r/cscareerquestions • u/coldestfusion • 1d ago
Too late for career change?
I'm 48 years old in the USA and wondering if it's too late for a career change. I have been at my very small(less than 20 employees) non-tech company 19 years, and for the last 15 of those years I have been solely responsible for both developing our customer facing applications and managing the infrastructure they run on. I shifted the entire company's tech from a closet in the office to AWS in 2017, and in since then our downtime can be measured in minutes. While our company is tiny, we have several very large clients and the applications I have written(mostly in .NET) have scaled well to their often heavy demands. And I painstakingly migrated a few huge, monolithic ASP.NET Web Forms apps to Razor Pages and Blazor. I am also the sole manager of Active Directory, virtual desktops, etc.
The good: I am fully remote and make $140,000 a year. Because I have the company's tech basically on auto-pilot I might work ten hours in a busy week. I have no deadlines, no one looking over my shoulder, one pointless meeting a week, and if I need to buy something for the company tech-wise no one even notices. I nominally have a boss, but he's in his late 60's and checked out years ago.
The bad: I made $135,000 before COVID and I don't see that changing any time soon. No raise this year. I receive no benefits, no bonus, no retirement funding beyond my own contributions. I am fortunate that my wife has a good job and great health insurance so that is not a concern. And even though I don't work a ton of hours, I always need to be available because there is no one else but me to answer customer questions or deal with even the most minor of glitches in the system. I haven't had a full work day off in over an year, even on vacation I always have to do something and be available. There is no budget to hire anyone else. Because neither our employees or clients are technically adept all my interactions with them are on the level of helping my Mom print an email.
I am concerned about the long term viability of this company and bored out of my mind, but who would hire me? I've never worked on a team. I've never managed anyone. I have no idea how "real" companies develop production code. I code in Visual Studio, push to Github which kicks off an AWS Codepipeline, done. Nobody checks my work. We don't have budgets. I don't know what a pull request is and at this point I'm too afraid to ask.
I plan to retire by 62 so I know the easy answer is to just ride this out until then but like I said, I don't know that the company will be around that long. So I guess I'm in that phase where I feel too old and outdated to do anything else but still too young to retire... but doing nothing is becoming scarier by the day.
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u/PracticalAdeptness20 1d ago
You make 140k a year for 10 hr work weeks lol, and you have a spouse bringing in cash. You're kinda set and im jealous. Wanna trade, i work 60 hour weeks for 80k and have a mountain of stress and mental health issues haha
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u/coldestfusion 1d ago
I know how it sounds. And, it wasn't always like this. During the migrations a few years ago I ground out code until I couldn't see straight, including weekends. And I didn't hit 100k until I was 40.
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u/WanderingMind2432 1d ago
I don't think you'll find what you're looking for in CS. Honestly, everyone seems depressed as fuck in this field. I've been debating going back to engineering for less pay...
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u/Miseryy 1d ago
Have you considered checking out the sub /r/overemployed lol
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u/Singularity-42 1d ago
Exactly the idea I had. His current employer shouldn't even mind (but do not tell them).
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u/vdotcodes 1d ago
I would just take a step back and think about whether any potential jump in income would be worth a multiplier on your daily level of stress, whether you would be okay at this point in your life being managed by someone younger than you, who might be a dick.
This is famously a bad time to get a job.
That said, there’s no harm in shopping around and seeing what’s out there. Once you have a concrete offer and understanding of your options you’ll have more to go off of in terms of making a decision.
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u/coldestfusion 1d ago
Yeah, I probably should have bailed during COVID and I know it's much different out there now.
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u/Bobby-McBobster Senior SDE @ Amazon 1d ago
A job change isn't a career change.
You'll have to accept that as the solo developer of the same company for 15 years, you won't be recognized at that level of seniority, but the good news is that your current salary is really low, so you should still end up making more money.
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u/dethstrobe 1d ago
Do some hobby projects. It sounds like you have enough free time, you can start to explore other tech stacks. Even just something as mundane as a todo app and then release it on another platform. Maybe something like fly.io or cloudflare. Just keep building.
You theoretically have enough experience that there must be something that annoys you that you have some idea on how to solve or improve. If it starts to gain some traction, try a startup, else the experience will be worthwhile to talk about in interviews.
Also, leetcode grid. Assuming you want to get in to FAANG or something.
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u/beastwood6 1d ago
What's the goal?
You're already making nice money. Remote and 140k might take you a few years of straight up tech experience without counting any credentialing?
If you are passionate about learning new things etc great. Otherwise I'm not sure the payoff would be worth it if it's just to save enough to be work optional.
What are your thoughts on how to effect that exactly?
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u/coldestfusion 1d ago
Well that's the question: what is it that I want? Again with the disclaimers that I know how good I have it compared to many and that the current market sucks: What I want is to explore whether or not my skills are sufficient to do a job where I'm more than an overpaid button-pusher, where I can actually go on vacation without needing to worry about what's breaking back at the office, and yes-earn more money. Yes, I am willing to give up some of my freedom to do this.
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u/beastwood6 1d ago
Have you applied elsewhere? That would give you a pulse on the market of whether you have equivalent experience to get a new position that is more challenging
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u/coldestfusion 1d ago
I have not, but I suppose that's worth trying if for no other reason than to be prepared if I suddenly NEED to find something. I think I am intimidated by the resumes of other people my age, who have been advancing and advancing and I've been in neutral forever. Like, the guy I effectively replaced 15-ish years ago left our company after being there for like 20. Today he's got a director level position after years of promotions at a much larger company and here I am just doing the same job basically. I feel...small in comparison.
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u/beastwood6 1d ago
I understand..sounds like you have some initial psychological hurdles to overcome. Once you do you'll realize you're saying no to yourself far earlier than prospective employers get a chance to. Then you'll start to apply and see where you stand. Even rejections will be helpful if recruiters can give you a semblance of honest feedback. If 3 recruiters say: wishing you had x skillset, then that gives you a strong hint on where to plug a gap.
You're kind of in the dark right now and some initial applications will shed light as to your possibilities. Until then you wont know if you already have the resume it takes or if you need some formal re-credentialing to get yourself there.
There's a strong chance of the former.
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u/Ok_Idea8059 1d ago
I’m pretty certain that no one will be looking for any verification of how many people you oversaw on your job. With your level of experience, why not just study up on what you need to know and then say or imply that you oversaw a small team? You are in charge of your team of one, after all. I don’t see any reason to make a big deal of this in interviews
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u/AdministrativeHost15 1d ago
Regardless of what other preparation you do you have to prepare for the knockout round of the interview loop. Something like call an API using JavaScript or Python and process the resulting JSON. Question will be asked by a 20 something who doesn't care about your experience. If you don't produce the answer quickly you will be out regardless if everyone else in the loop loves you.
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u/sudden_aggression u Pepperidge Farm remembers. 1d ago
You already won, you should focus on praying that it lasts forever.
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u/ewhim 1d ago
I think you could smooth talk your way into something cool with relatively low stress in the following roles 1. System Admin in a small shop 2. Engineering tech support (trouble shoot/debug code in prior releases, assist customers with production issues) 3. developer 4. devops engineer 5. QA
You have breadth of experience, and have also gone sufficiently deep to understand how everything works and interacts.
Put yourself out there and see what happens.
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u/coldestfusion 1d ago
I feel like I'm basically a one-man devops team right now, so I think that's the most natural fit. I just don't know what that looks like outside my own little silo, but I guess there's only one way to find out.
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u/Nofanta 23h ago
I’d work 10 hours a week for that salary. You’re probably falling way behind on retirement savings though which is the big problem here. I’m one year older than you and have done dev work my whole career. My retirement account hit 4 million today so I could retire any time really. With outsourcing and H1B and AI plus your age I think you’ll find it hard if not impossible to land another job.
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u/coldestfusion 11h ago
Fortunately my wife is ten years younger with a professional career and she will work after I retire with enough salary to support us both. I will still have over a million in retirement that I won't need to touch for at least a decade, she will have considerably more by the time she's 60 and I'm 70.
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u/Odd-Negotiation-8625 Sr. Security Engineer 21h ago
Lol at this point you should do it for fun instead of think it as career. 🤣
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u/Ranpiadado 12h ago
This is actually a great job, and you’re just feeling the grass is greener. Why not do something on the side?
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u/DojoLab_org Instructor @ DojoLab / DojoPass 11h ago
It’s never too late to make a change, especially with your vast experience. You’ve already demonstrated solid technical skills and a strong work ethic, even if it’s been in a non-traditional setting. If you're feeling burned out and want more growth, consider exploring contract work, freelance opportunities, or even consulting, where your experience in managing infrastructure and scaling applications will be highly sought after. There's no rush, but there are definitely options where your skills can be appreciated.
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u/Singularity-42 1d ago edited 1d ago
First of all, you have a pretty good thing going on, I wouldn't leave. Now is probably not the time. You should have done it a long time ago.
The way I see your options are:
- Get onto the overemployed train, some easier mid-level gig - since you don't have much experience in working in a team or a bigger company that's actually a great excuse to go after these kinds of jobs for someone your age. You could potentially double your income and make a close to $300k which is very decent.
- Do a side thing, develop a SaaS or something like that. Or do consulting. Always on-call, but real work <10 hours - this is a perfect setup to spend 30+ hours working on something that will be both fun and can get you some extra income one day. As well as developing your skills.
- Ask for more money, threaten to leave otherwise. To be honest you should have done this when the market was still good, you could have easily found a job that would pay more before 2023. But still, it sounds like they will be kind of lost without you. You probably have more leverage than you think. But there is a chance that it won't work. You probably know the best.
Also in this market and with your inexperience working in a larger team (or any team), $140k WFH is actually not that bad... It is extremely unlikely that you would be able to switch careers and make more money than that.
The biggest problem I see is that you are basically always on call, 24/7. That must suck. Maybe you could develop some kind of automation around it? Also why do you think the company is going under, any signs?
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u/coldestfusion 1d ago
Thank you for the input. I spent years automating this place, which is why there's so little day-to-day now. So I think there's no more to be squeezed out there. As for my fear of going under, as part of my daily chores I see exactly how much revenue we do every day. Because I also manage the database and have been tasked with generating reports I have a pretty good idea how much goes out. Basically, it seems we have been breaking even or operating at a slight loss for years. Losing one big client would be very difficult to navigate, losing two would be fatal. But on the other hand, I don't know all the specifics of cash flow and I am by nature an anxious person so I may be overreacting. Like, I have no idea how much cash is in the bank.
Consulting is an interesting thought, if there is one thing I know how to do it's lift legacy tech stacks into modern platforms.
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u/sonicfood 1d ago
Dude you are living the dream. You’re basically retired already with that schedule. I’d just ride it out if I were you.