No One Starts Again After 13 Years. I Did.

I have a CS degree. Then I stayed home, and the few years I’d planned turned into thirteen.

When I decided to come back, someone told me plainly: no one starts working 13 years after graduating.

I believed them for a while. That’s the part I want to talk about.

What I had to relearn

Almost everything with a version number. The tools, the languages people actually used, the way teams shipped. Thirteen years is a long time in this industry. I re-taught myself from scratch, one evening at a time, and somewhere along the way I also finished a second major, in Accounting, before choosing CS again.

What hadn’t changed at all

How to think about a problem before touching it. How to break something big into pieces small enough to finish. How to keep going when the thing you’re learning makes you feel slow.

Those weren’t in any course I took again. They were already mine. I just had to trust them.

What I’d tell you, if you’re the one starting again

Work hard, yes. But also: build resilience on purpose, find a support group, and don’t hide your struggles. Hiding them is what makes them heavy.

“No one starts again after 13 years” was a fact about other people’s expectations. It wasn’t a fact about me.

Then I started as a software engineer.

If you’re standing at the start of your own comeback, what’s the sentence someone said to you that you’re ready to prove wrong?

Farah