HACKER Q&A
📣 supertofu

Am I too late for a software engineering career?


Hey, folks! I'm hoping to gather some career advice from software engineers.

I'm a web developer in my early 30s. I'm seeing my job slowly become replaced by no-code tools. I'm quite certain my job won't exist anymore in 10 years. Plus, the job is terribly boring.

My goal is to transition into software engineering.

I'm in the process of joining a program to earn a post-bacc in CS. I would be done in two years. What worries me is that I'll be entering an entirely new field a decade later than typical, and with a BS from a "middling" state school.

My only goal is to increase my earning potential (I'd like my next starting salary to be above 200,000 USD) and work on interesting problems.

What can I do to compensate for my late start and stand out more to FAANG employers? How can I compete with new grads with Ivy League CS degrees? (I did go to a nationally ranked school for my BA, but my degree was in literature)

  👤 nonrandomstring Accepted Answer ✓
I think the key issue is that Software Engineering is mind-set that requires maturity and experience. 10 years "late" is precisely the correct time to be thinking of that track change.

> How can I compete with new grads with Ivy League CS degrees?

Surely we all know the real-world value of newly minted top college CS grads. I was one, and I teach them, and I definitely wouldn't employ a 21yr old me to manage a complex project.

👤 David_GG
I have to say that I just enter into coding at my 50's, obviously not pursuing a carrer on it but just to do interesting things, mostly in the Audio field. Always loved code but probably (well, for sure) made wrong decisions in the past which took me elsewhere. Some how, life put me back into a place that got me closer to it and to the opportunity to learn about it with purpose. My only point is, never too late for sure. About competition: if > My only goal is to increase my earning potential, like in other sectors that you can tackle it by focusing on the less crowded places, not very popular languages, not very poular fileds of action.

I'm now passionate and trying to learn LISP to apply it in the Audio and Sound field, if that counsel you, probably im much hopeless :D.

👤 jstx1
> I'm a web developer in my early 30s. (...) My goal is to transition into software engineering.

What do you want to do exactly? Because according to many (most?) people in the industry you already have a software engineering career and there's nothing to transition to.

👤 dylanhassinger
degree is nice but not necessary. if you're a web dev already, you're basically qualified.

Build a small app on the side and start applying to every software engineering job you can, to get more interviewing experience

maybe you can just skip and go straight into tech management

👤 bjourne
According the salary statistics (which I'm not sure one should trust), the median programmer salary in the US was $89,190 in 2020: https://money.usnews.com/careers/best-jobs/computer-programm... So expecting 200k in starting salary is quite unrealistic.