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Ask HN: I recently lost everything and I need advice to rebuild my career

3 points by DrJaws ↗ HN
I recently lost everything, I closed my business and my shares on another, after working on them for 10 years. Now I see myself with 35 years and needing to start from almost zero. I do not have the strength, time or money to create a new business, so I am heading to the IT workforce. I can support myself for a few months that I am going to use to renew my knowledge in IT, since everything I studied years ago is not relevant anymore nor I can remember (jsp, ccna, etc)

As I have been outside of IT for such a long time and my age is starting to be a problem, I need to rebuild myself asap.

So, my ask HN.

What should I start today to study to get a decent job in the next year? I’ve been thinking to get a helpdesk low tier job in a few months to at least have some salary and resume, but that’s not enough, I want to plan my future and I need to start studying now. I need to know where should I go and what technologies and fields can offer me the best outcomes for the future. My research says that I should probably invest in machine learning and IA, but I also know that most of the people working there are mathematicians and physicist so could be difficult to land a job there.

Any advice?

Thank you

3 comments

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jamesmp98
What's your current degree? (if any)
DrJaws
HNC in computing (uk), I think is called trade school or vocational in the US?

I left everything because I saw some opportunities outside what I was learning and everything was slow, I used my skills to work trading stocks and forex markets with a small independent team. Then the AI and bots came with billions of investment and we moved to another business that ended failing. My plan was starting next year biotech or a medical degree next year as is one of my fav things to do as a hobby, but everything failed and that can't be accomplished anymore.

jfaucett
My advice would be to figure out what your biggest strengths are and to emphasize and augment those with whatever IT stuff you try to learn. This will give you the biggest payoff for the least amount of effort. Then look at the trade offs for learning whatever tech you want to.

For instance, the trade off probably doesn't make much sense to dive into machine learning if you have to (re)learn linear algebra, probability theory, and calculus before you ever open up a ML book. You'll spend years learning and hence foregoing a better salary just to get prepared to enter the market and be severely disadvantaged against the young and hungry mid 20 year olds whose heads are still chock full of theory and have their first couple of years of experience under their belts.

You have experience building businesses, likely at least decent i.e. easily improvable financial skills, and probably lots of project management experience. A positive example of what I'm talking about is this. Read up on AGILE/Scrum/Kanban, take on some freelance jobs in a domain your comfortable with, apply the methods, and within a year or so you should be able to get a well paid management job.

That's just a suggestion. Do the cost/benefit analysis for yourself, figure out your biggest strengths, and then just learn enough of the IT to bolster your strengths and pump up their monetary value on the market.

Best of luck