[seanos]

I graduated with a PhD 10 years ago from the same university (Nottingham) as he did, in mechanical engineering, and have been working in academia ever since, working my way up to senior lecturer (UK equivalent to associate professor), and I'm still earning much less than him. I do a lot of coding in research projects in my job and have some experience in web development from side-projects, as well as contributions to open-source libraries (mainly statistics and simulation based in Python) etc. Been thinking of making the career switch into a software development role for a while but wondered if it's too late. This makes me think it may still be worthwhile, even if getting that first role might prove difficult given my academic background and I'd have to start at the bottom again.

[noelwelsh]

If you go the data science / machine learning route, your academic knowledge (applied maths, formulating and running experiments, etc.) will be a lot more valuable than if you go for standard software developer roles. Also, no reason you'd start at the bottom.

[fanf2]

You won’t have to start at the bottom again, given your experience. Sounds like you could get a decent job in data science, and I guess you know of engineering businesses where you could apply your knowledge.

[tpxl]

> I'd have to start at the bottom again

If you have 10 years of weak coding experience and have managed to finish a PhD, you'd probably start at least at a mid level, not junior, and quickly get up from that.