I’m making great money in sales but I’m not sure how long I can keep it up. Most of the time I feel like my job can be done by an undergrad who’s got good people skills. Worse, I don’t think that experience is making a difference; I’ve been in sales for almost 10 Years now. I’m worried that the gig might be up and orgs figure out soon that they pay sales reps way too much. And I’m used to making so much money! Which brings me to my question... is it too late start getting a technical education? I’m turning 33 this year and have tried the online MOOKS a few times but never really get through any of them. If you do suggest that I get a technical education, where would you suggest I start? I have a economics (BA) and political science degrees and was never really a big fan of math because it didn’t come easy for me. Appreciate the feedback!
@ccak56 Cause it’s so low?
I think it’s quite hard to consider whether you should pursue a technical degree now without knowing other aspects of your life like family, kids, finance, etc. How comfortable are you if you spend 4 years getting a technical degree then trying to get a job in software. So, there seem a couple of options: coding bootcamp, MOOCs like you said you try, a CS or technical related degree. I think neither bootcamp or MOOCs are good enough. Both require serious commitment and you would never be competent as someone who is trained in this area in college — I know it’s controversial and people would cite good stories about bootcamp here but let’s not kid ourselves. Anyway, maybe it’s not too late to commit to a degree and make a career move because otherwise you would move on with nagging thought that you never try. Or if you just are half serious, maybe try a bootcamp and see how it goes. Maybe you realize coding is not that fun anyway and you would feel ok too. Good luck! :)
Thanks! I’m single, no children and never married. I’m not comfortable with a 4 year commitment so, aside from some moocs and a couple of programs I’m aware of internally at my company, my best bet to get technical would be the boot camps.
Not sure where I stand on the whole 4 year vs bootcamp thing but I've seen a few successful bootcamp people here at Uber get hired at entry level.
I think you should become more technical, but let’s not forget we’re probably in a severe software developer bubble right now. You have kids out of college that are paid the same as investment banking analysts while working 40% of the hours. Are the output most developers producing worthy of such bloated salaries? In the present, hardly, as many engineering projects are speculative investments. In the future, a ton of AI projects won’t come to fruition or the end product value isn’t there, and the current developer salary bubble will deflate. It sounds like you need to move into management where there is more of a skills moat. Being technical certainly doesn’t hurt.
I considered management but sales management is such a farce. In a way I feel like sales is similar to software engineering in experiencing the bubble. It’s not quite as drastic but I know that we are mostly not delivering work worth our pay.
Investment banking analysts don't really have a hard skill set though. My friends in that field say it themselves.
Good programmers will not lose their job because of age. I have some people who are more than 55 and have survived the tests of time. They don’t jump ship as often though.
Yeah it’s too late
Anyone who thinks 33 years is too old to learn code must be delusional. You can absolutely learn to code but don’t expect to get 130k on your first job. Good thing about Software engineering is you can cross more than 130k in very short period of times. Also please don’t join if it is purely for money without any programming passion otherwise your life will suck like Walmart Banana. If you have passion sky is the limit. There is one career path which I would suggest though, that is data engineering or BI engineering since you have sales experience. This field is mix of both world which I think fits you most and will enjoy more. Good luck
Let me do you a favor. I’d not recommend that to my friend or younger bro. I agree that anyone can learn anything at any age :) But for a “satisfactory” and lasting tech career, it’ll be very hard and uphill battle to start at this age unless of course you can commit and dedicate 4-8 years to get to a respectable level. But age will not be at your advantage because you’ll need heavy mentoring and experience of working and doing team projects and group discussions with smart classmates (assuming that your brain will be sharp and plastic and distraction free as 18-21 years olds for gaining most out of those interactions). Next, when you start job at a FAANG company, you’ll definitely feel awkward to start beside 22 years olds college grads or 27-30 years old PhDs. Even many of your managers will be much younger between 30-35 years. There’s another group of companies they don’t care about education as long as you have some cool apps, github commits, and long list of tech skills (like every new framework release, every new javascript library released and so on). Those companies usually do hype driven development and those jobs usually pay only 50-80k. And even if you work there for 15-30 years you’ll most likely be considered an entry level or just the next level at the FAANG companies. 3 years into my job, I’ve interviewed (phone screening) people with 30 years for the same level as mine and rejected, not because of bias, but for lacking the level of problem solving ability I was looking for (or the bar of skill). Some people got over 100k offers (hype driven) after doing 10-20 weeks of bootcamps. I’ve been to some events and found that the people I talked to will not enjoy sustained success for their lack of depth. For example there was a machine learning bootcamp and the trainer got confused—while demonstrating a python lib—with a matrix multiplication which requires that number of columns of the first matrix must be the same as number of rows of the second matrix. The trainer doesn’t know this rule let alone why even this rule exists in the first place. They’re doing bootcamp to be Machine Learning SDEs just because they think it’s in-demand, without possessing the fundamental skills from high school or college. They’ll mostly do as said by the more educated peers and managers and eventually their honeymoon will be over as soon as money runs out. It might be Ok to get a 120k job coming out of bootcamp and enjoy it while it lasts if you are currently making 20-30k or even 60k a year. But if you already have a career, then think twice before jumping. I can explain more if you like. I also know that there’ll be some counter arguments :)
Lol, so many assumptions of the status quo in this post. I’ll only comment on one. How do you know if someone, and assuming that someone starts now, worked at a “hype-driven development” place for “15-30 years” that they will be considered entry level at the FAANG companies? 20 years ago, Apple was nearly bankrupt. Netflix didn’t exist. Amazon only sold books. How do you have such confidence in projecting the next era’s companies so far into the future? How old are you? 28 tops?
There are exceptions and I’ve seen people who came from those companies and made quick jump to senior position (L6) in few years when they had solid foundation and skills. Most don’t even make it past the interview round. Saying based on my interview experiences. Go figure the acceptance rate, which is about 20%. Mostly the reason given is lacking experience of managing such large systems like ours and blah blah... even for sde2 positions. Unfortunate but true I’ve not seen candidates from a web dev shop/software shop (yes they often call themselves shops) to be ever considered for L6 or L7 positions at Amazon. I don’t necessarily support it, just my observation. I’m much older and have spent good amount of time in those jobs. The product was not hype driven, but they were hype driven in case of development tools and technologies. They would run after all the new things coming in that related field like all new javascript frameworks, mvc frameworks, web services framework, jsf, glassfish, mongo instead of mysql, and so on. Always jumping toto the next cool thing. And seen them reject high potential smart candidates for just not being familiar with a new test framework. Intelligence, problem solving ability and similar traits were secondary to the some familiarity with the the tools they were using. But once a new things come, they feel like they have to jump to that and encourage everyone to learn them. On the other hand at Amazon I’ve been using very basic old programming language and implementing solutions to hard problems without keeping trac of what is the cool next framework.
There’s always sales engineer! Might help you bulletproof your career a bit better.
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How much do you make?
$130k
Lawl