How to get a grad-level job in your 40s | Hacker News Reader

How to get a grad-level job in your 40s

9 pointsthrowJan228 comments

Our grads in our firm earn 140k and aren't expected to know much, they leave after a year or two. Basically I'd like to break into a new company and role and I'd be better than any grad and stick around. I dont need a formal grad program, I dont mind getting a pay cut, I just want to start again. Is it really impossible?

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This is definitely possible. My career in the early 2000's was spent as a mainframe developer and a ColdFusion developer (not very common these days). Then later did random startups and freelance projects for years.

Around 15 years into my career, I got a software engineer position at a game company and had a lot of fun. There are plenty of companies that could use your help. Sure, there will be some that consider you overqualified or may make assumptions based on your long resume, but you only need one yes.

You want a new job?

Yeah, the problem is I want to change areas. Despite an apparent desperate shortage of engineers I'm having trouble getting a job that isn't near-identical to the one I have now. I'd like to do data science or web front ends or something for a change but I'm finding it very difficult to be taken seriously. Its frustrating when I see clueless people getting entry level roles which I could do much easier.

what's your current background?

20 years of corporate java.

For data science, you could get a 1 year masters in statistics and leverage the Java experience for Spark and the associated ML libraries

Thanks - yes I could, however I was hoping to skip that and go straight to a junior role. I see grads hired for such things all the same, I guess its impossible once you're not young any more.

I think there's more to it than that. So many people want to break into data science that the market is flooded at the junior levels. With the masters in stats you cover that half of the role, and the Java covers the programming side of it. I'll bet you could make a lateral move into an ml engineer role

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