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Ask HN: Any mid-life career change hackers out there?

2 points by KevinEldon ↗ HN
I'm a 31-year old who has just started professionally developing. I taught myself to write code when I was 14 (MBasic on KayPro), but I'm not a seasoned developer (meaning I learned about arrays when I was 17). I've got a degree in business and have worked in the IT industry since I was 18, but software development has never been my primary job. My career up to this point has been mostly technical project management in a Fortune 500 technology company. Is there anyone else out there who has started developing as a 2nd (or 3rd, 4th) career? Did you start in an established company or in your own startup?

4 comments

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wmboy
26 years old, quit my job managing a technical support department (also invovled in project mamagment). I'm doing a few freelance contracts and working 30 hours a week at a web design company.

Previously learn some VB.NET, PHP and HTML/CSS. Now I've properly learned HTML/CSS and starting to learn Python.

steveb
I am 41, and recently moved from management into a development role within the same company (a large Fortune 500 company).

I managed a team of UNIX SA's and was doing a decreasing amount of technical work over the past few years. I was trying to learn new technologies with a long-term goal of starting my own firm, but my coding skills were not improving fast enough as I didn't have time to hack at work or at home.

So I found another group within the same company that needed strong UNIX skills in a development role for an Grid application. I basically do whatever they need, whether it is making Windows MSI packages, tying systems together with python or working on the C++ codebase and feeling my head turn to mush.

Sometimes it feels like I do a Google search for every line of code I write, but I get a little better and faster every day. Last week I found myself porting some newer libraries back to python 2.4.