Ask HN: Have you successfully done a career do-over, and how did you do it?
I suspect its not as easy as many people make out.<p>I was a great C++&#x2F;OO dev for 10 years before I got bored, starting doing management, business focussed roles and more high level devops style work. After 10 years of that I wanted to move back into pure coding. With great experience should be easy right? Wrong.<p>I got a mid-level java&#x2F;python dev job and it was difficult, I was out of touch and everything was different or new. Languages, styles, CI&#x2F;CD, DI, git, containers, unit testing its a huge amount to learn. After a year I got laid off because I was getting paid like a senior but not keeping up with the grads.<p>A few years later I&#x27;m productive and useful in this new world but I dont really like it. I&#x27;m enjoying Scala and functional programming but with so many libraries and tools I feel like everything is so difficult and complicated. It takes a lot of study effort to keep up. Also I&#x27;m never sure if its because the applications I work on are badly designed, or I just dont really understand modern design.  I have a business specialty which keeps me employable but I miss the old days when things were simpler.<p>Being &quot;old&quot; at 40+ really isn&#x27;t so easy - I&#x27;m not sure you can ever redeem yourself in the eyes of the industry. Best you can hope for is get a non-tech domain specialty and find a big stable company that values experience and try to keep working on interesting projects. Once you&#x27;re laid off or fired once its really hard to be the super confident hacker you were at 25.<p>EDIT - thinking about if you want advice. Get a business specialty or technical niche. Dont get too lazy, if you aren&#x27;t learning on the job for a few years in a row, change the tech in the project or leave. It should be easy to keep employed but you have to keep working at it. Best career money-wise is to move to management, but its difficult to move back. Dont take the high paying job on a dead end project without a plan to get out.