[fakedang]

Looks like I'm following the same trajectory. Started off my "career" in finance (not even the quantitative kind), then set up a family office, converted it from a long-short shop to a quantitative one with the help of a very technically confident partner, and just "retired" last Friday.

Career in quotes because I cofounded a startup in university which we sold off. Retired in quotes because I'm such a bad coder that the code base has evolved to a level that requires much more competency than I can contribute. I have always thought of becoming a Data Engineer, since it seems super interesting (and relatively slow paced). Also, it was so hard for us to recruit a competent one (we finally did though), but it seems all the DE job listings want people with 5+ years of experience - there just isn't room for companies to take on a junior data engineer apparently :(.

Currently, I spend my time just building stuff to help real problems, something I've done in my spare time the past few years. For example, I just built a very small applet for my city's transport authority, and if the integration goes well, it might be used by around 300k travelers. It's wild, because three years back, I never would have thought that I would be able to have such outsized impact just by learning some front-end code.

[michepriest]

That sounds amazing! Congratulations

Do you still want to be a data engineer? I wouldn’t let HR “requirements” stop me. There must be a way. 5+ year DEs once had 0 experience

[fakedang]

It's not off the books, although I can understand stringent HR requirements for the role. We had the same requirements when recruiting :P, although we needed someone to be able to hit the ground running. I guess the same goes for most companies.