Changing career from Finance to Coding

Can a middle-aged finance professional really retrain as a coder in Silicon Valley?

A knight beaten down. Maybe by a career in Finance. Can he get up? Image by jaymethunt from Pixabay.

I had just turned 32 and landed my dream job. I was finally going to leave the depressing cost-cutting, downsizing, everyone for themselves, innovation stifling world of banking (sorry bankers!) and join Google, a high growth company leading the latest tech revolution. I was like a 5-year old in a toy shop — I couldn’t contain my excitement!

And for the next five years I loved it — not every minute of it, but the good times far outweighed the bad. But then that niggling thought started to come back into my head: is this really what I want to do for the rest of my life? Is this career path fully using my biggest strengths? Is it aligned with my passion?

I slowly realised I’d done it again. I’d moved closer to my dream career, but not quite made it.

You see, I got my first computer at the age of 7 back in 1988: a Sinclair ZX Spectrum with a whopping 128kb of memory. I loved playing the games (and the crazy sounds it made when loading), but I was more fascinated by how the games were made and finding out how I could do it myself. Over the years I dabbled in programming on each new computer and, when the world-wide web came along, on website building too. It came…