Thank you all for your comments. They are a big encouragement for me. This thread struck a chord and I feel like telling you my own story:
I am not that old (44) but still..
I practice programming since I was 14, tinkering with ZX Spectrum basic and then assembly.
After finishing pharmacy school in my home country (Greece - my parents insisted not to study CS) i went to the UK where after one year of formal CS education I landed my dream job as a software engineer in a big, now defunct, telecomms company (Nortel).
The highlight of my career? meeting Linus Torvalds in a conference about operating systems in 1997, where I went as a representative for my company, and having beers with him afterwards discussing the Linux threading model. He was not that famous back then. Top guy.
Anyway, shortly after that I had to come back to my home country and and although I had good offers from companies in the UK and the US I decided to stop my career abroad and live in greece.
The problem was that money as a programmer here was not that good, but mainly that there were basically only windows application programming jobs, VB6, VC++, MSAccess and the like. Boring stuff which I disliked since I was doing unix systems - network programming up to that point (that was 2001).
So i decided to change career, working as an IS - business consultant in multinational companies (AA and Ernst & Young), jobs that had nothing to do with programming. I did that for some years but got bored and pursued a Phd while working part time in my family's real-estate development business. However the real estate sector totally collapsed in Greece in 2009 because of the financial crisis and I had to change career path Yet Another Time (yat, similar to yacc in unix terminology :) So now i run my own small-scale pharmacy business (Pharmacy was my first degree).
The thing is that I feel somehow unfulfilled. Although I never stoped programming, for the last 15 years this is a hobby for me and not my main occupation. I feel unfulfilled because I now know that programming is my true passion and I should have never deviated from it, professionally-wise. Anyway.
Sometimes I envision that, because of necessity (the economic situation in greece is deteriorating fast, to say the least) I will have to abandon my doings here and pursue again a carear as a programmer abroad. But how? not only I am 44, but for the past 14 years I had no formal Software Engineering job.
Meanwhile, I am building a webapp using all the latest and gratest sexy toys (javascript, laravel etc) hoping that it won't result in a total waste of time. At least I am having lots of fun.
I am not that old (44) but still..
I practice programming since I was 14, tinkering with ZX Spectrum basic and then assembly. After finishing pharmacy school in my home country (Greece - my parents insisted not to study CS) i went to the UK where after one year of formal CS education I landed my dream job as a software engineer in a big, now defunct, telecomms company (Nortel).
The highlight of my career? meeting Linus Torvalds in a conference about operating systems in 1997, where I went as a representative for my company, and having beers with him afterwards discussing the Linux threading model. He was not that famous back then. Top guy.
Anyway, shortly after that I had to come back to my home country and and although I had good offers from companies in the UK and the US I decided to stop my career abroad and live in greece.
The problem was that money as a programmer here was not that good, but mainly that there were basically only windows application programming jobs, VB6, VC++, MSAccess and the like. Boring stuff which I disliked since I was doing unix systems - network programming up to that point (that was 2001).
So i decided to change career, working as an IS - business consultant in multinational companies (AA and Ernst & Young), jobs that had nothing to do with programming. I did that for some years but got bored and pursued a Phd while working part time in my family's real-estate development business. However the real estate sector totally collapsed in Greece in 2009 because of the financial crisis and I had to change career path Yet Another Time (yat, similar to yacc in unix terminology :) So now i run my own small-scale pharmacy business (Pharmacy was my first degree).
The thing is that I feel somehow unfulfilled. Although I never stoped programming, for the last 15 years this is a hobby for me and not my main occupation. I feel unfulfilled because I now know that programming is my true passion and I should have never deviated from it, professionally-wise. Anyway.
Sometimes I envision that, because of necessity (the economic situation in greece is deteriorating fast, to say the least) I will have to abandon my doings here and pursue again a carear as a programmer abroad. But how? not only I am 44, but for the past 14 years I had no formal Software Engineering job.
Meanwhile, I am building a webapp using all the latest and gratest sexy toys (javascript, laravel etc) hoping that it won't result in a total waste of time. At least I am having lots of fun.
kk