Ask HN: Devs/data scis who pivoted to a new career in 30s/40s, what do you do?

Is this true? It doesn't seem true to me. Are there data / studies on this?

If you keep running into an "employment experience" issue but you actually do know what you are doing, a dev I know used to be a maths teacher, created an LLC with a dumb name and created a consulting website. Then after a couple of years of no leads, simply listed themselves as an employee at said LLC on their resume. They are also one of the best devs I've ever had the pleasure of working with.

The hospital bit was key for me both in getting started, and maybe more importantly for the transfer from admin that scripted to developer in engineering. They have a huge demand for people who can program, but the pay is "goodish" at best, and the culture is...slow and crufty. Lots of room for growth, and they are more willing to accept non traditional backgrounds. Best of luck.

I had to leave game development because my seven year old son suffered a tragedy which completely disabled him. Game development is simply too volatile and risky a career for someone with that kind of family obligation.

As for the transition, I had accidentally achieved some recognition as a researcher of land economics through various blog posts. This attracted the attention of a new friend who was inspired by my work to put a startup together, seeing real estate mass appraisal as the most important missing piece for policy reasons, but also a potentially great business idea.

Investors agreed with him and a startup was formed. This gave me an alternative to game dev when I needed it most.

As for the actual work transition, I had a lot of subject matter to learn which we facilitated by hiring experts from the field, including former IAAO researchers (that’s the relevant standards body) as well as local appraisers.

I’m still learning but a lot of my skills transferred. The biggest difference is this is typically a pretty low tech field so many essential skills are soft — all the tech in the world doesn’t matter if you can’t explain things in simple terms to a citizen. As I like to say “Prepare for a property tax protest defense, not a PhD thesis defense.”

The other big difference is cost structure and expectations and competition. Game development is essentially selling one of the hardest kinds of programs to write, to the world’s best served audience, under maximum competition, for the lowest prices.

In local government you can charge what felt to me like large prices and still be genuinely considered cheap compared to what existing vendors charge. And people are used to software that doesn’t work and customer support that never responds. So if you can exceed expectations that is an edge here.

But many tech people have failed in this field, because they can’t master the soft skills and they can’t communicate simply; that part is deceptively hard.

There are projects, the time-scale is like a year, they can fail spectacularly, and it can be perceived as (may actually be) my fault. Projects from years ago can be understood, in hindsight, to have been fucked up. I fantasize about quitting and driving a bus, going home everyday having no doubt that the day's work met expectations. Giving my son a bath without feeling compelled to sneak away for another edit-compile-debug cycle.

It's becoming increasingly evident to me that I just want to stockpile savings against what feels like an increasingly inevitable crash-and-burn of this career. Be it GenAI, my own ADHD and lack of follow-through, whatever.

And when that day comes, just do something I can't fuck up

IME, people are often (not always) very bad at identifying the true source of their psychological stressors. When your life is unsatisfying for reasons that are your fault (or just very hard to fix) and hard to grapple with (e.g., your romantic life is awful, you hate your physical apperance, you antagonized your family, you're an addict, etc.), your working hours can feel intensely oppressive with that other stuff weighing on you and the newness of scenery and focus can appear like an attractive chance to escape. But it's often an avoidance tactic.

I have no idea if that's the OP's issue, but the great vagueness in his question about jumping careers sure raises red flags for me. The grass often isn't greener elsewhere, and the problems just follow you.

This is true.

A fair while back I left database and dev work for a few years. Tried my hand at kitchen design and sales, loading trucks, ISP tech support, chicken farming, builder's merchant sales counter, call centre night manager, farm labourer, collections agent, and more.

Loved it all, but my motivation was to experiment to see if the tech world was just my default or something I truly enjoyed. Turned out it was the latter so I returned to it.

Initially I was down about 20% on salary on my return to the industry, but a couple of years sorted that out and early employers seemed to appreciate the more rounded real-world experience.

Cathartic. Though I wouldn't do it again now I have a wife, mortgage, and dog to support.

They would, of course, love to be paid as well as I am, and many would love the schedule flexibility (though some of them also get to make their own schedules much like I do), but they feel very strongly that being stuck inside, immobile, spending all their days reading, writing, and talking, mostly on a computer screen, would be totally miserable. So the grass isn't always greener!

I'm the opposite, I certainly fantasize about doing different things that are mostly intellectual, but I know I'm well suited to sitting around reading, thinking, writing, and chatting from time to time.

I didn't really understand this until some of those family members started finishing high school, and I started trying to suggest careers that seemed good to me, and more than one person finally told me, "I don't want to do any of those things because I'll be stuck in front of a computer all day every day and I would hate that". And I think they were right! "Know thyself" is important.

(Note: I'm talking about careers in trades and professions that are not office work. But not entry level jobs at retail businesses like most of your examples. I think everyone does indeed hate working in retail. But not everyone actually does prefer being on a computer in an office to nailing shingles onto a hot roof!)

And there's probably some solutions that simply need more adoption like electric stair climbers.

1. The degree itself, even from a top school, doesn't guarantee you anything. It opens a few doors in finance (Investment Banks) and consulting, but you still need to fight your way through them. Wall Street also doesn't really like career changers, so it's already an uphill battle before you even enroll.

2. Silicon Valley doesn't seem to give even a tiny shit about the degree. In fact MBAs get regularly dunked on here at HN (as if the degree itself turns a smart engineer into a drooling dumbass, but whatever). So if your plan is to get an MBA to zoom back to tech to become a Director or VP or something, your plan is flawed.

I wasn't successful at either of these paths, so I went right back to "Individual Contributor" software engineering after spending 6 months unemployed hopelessly looking for an investment banking job. So the degree ended up being a waste.

For me, and my current interests, this would be climate and energy technology, a la heatmap.news. For you, maybe something in the commodities and geopolitical analysis space.

It's easy to make fun of how everyone has a newsletter and a podcast now, but at the heart of that is that it truly is the case that there has never in history been a better time to do reporting on interesting things, and possibly even find a large enough audience for it to be a real and sustainable vocation.

Try messing with scientific datasets and publishing a blog and seeing if you can replicate results or find new ones. If you can do that fluidly - you'll be a shoe-in for that type of work.

Even considering preparation for a graduate music program I had the option of taking fundamental music courses at nearby schools or studying with an independent teacher. Ultimately I chose to go independent. That let me start immediately and offered flexibility in my own daily schedule. The graduate program professors I spoke with gave no preference to undergrad vs just demonstrating knowledge.

I'm glad that the website helped!

Hell, there's even a difference between writing blogspam and high effort content about the same topic. I genuinely love delving into the minute aspects of German bureaucracy, because no one really put those details on the internet before.

Another aspect is that people genuinely appreciate my work. It's an awesome feeling, and it certainly kept me going.

I'm pretty neutral with my recommendations, unless I really know what I'm talking about. I don't want it to turn into another shallow affiliate sales funnel.

as someone who enjoys playing boardgames, what i would caution against is trying to run some kind of boardgame cafe. the problem with that is you end up with customers like me playing a long game occupying a table for 3-4 hours. maybe everyone buys a drink and half the players buy a meal. the revenue per table per hour will be low compared to a normal cafe or restaurant where you could cycle multiple groups through the table in the same time, and where the expected revenue per customer would be higher.

the places where board game events thrive are where the fixed costs (rent, wages to staff a bar/kitchen, etc) are subsidised by something that isn't board games. i.e. where the venue is open anyway and has spare capacity to fill a few tables with board game players who stay for hours and do not spend money quickly. in australia this is often at a pub/club which has an old spacious venue with lots of tables, where the business is kept afloat by income from a room full of people losing money playing the pokies (slot machines).

Once I am in the clear, I’d be happy to open source the process of acquiring a SMB and running it. I basically become a business broker myself for this one deal, thanks to the broker I worked with.

Once I had a little bit of a following, Casey Reas reached out about doing a group exhibition with Feral File that he was curating. That was a big moment. The release was very successful, and I saw that this path could be viable. It took me another year to fully commit to full time art though.

I think just immersing yourself and starting from the ground up is really important. Learn the basics, don't rush it, and educate yourself along the way. Study past plotter artists and pioneers like Vera Molnar and Harold Cohen. Find your style and iterate.

By far NFTs have been my bread and butter. Cringe, I know. But past all of the scams, grifters, and bullshit, there are actually collectors and artists doing amazing and innovative work with code-based art. A lot (but not all) of the bad vibes have found something new to flip a quick buck on, and what's left are passionate folks. Not to mention places like Sothebys, MoMA, Christies, etc.

Why does generative art marry up with the blockchain? Because you can store code on-chain, and you can use the transaction hash to seed a PRNG. This allows the artist to issue a set of unique artworks all generated from the same algorithm.

To see what I mean, check out www.artblocks.io and fxhash.xyz.