Ask HN: Any advice for an older engineer stuck in his career?
I am in my mid thirties. I earn decently, but it has been years since I learned anything new or even enjoyed my work. I am not half as good as the HN crowd, but I can build things and be quite useful to a team. I made the stupid move to go from Java (desktop apps) to PHP and am now stuck maintaining a poorly written legacy (15 year old) app and under a lot of pressure to deliver (fixing performance, clean up code etc) and I am not living up to it. Most importantly, I am just not enjoying it.
What can I do to get out of this rut? I absolutely do not want to work on legacy codebases anymore (can't leave the job until July for various reasons) and I'd also like to get out of PHP if possible (go back to Java or learn something new).
I am afraid to apply for jobs that require experience I don't have. I'd totally love to work in graph databases for example (have played with it a bit before), or data analysis, data viz etc.
What can I do to get out of this rut? I absolutely do not want to work on legacy codebases anymore (can't leave the job until July for various reasons) and I'd also like to get out of PHP if possible (go back to Java or learn something new).
I am afraid to apply for jobs that require experience I don't have. I'd totally love to work in graph databases for example (have played with it a bit before), or data analysis, data viz etc.
Any advice?