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Comment by woofyman | Hacker News Reader

At 51, I resigned from a company I had worked for 18 years when evil people bought the company. I was primarily a c++ developer. At the same time my long term relationship ended and my mom died six weeks after a cancer diagnosis.

It took six months for me to get interested in coding again. I started experimenting with Processing then developed an ios opengl based app.

I was out of work for 13 months. Now I develop in Lua, CoffeeScript, javascript, angular, php, Java, Clojure, Actionscript. All self taught while on the job. I'm thankful that someone gave me this opportunity. Otherwise I'd still probably be unemployed.

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Can you provide any more details on how/why someone gave you that opportunity? Was it a friend? Friend of a friend? Did you apply for a Lua, javascript, angular, php, Java, Clojure, Actionscript position that you weren't qualified for, but did a good job of selling the transferability of your c++ skills? I'm genuinely interested in the details and any lessons you can share.

When my ios app hit the App Store, I send a message to my linkedin connections. The man who hired me was a former colleague of mine. He knew I had to ability to learn any new technology that I put my mind to.

Thank you!

The evil people who bought us were then purchased by a major Corporation who later had to write down billions of dollars because of alleged financial improprieties (cooking the books to make their stock more valuable)

Ouch!

The last company I worked for closed our division (and laid all of us off) solely because of politics. The irony was that we had had the highest return on investment of any division in the company for more than a decade.

I'm now stuck in a dead-end job at a small company. Our CEO has an absolutely toxic managerial style and I need to get out. Unfortunately, I'm in one of those complicated situations where it's really hard to find another job (e.g., over 40, specialized field, geographically-bound).

The CEO's toxic management style means, among other things, we're all expected to work absurdly long hours. So, I don't have a lot of time to put in to job hunting or retraining, and I have vacillated between how I should be using my precious time.

One of the things I've considered was developing an app (that scratches an itch of mine; but I've heard others complaining about similar problems here on HN, so I know I'm not alone). While your experience certainly doesn't mean that I will get an offer, it supports the premise that a single app can lead down the right road.

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