number on it... the real story is that all that happened over 10 years. I really don't think it has to do anything with age, just consistent effort over time. I was being constantly told that I didn't have what it takes to be in any technical field when I finished university.

This is a great story. It's interesting how someone can have no interest or aptitude in a subject, but then later in life revisit that subject and thrive in it. In college I struggled with my programming classes (did not enjoy them) and decided to go into finance with my Math degree. Later I fell into a programming role and loved it. 25 years later and I still enjoy being a software developer.

I think often you can be fooled into thinking you aren't interested in something because it isn't presented to you in the right way. I still feel this way about math... I am not a "math person" and I find the way mathematicians talk to each other very confusing. Hopefully the move towards digital pedagogy will also be a move to teach the same subjects multiple ways, depending on the individual learner's biases.

Totally agree. I was dropped into a C++ class in college with very little (even using a computer) experience. Later I was eased into web development. Totally different way to be introduced to the field.

Great story! Thanks for sharing. The older I get (33 now) the more I realise that keeping yourself moving forward, learning, experiencing new things, comes down to chance encounters with people and opportunities. We just have to get out there with a positive mindset and an interest in new things. Getting good and comfortable in a career early on can make that challenging.

"Luck favors the prepared" is one of my favorite expressions, and I feel like it applies to this. Chance encounters do create tons of opportunities , but you have to be prepared to take advantage of those opportunities.

Out of curiosity, had you done an undergraduate research project / thesis before getting into an MSc program? Also, what do you mean by a professional Masters? I'm still learning the jargon of academia. I'm sort of following a similar path, through dipping in and out of an undergrad CS degree now that I've sort of become disenchant with web dev. 27 now, but hoping to worm my way into deep learning in the Geospatial field or just some aspect of geo-spatial hopefully with some aspect of the work being field work or generally outside. I'm interested in having something sort of official like contributions to papers, and I'd like to put the deep intellectual interests and obsession with ideas to use. I used to have these with regard to frontend dev, but after re-inventing the same problem so many times, that's getting a little boring.

Like the rest of my story I got super lucky and I don't think it's a repeatable path. I had done a small "research project" for course credit with a professor, but I don't think it counts for much and it didn't go anywhere. The way I got into the MSc was by emailing every single psychology / neuro professor at a university looking for a summer volunteer position! I was taking non-degree coursework at one after being unemployed for a while in order to upgrade my CV enough to get into a program. Back then I think I was aiming to get into something clinical. A new prof. at the time asked to meet with me for the position and then suggested at the meeting that I do a MSc with him. I think he was having trouble recruiting because the rank of the school was not very high. Luckily, he was also super smart and taught me a tonne. That was a research MSc. The professional MSc I am in now is quite new has more emphasis on coursework and not on machine learning research. It's a way for the school to teach a lot more students about deep learning without professors needing to dedicate too many resources to individual student supervision. There is no expectation to publish or anything like that, although there are always ways to publish if you are interested.

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?

How was the road of entering a CS Graduate program from a non CS undergrad? I majored outside of CS and have been mulling around whether to run for a CS masters or just return for a CS undergrad on the side.

If you can convince a CS prof at your target school that has pull that you can handle a CS degree, they can pull strings to get you in. Actually this was done for me to get me into the Neuroscience MSc as well (my undergrad was that lackluster). I was actually rejected formally from both programs before an internal memo written by said professor reversed those decisions.

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 :)

Really? I look at all of the big, successful companies around and their founders were typically over 35 when they founded them. Silicon Valley's young-founder-billionaire thing is hugely atypical in the rest of the world (and hugely atypical in Silicon Valley too, but the few who've made it huge are so visible that people think they're the norm.)

I changed careers at 34 after working in food service and starting my own restaurant. I decided this "Internet" thing had legs and started teaching myself. Got a job where my boss realized how little I knew, and paired me up with someone who has become my best friend and mentor.

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.

I'm only thirty, but my view is that my ability to succeed only grows as I get older as I have more world experience, knowledge and connections to pull from.

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.

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.

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?

I recently read two works by a great Australian writer who didn't publish his first book until he was exactly 35, Gerald Murnane.

You'll like his work if you enjoy literary fiction with a formalist and philosophical bent. Fairly calm and airy.

I don't know if i count since no one knows me (which is one of my goals), but i consider myself to be applicable since I've basically hit all my life goals (well, aside from being a writer which I'll start on now), and my explicit strategy was to focus on learning/upskilling over formal paths.

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...

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