Ask HN: End of the rope at 42- Thinking Coder School-Does it make sense?
So, unfortunately it has come to this... after half a decade of start-ups in SF Bay Area doing growth marketing, CRM, Marketo, email, ads, SEM, SEO, and product management in B2B and B2C, I've landed in the wrong side of 40 years old, not white or Asian, no fancy MBA (Though I have one) and not a coder.
I've have a good set of experience over 10 years, and the last startup where I was handling channel growth (grew from 300K to 2MM subscribers in 2 years) was a successful acquisition last year. It was a foreign acquirer, so I can't follow my job out of USA.
12 months later, 300+ job applications later, 10 in-person interviews later (from FB, AppDirect, Ancestry, HP, DocuSign to smaller startups) NOTHING has landed. I've exhausted my personal network and expanded the search to LA, Portland, Seattle and nothing as well.
All I can tell you is, every position I interviewed (and was final 2 candidates or whatever) companies have hired younger and sometimes even less experienced people than their declared criteria. I'm not saying I was the perfect fit for each position, I wasn't for some I'm sure, but reality and data is what it is. I haven't had a harder time ever in Silicon Valley to get back to work.
The question is, should I try a coder school? I've been thinking really hard about it. I don't want to add another $15K-$25K in debt just to be a 40-something noob non-white/asian coder without a job on top of everything else going wrong. I wanted to figure out if I need to add some certifications (Marketo, Google, SAP) but no one has requested them where I'm looking for work and entry level jobs using these aren't that many.
So, thoughts? Would it be worth to really learn JS or a full Ruby stack for a career switch or will my age/background still nullify whatever coding skills I can get.
Honest answers - Do you think the age/background thing continue to overrule anything I do? Hmmm..... I think you have a great story to tell. You're a growth marketer learning engineering, so that you can be a one-man growth shop for an early-stage startup. Bootcamps aren't magic salves, and it can often take 3-4 months for the average grad to find a job. That said, I think you have a much better story than the average bootcamp grad, who are usually coming from completely unrelated fields. You could hit up literally every single seed / series A-ish startup and pitch them to own growth. Would be happy to chat in person (I'm a self-taught dev myself), contact info in profile.