Quick facts:
- Interested in programming but my knowledge is rusty and feel I wouldn't be able to brush my skills up for a job - Worked in advertising for a long time in a completely different market - Current goals are vague, but I definitely want to save enough to pursue interests (writing and film) in the long-term.
Has anyone of you faced a similar dilemma? What did you do against it? I feel the intertia building up over time and I am afraid of being in a limbo if I don't act soon. I do not live in the US if that helps.
Do your best to be a bit more resolute. Everyone is anxious in life about something.
I can tell you for a fact there is someone your age or younger with a family and mortgage and a career change to think about. There’s probably someone your exact age whose entire career got derailed for any number of factors, wondering if they’ll get another go at it. But here you are wondering if your brain will stop working in a few years, or if you will ever get to write a movie.
You can write your movie right now. It’ll suck, but so what? Write another one. You’ll bomb all your upcoming interviews. Go to more.
From the immortal bard Arnold Schwarzenegger:
“Stop whining”.
You might be putting too much pressure on yourself to fit a particular archetype. This can lead to self doubt, anxiety, and fear. I would advise against looking at a career in tech for quick money. If you really want to get a programming job you need to put the time and effort in. You might need to start at the bottom and work your way up. Just like any other endeavor.
The average age of a college professor is around 45, and older entrepreneurs out perform younger ones in general, so I think we need to put this cognitive decline nonsense to rest.
These social media forums can be soul crushing. I would advise spending more time in self study and self reflection than reading the paranoid opinions of 20 year-olds.
_What Should I Do With My Life?_ by Po Bronson really showed me that it was/is okay to not be happy with my job and to make a change.
I've written about my career changes here [0] and here [1].
My advice to the "directionless and lost" is to find a job that has meaning beyond paying the rent and food, and that you enjoy, but gives you enough time to pursue your other interests. This helped me tremendously
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33126861 [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30204355
Personally, I realised that just because a job title is more senior doesn't necessarily mean that I want to do it — it's a trade-off that comes with not just more responsibility for more money but _different_ responsibilties for more money.
I found that moving from school/university (very linear, clear if you were doing "well" or "badly") to the world of work, it was easy to get sucked into the mindset of going up the career ladder as what I should be striving for. We don't expect all doctors to become hospital administrators or teachers to become school inspectors but in the private sector there's a focus on moving up all the time.
Moving away from that mindset, I took a couple of sideways/downwards steps and have never been happier. So long as I'm doing a job that I like and have enough money for my needs, what rung on the ladder I'm on doesn't really matter at the end of the day.
As for cognitive decline in your 40s or 50s, that’s the first I’ve heard of that, and the people I know at that age are still sharp and have the benefit of experience.
I’m not in the States either. Tech is one of the best fields wrt global opportunity; even if your passport isn’t the best remote work opens plenty of doors.
One of the worst things school systems teach us, incorrectly, is that life is a linear progression. Every person on a career ladder is missing out on other career ladders that may be better for them.
Apply to every job that looks interesting, network, get in the habit of checking the careers section of websites you visit.
Locate a job advert you’re not qualified for, spend a week watching YouTubes on the topic, and apply.
Walk 3 miles across your town and count how many “hiring” signs you see. Apply for 10 of those.
Readjust your expectations every day (that’s right, no hyphen) for three weeks and then re-assess (yes, hyphen here). You’ll get a crappy job, but lots of fodder for your writing.
Your next job will be better.
1. Don't take negative thoughts as an indicator of anything. They just are. Using either their presence or absence as some sort of signal is a waste of time.
2. Everyone's winging it to some level. We just don't see it. Meanwhile we are intimate with our own challenges. So cut yourself some slack.
3. Inertia's a bitch. Only cure is action, any action in fact, even when you are not sure whether it's the "right" move or not.
Wrote more on doubt here: https://www.leadingsapiens.com/dont-overcome-self-doubt/
I just switched to SWE at 35. I'm having the time of my life as a junior web developer. No responsibility, hardly any meetings, just build shit and learn all day and get paid to do it. It's great, even if I'm not earning as much as I was before. I don't worry about cognitive decline at all, because why would I?
I remember endlessly googling, "Is 26 too late to start programming?", "Is 27 too late to get rich?", etc., etc. Now, my age doesn't worry me one bit. My perspective has changed dramatically when I truly realized a couple of things:
1. 30s is not old. If you live until you're 65 or 70, that means a career change right now would amount in 30+ years in that field. I felt like my life had passed me by at 28. Now I look at a 28-year old and think, "That dude doesn't know how young he is." So now, I have enough experience to know that right now, I am very young, within the grand scheme of things.
2. My thinking was heavily influenced by social media. All it takes is seeing a kid who is 10-years younger than you making double or triple your salary for you to feel like you're too behind. The reality is most people are not making those types of salaries.
3. Do research on people for whom success came later in life -- there's a bunch of them. And we're only talking about public cases; not cases of late success that never made it into the public eye, which I'm sure there's even more of.
4. I've learned to focus on my quality of life (health, financial security, relationships, learning, growing, pursuing things that I'm into, traveling). My goals are not "getting rich", but rather, getting to a point financially where I don't have to work. That will probably take me 10 - 20 more years, and I'm okay with that. I just don't want to have to work when I'm 65.
5. When we find ourselves in this situation, feeling that life has passed us by, we have to throw time out the window. The problem is, we start thinking of ways we can "remediate" the situation quickly. But progress takes time. So do your best to just stop thinking about doing something quick, and really try and change your thinking to putting in the work daily (even if just a little bit), but being consistent.
I feel like I'm ranting, but I relate a lot to this question, and after really coming to an understanding of my personal situation, I was able to truly free myself by coming to grips with the truth.
Sounds like you are just having the classic I am getting old and running out of time to do all the great things I thought I would do, everyone goes through this. I doubt the feeling ever really fades but don't let it get the best of you.
You need to reset your expectations / ground yourself to your situation, you need to do some real goal setting short and long term planning.
Sounds like your mostly worried about "money" and there is no quick ways to make money. But there are lots of ways to make good money, I get the sense that is why you mentioned programming because it can be a lucrative career. But to be honest its not for everyone and I don't agree with the "everyone can be a programmer" sentiment. You are already well educated in other fields I would recommend exhausting those options before jumping ship.
Of course I know nearly nothing about you so take my opinions with a grain of salt.
What I have seen result in the most career growth is changing jobs often, never stay put. And continuous education with new problems to solve. Your job should be engaging (not 100% of the time but like a wave)
First, cold introductions to/interviews in performance/efficiency-based relationships in general are terrible, terrible contexts. Mental model templates apply on both sides. Huge waste of time when one party does not fit into the template/box the other party necessarily has. Has nothing to do with the actual potential for a relationship.
Reach out to people you used to work with, or who you went to school with, with whom you had good interactions, learn what they are doing, who they work with, etc. Someone, somewhere, will know someone doing something interesting to you. Getting a single warm introduction is literally worth 100 cold interviews.
Second, put as much time as you can afford into producing the sort of work you would like to be paid to do, and make it available online. Reprise your academic projects, whatever. Treat this like a job, for a few months, and get stuff out. Much, much better than just a resume because it is actual work and you will learn whether you do like it and have facility for it, and if you do, talking about something you have done and liked is an easy path to conveying confidence. And confidence is very, very important to convey in relationships, old and new.
Finally, as someone in their 50s, on cognitive decline- I would suggest meditating on the serenity prayer- (though for me it is without the god part because there is no literal god, only we storytelling, narrative focused humans in this wonderful, fragile world). But for all our societal advances there are many, many things we collectively don't understand, about aging and other topics. Plenty of people produce creative work into their 70s, 80s, 90s. Maybe you will be one of them.
Know yourself, and take care of yourself, but develop the wisdom to know what is under your control and what isn't, and the serenity to recognize what isn't in your control cannot be lost- instead every day with it is a gift. Use those gifts when you have them, and help others to use theirs.
Best wishes.
For what its worth, those posts made me feel the same way.
But this is typical internet stuff... you see someone doing well, it triggers an some kind of emotion. you see someone expressing anxieties about something you can relate to, it triggers an emotion. Its the same thing as looking at hot people in advertising, or people having fun on instagram. Its not reality.
"For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business."
I wish you the best and do your best to get a job and get your life moving. I believe in you.