Ask HN: Did you change career paths after 30?
If so, how’d that work out? Advice?
I left engineering (non-CS) at 36 y/o to become a firefighter-paramedic. Long story short, took EMT-Basic at night for shits and giggles, realized I really liked it. Then went to paramedic school afterwards not knowing what I was going to do with it. Close to graduation from PM, county FD was hiring paramedic only and cross training to be FF as well. I figured if I didn't do it then I never would so I did. The best career decision I ever made. I stayed for 14 years before covid scared me away due to a chronic medical condition I have. I was married and we had just had our 1st child. (Still married, oldest graduated H.S. this year and our other is a sophomore in H.S.).
During the 14 years as a FF/PM, I felt I needed a backup plan in case I got hurt or my medical condition got to the point I had to leave (thought of this WAY before covid). I went back to school for a master's in CS, online. I was 40 y/o when I started school and completed at 45 y/o. After graduation I worked a few part time, remote jobs as a software developer.
Then in 2020 covid hit, I had enough, and started applying for CS jobs. Landed my 1st full time gig at 50 y/o. Stayed for 2 years and then, last year at 52 y/o I landed a new software dev position.
Never once, even the positions I interviewed for but did get the job, did I feel my age was a factor. It was never my plan to have a diverse and disjointed resume, it just happened. I did things I felt were in the best interest for my family and/or me, with an eye on the future.
I've got a 5-year plan to leave tech and go back to school to become a therapist, specifically working with people suffering from OCD (and perhaps some other forms of anxiety). At this point it's mostly meeting with people in the industry to hear their stories, with a goal of applying to master's programs in the next two years.
Most likely complete a 3 year program and then open up a private practice.
Demand for therapy in my area (Seattle) is at an all-time high, and there are often considerable wait lists when it gets specific like OCD.
I do a ton of work with exposure and response prevention for ocd. Also work with autism, more generalized anxiety issues, mood disorders, lgbt issues. Have history with pediatric patients, dissociative and homeless populations. Let me know if you have questions. I’m east coast, northeast specifically, but I’ve been doing this work for well over a decade now and would be happy to help guide if I can
Okay a few things to toss out for your thoughts:
1) I'm sure there are lots of "idealistic" views I have about being a therapist, but I'm also realistic. There are going to be "harder" clients, I'm sure dealing with insurance / chasing payments / etc isn't fun, but in what other ways might one be too idealistic about thinking of therapy as a career?
2) Any specifics as to why you're looking to move?
Those splits can sound high but they make sense for smaller groups in areas with high commercial rent. That said I’ve since shifted to telehealth and gone fully private with my own llc. This has significantly raised my income (almost doubled). But this creates major headaches because I no longer have that buffer. It can be heartbreaking at times to work with a client who is truly trying hard, struggling because of financial stress, and then having to tell them their card was declined. Or even worse, the insurance finally processed the last three sessions, it turns out their policy had lapsed, and they now owe you $360 plus another $120 for today. Do you shoulder the burden and eat those costs to help that person struggle a bit less? Tough call.
Other things in terms of idealism: the hourly rate is pretty decent. Around here a masters level clinician will get ~$85/38-52 minute session and ~$110/53+ min session. And you will likely have no shortage of clients; I’m always overbooked and I have a wait list through the end of December right now (which is the cap, I could easily just let it grow). BUT you are working with people with mental health issues. You will have people that no show. You will have people that cancel. Sometimes it’s the standard stuff like right now strep and RSV are going around or in a few weeks the holidays will happen. You will have people that enthusiastically begin services, tell you their life story, create a treatment plan, then disappear. Your earnings will become contingent on how well you can keep your utilization up. There will be weeks where you work a lot but you spend a lot of time doing things you don’t bill for; answering emails, doing new patient consults, etc. if you work with kids/teens this becomes much worse because you inevitably get parents that want to constantly check in. Your life becomes a balancing act of setting boundaries around this stuff. Do you just refuse to do it? Do you become the therapist that charges for every contact? Do you just give in and become the therapist that works 70 hours a week and gets paid for 30?
Practice ideals too: a lot of the day to day is way more frustrating than you can conceptualize. The ideal is someone comes in and says “I want to work on x” and then you do conceptualize the case and do that. But a shocking amount of people come in and say “I don’t know why I’m here”. Therapy can be so muddy and ill defined. In addition a lot of mental health issues are really sociological and economic issues masquerading as mental health issues and we’re often just not supposed to mention that which is frustrating. Like an employee who has a disability but the employer is being an asshole about accommodations will sometimes come to therapy to vent about the anxiety and frustration it causes. There’s nothing wrong with this person; they just work for an asshole. Or someone who is chronically anxious because they are poor. They might have actually mh issues but it’s really hard to tell with that financial stress constantly confounding everything. Etc.
You’ll certainly get the more annoying kind of harder too. People who push boundaries and email or text you 200 times a week. People who get really upset with you for challenging them a bit and freak the fuck out. People who make everything into a joke and never take anything seriously. People who talk over you and refuse to hear anything you say. People who refuse to honor your time limits and push past the end of session even though they know others are waiting. People who say nothing the whole time they are with you. People who text you to schedule an appointment, don’t respond when you reply asking what would work for them, and getting pissy that you didn’t track them down like you’re their parent.
Generally though in terms of “harder” clients you should be fine on the outpatient level as long as you have good boundaries. Outpatient is somewhat limited in level of severity that can be treated so if you’re encountering someone that’s actively suicidal/homicidal, someone whose health is compromised to the point of danger (eg severe eating disorder), someone whose lost touch with reality completely or is significantly delusional, etc you should be referring out to higher level of care. In outpatient your “harder” will almost always be the above
One last big thing from a practice point is the vicarious trauma thing. If you do trauma work it can be rough to hear the awful shit people have gone through. Although while this may sound callous it’s not always as rough as you would think. I’ve heard absolutely horrible stories of sexual assault, child abuse, etc, and they don’t really stick with me the way I worried they would. What sticks with me more is the day to day pessimism. Talking to people who are in depressive episodes all day for years can really fuck with you. Keep yourself in check, do your own therapy, self care, whatever it takes
Keep in mind the beginning of the career kind of sucks. The system is built to keep community mental health agencies afloat, at least on this side of the country. Don’t be surprised if you have to spend the first ~2 years post grad working for peanuts in an agency accruing hours for licensure. Your wages will go up significantly once this occurs, especially if you go telehealth only fully independent. And especially so if you work a lot. A great deal of therapists only work 10-20 client hours per week. I do more like 30-35, 6-7 per day. It’s not a particularly long day. 2 people, break, 2 people, break, 1-2 people, done. 8 hours with 2 hours of breaks. This is where I break from my colleagues a bit as a lot of my peers think this schedule is too much. I think they’re being a bit dramatic tbh. I also think this is why they complain about barely making 60-70k a year and I’m making well over six figures even with a pretty generous sliding scale. I don’t mean to brag, genuinely, but more to illustrate that you can make a solid living wage in this career if you work smart and put in the hours. It’s not an easy job by any means but at the same time what job lets you put in 20-30 hours a week and make six figures? That’s absurd. However, you can realistically put in an actual 40 and make a solid income with a potential for very good work life balance.
As for question 2 I think it’s mostly that I’m a bit bored. I’ve been doing clinical practice for over a decade now and it’s work that I enjoy but I find myself doing more stuff on the side. My projects on the side get more and more ambitious and I figure it would be nice to develop those skillsets more with actual connections. I’ve kept programming and doing a lot of microcontroller stuff since high school (which was 20 years ago, ugh) so I’ve gotten pretty decent but at the same time I’m sloppy in a lot of ways because I’ve never had a proper instructor or mentor. I think connecting with a proper work environment or maybe going back to school might help take me to a more serious level. I’d really like to be good enough to combine my programming skill with my research interests in behavioral psych and operant conditioning models. Although I’m sure there’s some 22 year old in the machine learning gold rush beating me to it lol
Sorry for the novel, I’m pretty chatty. hope this helps!
Appreciate it!
Each has worked out better than the last and brought me more enjoyment (and dollar bills as well, ah gem). I still like my rocks, but I really like coding, too.
Now over 40 though. Hoping to stick with the software engineering side of things from here on out. But who knows!
Edit: In terms of advice - if you’re bored or lacking fulfillment in your current role and something else legitimately interests you, take the chance and do it.
It’s not always possible of course, I am very very fortunate in having a partner who is supportive and can help cover us financially while I attempted to ramp us in new careers.
But people with a strong enough desire seem to find a way. It just might take a bit longer.
And, if you care to postulate, do you think the opportunities are more for geologists to supplement their work with programming or more for software engineers to solve geology problems for geologists?
I was tired of having to keep redoing the same thing whenever the product owner or designer changed their mind on something, and the tipping point came after they were looking for suggestions for this one visualization clients had a hard time understanding. No one liked my suggestion so we did one of the other ones, then a few months later it came up again as still too confusing and the designer came up with something new - that just so happened to be the same thing I had originally suggested. It's been that version ever since.
Switching to maintenance here meant that we're directly solving problems. Not just "thing is broken, fix it" but also creating simple for-purpose tools, refactoring and upgrading, and largely being able to plan our own work. It's been a great place to use the depth of knowledge built up over the years, though not so great for new devs to build that knowledge in the first place, like we typically would try and use the role for.
- in job1, I redid the same thing three times (!!) using different tech stacks and/or different designs; got tired and found new job
- in job2 I was working on performance and tooling, so this was quite new; but after 2-3 years it became clear the app will go the same endless cycles of UI rewriting & refactoring, with things changing faster and performance degrading faster than I could improve it
- in job3 I'm in a senior role & platform team, building & ops-ing stuff; but most importantly the company is here to stay, and it builds new stuff; there's a very stable design system, and we keep innovating & keeping lights green, rather than doing endless brand refreshing.
Also a critical diff IMO: job3 is a b2b product -> focus is on making stuff work;
job1 & job2 were b2c products -> focus was on chasing new b2c customers (hence endless UI changes, lack of focus and vision)
After that, pivot to IT security ... burn out. Then pivot to web development which emphatically burnt me in different ways (I'm kind of nonvisual, so visualizing things is my bane. see aphantasia which I found out about later). Last - embedded electronics software, where I'm much happier. Sadly out of work for the last year so let's see where next....
Advice? It took longer to get a job as an SWE than I had anticipated. I kind of stumbled into being a Unix sysadmin way back when and didn't give much thought into getting my first SWE job paying a real salary.
In hindsight I would have paid more attention to college internships (although I don't know what companies make of someone 30+ on an internship). I was enthusiastic about Android when it came out, and at this point I'm happy I focused on it, but if I had been studying Javascript and React instead of Java and Android I might have gotten a job sooner. Also, I was doing my own projects and did not think to work for some small company for low pay, but eventually I did - I made a little money, got a little experience and had something to put on my resume and talk about in interviews - and I was upfront with them that I was not planning to stay for many years (I wound up staying about a year and eight months, longer than I had anticipated).
So my advice would be to think about how you're going to get that first job on the career path, beyond the idea that you'll go to college (or training) and study hard. I went to college and studied hard, and even was doing a lot of my own projects as well, but in retrospect it took longer to get that first job with a decent salary than I had anticipated.
I worked for small startups for 2.5 years in order to gain relevant experiences.
I'm currently working for a large company, but I don't think I could get this opportunity if I didn't have the experiences gained through small companies.
The university job worked out in the end. I got tenure after a few years, and I had many more opportunities to learn and to interact with interesting people than if I had continued as a freelancer. I retired from the university earlier this year at the age of 65.
Looking back, I am glad I made that change when I did. But I still remember how nervous I was the day in September 2005 when I emailed my long-term translation clients and told them I couldn't accept work from them anymore.
I myself went from support > consulting > dev > cloud. None of those are a change in career! It is all still software!
Neither is going from a SWE in one industry to a SWE in another! That is just a new job!
Going from SWE to being a Firefighter or Police is a change in career.
Going from being an ER nurse to a SWE is a damn change in career!
I also wish I reached out to my network a bit more and talked to other SWEs prior to accepting my role. Not that I would have changed my decision, just could have leveraged friends to get a sense of the day-to-day.
It's been working out well due to me having doing something I enjoy more than doing something that makes me money.
What I regret is not getting here sooner.
Five more years after that and I make 10x what I did 10 years ago and am working towards FIRE. My family lives on <30% of my income, the rest goes to savings and investments. We should reach our FIRE number before I turn 50.
I love the work I do (DevOps with a Security focus), and that year off I took I was miserable. I'll probably never really retire, just be to the point where I can do the work I need to in under four hours per day and travel.
Also any tips on how to 10x? I'm happily employed but I would be open to moving. I've sent quite a few resumes out but no offers that are outside of what I already make.
The easiest way to 10x is to work 80 hours per week, but make sure you get paid for 80 hours per week, not just 40. I'm a workaholic, so I've been doing that for years on end.
I work multiple C2C contracts and make sure that the work that I do overlaps heavily between clients. I only take on clients that are all in on terraform and lean heavily on AWS managed services. With those two keystones in place, the value I can provide clients is far in excess of what they normally would get because I get to see it all. I run into an issue at Client A, and I put things in place at Client B to mitigate that issue before it even occurs. The DR solution I design for Client B is mostly copy/paste for Client C with minor adjustments and all the lessons from having just completed a DR failover test for Client A.
Started as a retail pharmacist, moved to become hospital pharmacist, a sidetrack to become a COBOL computer programmer in warehouse software, then back to retail pharmacy plus aviation training as far as Commercial Pilot Licence, then back to retail pharmacy when General Aviation went through a downturn, followed by becoming general manager of the family's Commercial Rents business.
In my youth it was common to see people stay in one job for all their working lives. Today it's common for people to have several careers over that time period.
SE is not moving to these places for better quality.
But if you slap an identity on your profile then where you are may not matter that much. There will still be a pay gap but pay will be worth while.
Guess what i am trying to say is that it is worth giving a shot but that shot needs to be given your all you have. I dont have specific examples but it is doable.
Plenty of poeple live in 3rd world countries and have found ways to break into SE and make a decent living. If they can do it, so can you. All the best
But seriously, there 8 billion of us on the planet and things can be massively different for different people.
First, software engineering is NOT necessarily well paid anywhere. A lot of that is a usa thing! Even in Canada, developers are far less on the crazy side of bell curve than in usa. None of my friends can make any sense of usa salaries. And in many other parts of the world, IT worker is an office worker. No special unique magic dust attached to profession.
Second, why do you assume you don't need a degree anywhere? That's true in many companies in usa. It's not necessarily the case in all companies everywhere.
Et cetera et cetera. Being In The right city, family, ethnicity, religion, group, caste can also make a massive difference in many places. There's just a zillion aspects to being successful in various situations that not all of us may be aware of.
Sorry if I'm harsh, but having lived in places outside of the North American continent and still remembering their reality / having contacts around the world, the willing, arrogant and patronizing HN bubble sometimes really grates me :-/
(if on the other hand / benefit of doubt, your intent was to encourage the op, I think the message slightly missed the mark... Better luck next time :)
It certainly was. I do realize though that my style is too crude and seems to lack empathy.
Nothing about the GP indicated victimhood, only striving for a better life with real challenges in front of them.
All of my experience was mainframes and cobol anyway, and leaving that for a more modern SWE is a radical path change as well.
Anyway. Working as a SWE sucked all of the fun out of it. Now I get to enjoy it as a hobby again.
I know lots of others 30+ who switched to cs after 30 as well. Much less going the other way. It's worked out quite well for everyone I know.
I know thats not at 30... but close enough given the huge change in career trajectory.
But can't leave behind tech. Still writing code to automate things at work.