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by numinary1
2719 days ago
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Sometimes what you need is change. I am sixty-five years old. I was a programmer for fifteen years, started a consulting company, then a software business. Was acqui-hired. Became VP Product Dev over 27 locations, 1200 developers, hundreds of products, then semi-retired for four years and worked on digital audio production. Got bored, did another startup, wrote code. Sold it and became CTO of a product division. Later worked for an investment group, became CTO for one of their acquisitions for almost ten years. Six years ago went back to technical work on my "reverse career plan" (junior programmer by the time I'm 75 ;-) ). Wrote js/react analytic front-end apps, Python back-end analytics, got into machine learning, co-authored a book about it, got some big data consulting gigs, learned Hadoop/Spark. Currently hands-on dev for Spark and ML apps. For me, changes were the key. Burnout melts away. But you can burn out in any role. If you have the skills to do tech work, try to keep them alive. Coming back to hands on tech work is incredibly refreshing. So is leaving it behind for awhile when you've reached the burn-out point. |
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I did this to get back to being hands on, and as a gateway job, and enjoyed it, but am also now starting to tire of that again.
I can see myself going through a similar cycle that you did. The only thing I find difficult is explaining it to recruiters when applying to jobs - they always ask, “why would you bounce around in such a way”!
It looks like perhaps you were able to avoid that problem by starting your own businesses and then getting acquihired, writing your book, and other pursuits which moved you back to a “traditional job”?
By the way, I love “junior programmer by 75”. I feel the same way, and not entirely that it’s a bad thing. Just reality, there is so much to know and learn.