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General Discussion

Joe M
PLUS
Joe M
Courses Plus Student 66 Points

Help/Advise: Career Transition : From a Mainframe Developer to a Full Stack Developer(using most recent technologies)

Hello All

I'm going through a mid-life(I'm 41) crisis both in age as well as in career. I started my IT career with mainframe programming and I did very well for the first 10 years of my career(I enjoyed living in US/UK/Hong Kong being an Indian). Then, as part of my job my responsibility became a Manager and more towards managing a group of people with diverse technologies(AS/400, Mainframe, Distributed Technologies, Middle-ware, Vendor Products etc..etc...in all global banks). So the last 10 years I spent learning how to manage people(basically learning the soft skills) and whenever I had IT problems of my group, I have and had always good people who take care of those and my job is just to manage the management and stakeholders demonstrating my team and I are ahead in the game. This last 10 years also worked well for me (except I lost my job with a bank in 2013 but that's OK, I got another job with another bank).

Most recently, I got a new boss and we had some IT issue(we call it Incident) and the new boss is a very detail oriented guy and got a hands-on technical experience about how stuff works and his expectation was I'm not competent enough to handle the tech stuff. He made a comment during my one-o-one saying 'Joe, you need to make your hands dirty in Technology'.

It's been two weeks and I can't express what's going on with me. I just took that as a challenge and committed myself with a mission statement 'Joe, you are going to make your hands dirty in Java 8, PHP, HTML 5, CSS, Oracle with Database Admin, Python, Android/OS mobile development, Swift and Go language, AWS cloud services, Hadoop Framework with Big Data, IAAS(infastructure as a Service), PAAS (Platform as a Service), and SAAS(Software as a Service), Active-Passive & Active-Active data center concepts. All these stuffs I'm committed to do in the next 3 months.

The above is true story. It will be highly appreciated if anyone can offer mentoring/advise if my goals are realistic or I am becoming emotional considering my mid-life.

Learning and investing to learn these stuffs in not a problem with me. I'm financially sort of afford to do whatever it can take to complete this.

I will contact you and make all possible effort to meet you in person (no matter wherever you live) for your help/mentoring.

Looking forward to hearing from you.

Thanks Joe (I live in Singapore).