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Ask HN: How to get back into engineering?

2 points by passwert ↗ HN
I've been an engineer for ~15 years and made the switch to product roughly 6 years ago. While I enjoy product work, I've been noticing that my true passion is still programming/SRE (mainly Python) and I'd like to get back. I fear however that most companies won't consider me,

a) because I'm a bit rusty or too old (35+) b) I'm probably not up to date with the latest technologies. c) I'll likely fail "LeetCode" style interviews...

Has anyone done something similar and can give me some tipps?

I wouldn't mind learning something new (e.g. node.js) and my gut feeling tells me that I should probably look into learning LeetCode-like exam questions.

5 comments

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PaulHoule
There is still a lot of Python work.
seanw444
And apparently surprisingly few professional Python developers, at least in my area. In my interview with my current boss, he mentioned that it was hard to get any responses. It's not particularly unique in its tech stack, either. Python+Django+Postgres.
PaulHoule
I had some bad experiences with Python back in the day (1999!) and then later was disgusted by the Python 2 vs Python 3 split but I got dragged kicking and screaming back into Python because the demand was high and people just kept showing up wanting me to do Python work.

I found out Python 3 wasn't that bad and now it's my preferred language for general hacking even though my paying work tends to involve Java or Javascript.

jstx1
35 isn't old at all. The biggest factor against you is the fact that you've been doing something else for the past 6 years. You need a good story for why you're moving back to development and you need to be able to show that you can still do development work. If you can pick up some development work at your current company, that would help a lot, otherwise think about doing some programming on the side.