Ask HN: Ever faced difficulties pivoting your job or career later in your life?

This could be a number of things. For context, I've been in recruiting for ~20 years (mostly software startups) and I also write resumes and consult/coach job seekers on a number of topics.

Getting rejected without getting to the interview stage could be for several reasons.

Ageism - not all that likely in your early 30s, depending on your audience.

Resume - if your resume doesn't convey your background well enough for the job you applied for, obviously nobody is going to interview you. If your resume is too bulky, nobody is even going to read (or skim) it. If you'd like it looked at by a professional, I'm easy to find.

Overqualified/not a fit is often code for something else. It's much easier to tell a candidate "you're overqualified" (i.e. our work is below you) because that is flattering. It's much harder to tell someone "the team genuinely didn't like you", as that is not only insulting to some people but also may cause you to ask follow-up questions. Tell someone they're overqualified and it's hard to follow-up - tell someone they "aren't a fit" and they don't usually ask "why?", because it's rather ambiguous.

Sometimes overqualified means "paid above what we can afford".

You mention twice you're in a niche industry, so I am guessing it's pretty niche. Your problem is likely a marketing issue. How do we package your background in order to make it attractive to a wider audience? What are the elements of your background that we can make more 'universal' to people out of your industry? Does your resume speak too much to the people in your industry, and does it assume that readers will understand some of the terms and acronyms that may not be part of the wider tech lexicon?

Could be tons of things.

If you were in the same industry (potentially the same company) for 12 years, you may be getting tagged with a bit of a "career employee" stigma. I'm 49 now and took 5 years out between the ages of 39-44 to teach English in Japan. I'm back in the industry now. It took me about a month to get a job when I came back.

The key is really flexibility. If you have a a very narrow focus, you will have difficulty getting work. You need to be able to take on anything. In my career, I've worked in health care, Windows productivity apps, telecom and now I'm doing business systems/web development.

There is absolutely nothing wrong being a pre-sales guy. There is tons of work in that area. But if you try to stay in a particular technology area, you may find that there just isn't much work. You need to show that you can branch out and be productive in whatever a company needs you to do.

For me, having a portfolio and a solid side project helped a lot. If you are working now, I recommend spending the next year taking 8-10 hours a weeks to build a good portfolio that show-cases what you can do. A side project is fine, or several projects, or concentrate on writing blog posts -- whatever you think will be able to sell your skills in the future.

Also, take time to go to meetups, coding dojos, etc. Again, if you spend one day a week for the next year in these kinds of activities, you will find that you will be well plugged in to the local scene.

And yes... I realise that this is pretty difficult when you want to also have a life outside of work. But it will pay considerable dividends for your career.

I am in my late forties and on my third career pivot. My progression was from electronics technician to unix system administrator to project manager with some short stints in other occupations between "real jobs" - I worked as a high school cleaner for a while and as a grave digger. Last pivot (to PM) was just over 5 years ago. I wouldn't rule a fourth (or more!) pivot out, though it is more likely to involve going from employee to self employed/business owner rather than a different type of salaried position. You can succeed and do well at anything at any age if you are willing to work at it. And by work at it I mean in company time and in your own.

I recommend: only do stuff you are interested in any-way and only work with people/companies who are fun and worthwhile.

Good luck!

So if they tell you you are too old in your early 30s/40s/50s/etc. their hiring policy is fucked up in the first place, so do not worry about that, as you do not want to work for such a company anyway.

My advice is to think about the $domain (news, social-media, medical devices, bioinformatics, vision, gaming, earth-observation, automobile, chemistry, education, ...) you would like to work in and the $activity (software development, software testing, marketing, sales, support, devops, technical documentation, talking-with-humans, teaching, ...) you would like to spend most of your work time onto.

If you have clear answers to these questions it might be simpler to find potential work employees and companies and you can also make a more specialized cold-email application.

I am at a similar position but have not yet to started to actually look for a job. I am a 37 yo marketing guy and now I am learning to code to become a software developer (web). My approach is to take some time to learn the basics, create some projects that a potential future employee would recognize as demonstrative of my hard skills and then start looking.

When you talk about software development, this path is obvious, you can't do anything if you don't code. But even when there is no obvious hard skill that you can learn, I think you should try doing this way. Study, practice and create a portfolio of projects that demonstrate you are really knowledgeable about the topic. Don't expect any potential employer to trust that your skills are transferable and the new skills you will learn "on the job". Try to be as ready as possible to perform at the new role, not be hired as a promise.

Also, I don't believe 3 months is that long time to be discouraged and draw conclusions about why you are unemployable. Keep trying to check if that is actually the reality.

That said, I don't discard ageism or other reasons not related to performance to influence all the dismissions. It is possibly (probably?) part of the reason, but one you can't control. Except having some thoughtful arguments on why your age shouldn't be a problem, maybe even an advantage.

Good luck!

> So, have any of you ever been in the same situation and do you have any advice on how should I overcome this?

I haven't, but a good friend had a very similar experience. He worked in telco, stayed at the same company for almost 20 years and then wanted to move on.

The problem wasn't him, it was the company he worked for. They had (still have) a reputation for being bad on the technical side, using age old technology and an even older management style, never updating anything to contemporary standards. Sub-par products.

Potential employers didn't want him because they were afraid he was representative of his old companies' culture. Half his resume was just the different positions he filled at that one company.

The solution he eventually found was to dissociate himself from the company as much as possible on paper. He also picked up 2 modern technologies that he had never used and mentioned them in the applications, as a form of showing he was ready to learn new stuff. It worked.

Yes. I had a lot of problems. In my late 30s, I worked at a large multinational for 10 years doing... some kind of middlemanagement sharepoint stuff that makes my brain fall asleep just thinking about it. For about the last 4 years i knew i had to get out, but never did.

Eventually redundancy was offered and i went for it, all eager to throw myself far away from microsoft vista, sharepoint and balanced scorecards into the brave new ubuntu/os-x, ruby, agile world.

I worked on side projects, i built stuff, i hosted on heroku, i went to meet-ups, i got mentored, i did all the stuff... except get a job. I went to interview after interview (where i did actually get an interview). I got short term contracts and held on until i was thrown out - what i realise now that i didn't realise then was my confidence was shot. I was dwindling savings, keeping a brave face throwing myself into everything but the constant rejection was killing me, i just never realised it.

One day a doctor friend mentioned that they needed 'an IT guy' in their clinic, with nothing else going i submitted the 42875th iteration of my cv. I had no idea what the job would entail when i went for it, it turned out that they had no idea what they wanted, but part of the job was making sure that 'PC LOAD LETTER' doesn't stop them from printing letters, but the interesting part was that they had to submit governmental reports on patient demographics and results - this was the interesting bit (for me).

So i took the job (awful, awful pay in the NHS it was about 13K (gbp) but it just about broke me even... although possibly not after childcare). But learned R and started rewriting excel macros and dismantling legacy access databases (where applicable, some were perfectly good) and off loading heavy lifting tasks to R - it was a tremendous expereience. The clinic was very happy with my work (as well as the data stuff i would come in weekends to help fix computers). But the most important thing was i LOVED my work, and so my confidence was back.

This was the single most important thing, i loved my job, i loved getting clinic computers working in an underfunded clinic, i loved helping management identify trends in their clinics. And i came home from work, broke, but very happy. And that was the key to getting my confidence back.

I've since moved, i'm in my 40s still very happy working as a data engineer but the reason i write this is perhaps there is industry bias, perhaps there are people looking at you and thinking 'too old' - but perhaps there are people looking at you thinking you lack confidence. Are there perhaps any places that NEED someone like you? where you could find a fit?

" pre-sales, architecture design and lead the onshore/offshore teams to deliver client projects"

Usually senior technical people who can do pre-sales and lead projects as a "safe pair of hands" are in demand. Smaller companies are usually always recruiting people for those roles - I suspect you are getting filtered by clueless HR people for not having the the right buzzwords.

Have you thought about maybe paying for some training courses - the content of the courses might be dubious but it might get you the right branding?

I've made a few career changes so maybe some insight. I've went from developer to creative producer to enterprise architect to now AI. For the most part they wont hire you because they don't believe your skills transfer. So to get the job you want you need to do the job. The best way to do this is to talk, network, share, speak, code in the new industry you want to enter.

Agism, Techism, all the ism's are really an answer to the question: Can you do the job? You need to answer this sufficiently well. I'm sure you can.

As an aside, I started my own AI firm in 2014 because there were no firms doing it.

I am now preparing for a small-ish pivot. For the last 12 or years I have been a Drupal / PHP consultant, architected a few very large sites, including one at the time being in the Quantcast Top 100. I am now trying to branch out to Elixir or Go and can't really find a part time job doing either. I think this would be necessary to build up some experience before completely jumping the Drupal ship.

I am 42.

Hey, you're not old! Really. I'm 57. At a guess, if you're experiencing 'ageism' - this is really a proxy for an employer's suspicion that you're no longer as biddable as early-career folks who can be persuaded to work 12 hours a day. It's their loss.

Part of the issue might come from being from PreSales. Does your resume strongly reflect that you were in a PreSales role? Should it? If you are applying for PreSales roles, then yes. If you are trying to get out of PreSales, then no.

In my last job I was part of the PreSales organization and my official title was a PreSales one. My team was very technical, but IMO PreSales people are technical "experts" only in the sense that they are knowledgeable about the product they sell and the architecture around their product. Basically, they can talk the talk but how much they can actually do is very narrowly focused. Many PreSales people typically aren't truly experts, even in the products they sell.

I decided to get out of PreSales and into a lead technical role and spent 4 months applying to positions and getting nowhere. Eventually I figured out it was because my resume reflected I was PreSales person and this was a huge "Jack of all trades, master of none" red flag for people. I changed my resume and completely de-emphasized the PreSales aspects and focused on all the deep technical consulting work I had done. I did the same thing in interviews, and made sure people understood I was in a very technical role and I was not spending 40 hours a week giving demos.

It still took me time to land a new job, but I started to get interviews and eventually offers after those changes to my resume.

The best way to combat ageism is to look for hiring managers that are as old or older than you. It does limit your search a little, but you have to limit the universe of potential positions in some way. Enterprise roles tend to have less ageism than consumer ones.

A couple other thoughts:

1 - When you have too much experience for the job, employers are concerned that you're desperate, and will leave when a better opportunity comes by. If you connect with someone senior in the organization, you can negate this. (They'll have other uses internally for your skills)

2 - Smaller companies don't like hiring people from bigger companies. You have to push hard on technical skills and show that you're flexible. Also don't oversell the brand names of your employer. Names like Cisco and IBM mean something to big corporates, but less in the startup world.

3 - Look for ways to leverage multiple areas of your background. For more experienced people, it can help to look for jobs that are asking for 2 or 3 disparate skills that are less likely to be found in a junior person. For example, "I'm looking for someone who has done both consulting management and front office banking" In your case, telecom + testing + support engineering + architecture is unique enough that there are jobs where you will be differentiated.

4) The more senior you get, the harder it is to find the right job. It's a matching problem. There's either 0 or 1 jobs at each company for your position, but also much fewer candidates.

This is the situation I am currently finding myself in. I work as a telephone switch administrator for an independent phone company in Canada. I've had this just for 13 years now, it was the only job I've had since university. My undergrad is in computer science. I ended up with this job because the company bought out a friend's ISP that I was helping run when I was in high school. It was a good job, nice company, they treat me very well. Pay isn't quite at industry standards, but back then I was living in an isolated Northern Ontario Community, so it was a decent job. Plus it allowed me to work from home.

But I love programming. I've been doing it ever since I was a kid on a Commodore 64. While I do get to do a good amount of programming, I wish I could do more. It would be awesome to get more into systems or embedded programming. I recently moved to Ottawa, one of Canada's major tech hubs, and I've been sending out resumes everywhere. So far I've only gotten one interview, which was at Shopify. But I didn't make it past the initial interview--there were too many other applicants with more experience than me. I've applied to other telecom related vendors as well, like Cisco, Genband, Nokia, etc. but I've never gotten a callback.

Now I find myself wishing that after graduating university I'd taken an internship at Nortel or someplace like that, so that I'd have it on my resume, and focused on my programming career rather than just keeping the same job. I find that all entry level job postings are for new graduates only. I've contemplated doing my masters so that I could "reboot" my career so to speak and become a "new graduate."

Given your skills and industry focus you might have good chances to land a consulting job at one of the big IT consulting shops in telecommunications.

I have worked as a business consultant at Accenture for six years in its telecommunications practice. Assuming your resume highlights both your technical and sales skills, you surely would have made it to an onsite interview for our team. With 12 years industry experience and team lead experience you could at least push for Manager level (the lowest executive level) or higher. For a technical role you should apply at Technology Services, not Consulting. Either way, that you have deep experience with specific vendor products also is a credential that you should highlight.

I am not at Accenture anymore and have no stakes in recruiting. My post most probably also applies to the other big shops in the industry: IBM, CapGemini, probably Siemens depending on your location.

If you need a personal contact in Austria/Germany I might be able to help (just updated my profile with my contacts).

As a person still minimally younger than 35 your opinions are quite sobering. I think at this point of my career I should focus on high salary (in live in EU though) while maintaining a good physical condition as I might have no other choice than salary and lifestyle downgrade in 10-15 years from now.

Hi,

I am retired, but I worked at a European Telco as a R&D engineer my last 12 years and as a manager before that. I was 58 when I left. When I was in my forties I experienced the same rejection as you when I tried ti find a new job. Fortunately is was during the Internet bubble and there was a great demand for people speaking English and having knowledge in IP/Web and Java programming (nobody said "coding" at that time). So I was a bit astonished to be accepted but all in all those 12 years in R&D were deeply interesting, sometime frightening and often frustrating. But I am grateful to the people who recruited me. I never experienced some difficulty to learn or to adapt, even now at 60. I look to start a new business right now. My tip would be to not be impatient, stay where you are while it pays well. Things change quickly in the tech domain. No technology or business process is adopted in a tsunami manner, adoption is usually very slow (decades) and there are always several technologies in competition. But meanwhile you might get some orthogonal or complementary knowledge (Coursera/eDX) to what you have today in an effort to show dedication and capacity to learn. Who knows, in a future job this new qualification could make the difference. Good luke!

I wrote about my pivoting story in here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13532415

tl;dr: was 28 sales manager in Mexico, no English. Today I'm 33, frontend lead developer in US.

Sorry for the link, I don't want to write everything in here again.

One suggestion is on your resume use the STAR system

Situation, Task, Action, Result

Rather than the usual "my responsibilities".

Then you can demonstrate the value you brought rather than the potential you might have because listing your responsibilities doesn't mean you discharged them.

Related discussion here - "Ask HN: Good Career Alternatives for 50+": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13531096

You basically have to start over at the bottom. You might be a lead in your current position but you are entry level in another. You'll need to take a pay cut to switch careers, in my experience.

And let's be real regarding ageism, you only get about 10 years of not being "too old", and then for the rest of your career it's going to be an issue whether big or small. Part of being a professional is navigating all of the BS you will get if you are not under 35, white, straight, and male.

Find some kind of skill pivot. I.e., so you already have the skill to get employed in your new thing even though you haven't had it on your CV before.

In my case:

- Unix (via Python and devops) to programmer.

- Programmer (via product and custdev) to founder.