Comment by bobosola
16 hours ago
I jumped the other way round aged 40 from non-tech into tech. I went from being a UK merchant ship captain to working as a software developer. I did it over a couple of years by increasing my knowledge in my spare time as a hobbyist until I felt I was at least good enough to be employed in a dev role. I should mention that this was back around the millennium, when web dev was still a wide-open and rapidly changing field.
The obvious big issue is maintaining roughly the same salary level, but you’d be surprised how much you can tighten your belt if a making a big jump down. A non-obvious negative is getting used to loss of status. That hurt a bit initially, but I soon found that the novelty of re-inventing myself in a new domain was massively invigorating, plus I was suddenly working with very different (and much younger) colleagues. So I decided to shut up about the old job from day one and never mentioned it unless asked (no-one cared anyway).
But be aware of turning a hobby into a job though. I got into dev as just a hobby initially. Then it became a paying part-time gig when on leave, which eventually lead to a job offer via someone I knew in the business. You’ll soon find that doing your hobby for a living cools your enthusiasm for your hobby, especially when dealing with difficult customers, bosses, or ridiculous deadlines. That said, I’m really pleased I made the jump and don’t ever have to wonder “what if?”.
Great story!
> You’ll soon find that doing your hobby for a living cools your enthusiasm for your hobby
I think a lot of software developers are in that situations. I suspect for a lot of us, programming started as a hobby.
> A non-obvious negative is getting used to loss of status
I can imagine. I never had a great status, it can sound very vain but I sometimes I wish I had one :) Ironically, working in a big tech company can send you to the very top of the salary range but nobody knows, you're just a "programmer" which isn't super prestigious.
> I went from being a UK merchant ship captain to working as a software developer.
That's one hell of a story. How did you end up in the trade to begin with? How long it take for you get promoted to captain? What kind of cargo did you typically carry? How big was your crew? What was the largest ship you captained? What are farthest points you've sailed to in all cardinal directions? Were you still you still operating with paper maps and sextants by the time of your captaincy or was GPS common on ships by that point?
I went to sea with BP Tankers as a deck cadet in 1976 trading worldwide, largely to escape my small village life. When I qualified as 2nd mate, I moved to mediterranean trade small bulk carriers, then oil rig supply ships on the North Sea. Got my first command at 32 on the rig boats, so around 14 years at sea by then. Ended up on local ferries when I became a father in order to do shorter trips away from home (I had to drop two ranks, but it was worth it). The biggest crew I captained was around 40 when working on a short-lived cross channel ferry service from Weymouth to Cherbourg. Rig boats typically only had about 12 crew though. My last seagoing job was a harbour pilot for a couple of years which gave me the spare time to learn software dev.
And yes, I was probably one of the last generations of seafarers who used celestial nav and paper charts on deep sea trips before GPS became universal. We used Decca Navigator for coastal nav, now also long gone and forgotten. So electronic charts were way after my time! I lost count after 40+ countries visited, but it's really not the flex you might think because there was very rarely time to go ashore.
However the experience and confidence gained at sea helped enormously when (say) presenting a software proposal to CEOs and the like, most of whom were the same age as me. They tended to assume I was much more senior than I really was! I never regretted the jump though. If you can make the money work, then I’d recommend career changing to anyone for the new lease of life it gives you. Especially if feel you have gone as far as you can in the old career.