Ask HN: Are there any opportunities for an old generalist?

I know people who work as web developers for shoes companies, furnitures companies, etc. and since they are a pretty much a "1 developer + 1 designer" team they need to be very well versed.

At 40 years old you should know there are no right answers to questions like these, and life is what you make it.

From my experience going through the whole resume sending and interviewing process you won't get much respect. You will be competing with fresh college graduates. Best is probably knowing somebody you have worked with and who is hiring.

Addition: That's the nature of the industry. Most of the current javascript, inverted binary trees hotshots will be dinosaurs in 10-20 years and face the same situation.

You are still a kid yourself. ;)

Don't sell yourself short. All that experience is valuable beyond the technical aspects. Just think of the soft skills and business knowledge that you have acquired. Also, you have demonstrated that you are open to learn new things.

> I don't have a ton of the management experience

But you have worked with a lot of managers and have learned the good and the bad from them.

> 2-year veteran with that specific skillset could offer.

Not everybody hires by buzzwords. I would say that the best companies hire the best "athletes" regardless of the specific skills.

2) Assuming you didn't underestimate - what skills do you want to focus on? You might be stuck in a local maximum, and need to travel in a painful direction for a while to improve your position.

3) Management skill doesn't matter for senior engineers. Leadership matters. As a consultant, you should have developed some skills in that area.

4) An 18-year veteran in the industry can make wildly varying amounts of money. Nothing except equity in a risky startup with high potential, <$100k in a high-prestige industry like video games or SpaceSomething, >$150K working for a large profitable company. Don't pin yourself to your age cohort, figure out what you think you're worth, and which place you'd like to be in.

5) We don't need a general warning. People tell "youngsters" all the time to think about their long term career. They ignore most of the advice, as they should. (If you're young, you're usually prone to take a lot of risk, because recovery is straightforward and easy, and it often leads to valuable experience).

At some point in their life, people realize that some of the advice now applies to their life. You're at that point when it comes to "plan ahead". No point looking back, that's not changeable - but look at all the planning advice now, with the benefit of 18 years of experience, and see what applies to you.

Here is what I mean. Let's say you see a job opening for a person with 5-6 years of experience in language X and you are fluent in language X and have projects you can point to or experience you can share. Tailor your resume to point to those projects and don't use a chronology based resume, use a skills/projects based resume. This way you can tailor it to each position where you have relevant skills. This is marketing yourself and selling yourself. While I say tailor your resume, never lie, just highlight things that are relevant and that give them a reason to want to call and talk to you. Then the fact that you are a generalist and can answer questions on 10 other technologies and processes etc, will add value for you not detract and make you look wide and shallow technically.

And moving forward, carve out a niche for yourself that makes you special in some way, don't lose the ability to do multiple things, but focus in an area.

If you approach job hunting this way, e.g. you are marketing yourself, you will have far greater success and have a far better chance of commanding the higher dollar.

That's what happened the last three jobs I had -- sent my resume to the CIA and they anally probed me. Lots of fun.

edit: Having alternated startups with big companies for about ten years myself, I feel like a startup environment can be "stable enough" for a father of young children. But you have to be willing to grill them during your interview process about burn rate and runway. A well funded startup can even be a good way to ride out a downturn for a year or two!

Saying, "I can do pretty much anything you need but I'm not particularly good at any of it" makes you an undesirable candidate.

Look at that list of skills you wrote down, pick one, and become passable at it - then you can start looking for jobs.

Hope this helps! Good luck!

When I was young, I'd get hired to do things I'd never even done before, because, "you're smart, and you'll figure it out." And I was smart, and I did figure it out. Yay.

When I became old, I'd only get hired if 1) I had generated explicit expertise in the area they were hiring for, and I could prove it, or 2) I was being hired by someone I worked with 20 years earlier who remembered me and that I was smart and could figure things out.

So the advice is: 1) go back in time and generate a huge network of people who can testify as to your general competence, they will help you keep making a living for decades to come or, 2) (if no time machine available) pick ONE thing, read everything you can about it and and practice it, and become an expert, so you can pass the interview in today's world.

As a good generalist, you can learn new things fast. But you'll have to do the learning before you get hired, not after.

Plus, many of those gigs will be long enough (even a few years) to let you add a bit of depth to your experience in a few areas that you can then sell as strengths when you're ready to move on.