Software - like anything worth mastering - requires many thousands of hours. The only reason I can think of that it would be harder to pick up at an older age is that often the hours are harder to come by due to family commitments and so forth.
I went through an intense several year period of studying jazz music beginning around age 16. I remember the discipline it required and the speed at which I was able to progress.
When I got into programming at age 33, it felt exactly the same. The discipline, the hours, the speed of progression; all very similar. Having devoted many thousands of hours to mastering a skill in my teenage years and again in my 30s, I'm not aware of any differences in capacity to improve at one age over the other.
I attended a boot camp and had ~25 classmates all over the age spectrum. Some were smarter than others, some worked harder than others, but there was no age correlation on either of those observations. I also didn't see any age correlated patterns in success in the job market. Some old and young students got jobs immediately; some old and young students had to fight it out a little longer.
If I lose my passion for software at age 40, 50 or 60, I would be very open to pursuing something new at any point in my life.
That's great that this is getting upvoted at HN. I started studying software development last November, at the age of 37. A few times, in my own and other people's posts stating that we are learning to code, there was more negativity in the comments than I would expect from HN.
It is always a mix of: "quit now, it take lots of years to become a developer worth of its name", "don't do it, software development is not the glamorous job you think, it's awful" and "give it up, you just won't be hired for a good job that easily".
An impression I often have is that there are developers who have some kind of resentment reaction to the "everyone can/should learn to code". Like new kids sneaking in your own private club. Outsiders trying to be like you. There is only one type of developer: that kid that started to code when he was 12. All others are impostors and wannabes.
I'm glad that there is this support sentiment for stories like this as well.
It does take a number of years to get enough skill to make great money at it.
However, if you have an aptitude for it, you can get a low-paying job (still way more than minimum wage) pretty quickly, so I think it's an investment that pays off rather quickly.
If you don't have an aptitude for it, well... I dunno that it would ever work out no matter what, so I guess there's not much point in talking about that?
But like most things, you have no idea if you have an aptitude for it before you try it.
I do recommend that everyone learn to code. I also recommend that they learn to draw, play music, manage people, and many other skills. It'll make you well-rounded and give you a chance to find out what you really like and excel at, and I've found that most skills are useful in ways that you didn't expect, and you'll use them forever.
One of the reasons why it can take years is because the intellectual development required to succeed needs a certain level of emotional maturity, something that the younger people does not have, shown in the negativity in the comments and their lack of quality.
On the other hand, in theory, an older person has that emotional maturity that yields the intellectual development. So something that might take years for a young guy to learn, it can take weeks for an older guy to understand.
When creating software, professional development shows in the ability to tackle more and more complex problems. Learning the latest framework is secondary to that. And that concept is scary for some people, just look at the type of questions that some post in quora about the topic.
Bottom line, don't worry about your age, sometimes older is better. Don't worry about people negativity, in Spanish, there is a saying: let the dogs bark, it means we are walking.
On one hand, it is supposed to take years. On the other, you are not supposed to be able to get a job if you are not junior just out of school.
A lot of it is much easier then people make it out to be and quite a lot seniors know much less then they pretend to know. At least, that is my long term observation. A lot of the "it is too difficult you aint got no chance" is just habitual posturing - if it is difficult then I look smarter.
Whether job is awful or not depends a lot on where exactly you work. The worst parts of the job are related to internal politics - whether between development team itself or between development and management or even development team and customer. It is bad when team believe you are lazy unless you work 80 hours a week and dont even try to organize things so that the work would be possible within normal working time (e.g. late meetings, expectation of instant mail answer etc). It is bad when developers fight over who is going to be the lead. It is bad when another developer insist on having everything his way and micromanages or badmount people behind backs. It is bad when there is a mess (e.g. no common standards) and no leadership.
None of that is something that you could not encounter in any other profession. It tend to be somewhat bad in agile teams, since those do not have clear responsibilities to team members (leading to either constant power struggle or strongly enforced conformity). However, as a new kid on the block, you wont have opinions all that much anyway, so you should be fine.
All those arguments have elements of truth in them.
You probably won't be a development job with a large amount of responsibility any time soon as you build up your skills. You will be fairly junior for quite a few years, and you will have to actively have to develop yourself to move on to be better jobs.
Software development has been glamorized by the media, yet the vast majority of programming jobs are pretty boring crud business applications. About as interesting as book keeping or filing invoices.
If you accept those things, and still feel interested then yeah sure become a developer.
It's not about stopping people becoming developers, its about giving realistic views of development so they aren't disappointed when they switch.
That's such a joke. Anyone with the time can learn what they need to know in under a year and so long as they have the interviewing skills and a portfolio showing they can do it, they can easily get a salaried position somewhere.
Will it be at google? Probably not. But who cares? You'll still be making good money doing something interesting. That's more than a lot of people can hope for.
Ignore the naysayers. A good friend of mine that I met in undergrad was in his 30s. He had quit a job managing a grocery store and went to school for CS. We have worked together off and on throughout the years, and he was always a very solid engineer (I'd work with him again). He's director of engineering at a decent sized company now.
I think the key for an older person is to embrace the skills they have, and apply them to software.
Finally, I'm of the camp that anyone can become passable at most anything if they have the drive. Software is no exception. Becoming great at something is a different story because it requires many variables to line up perfectly.
> An impression I often have is that there are developers who have some kind of resentment reaction to the "everyone can/should learn to code".
Absolutely. The benefits developers enjoy in the workplace (decent pay, ease of finding work, etc.) are directly a result of relatively few having the necessary ability to do the job. More people with ability means more competition, which starts to erode those benefits. These are benefits that anyone is keen to lose. The "everyone should learn to code" movement pushed by the big tech firms squarely targeted at reducing their labour costs, and there is concern that it will actually succeed once it has had enough time to come to fruition. The reaction you have experienced seems quite expected, but not for the reasons you were thinking.
I would even suggest that it is basic human nature to try and mitigate the competition, and not just within the workplace (romantic relationships being another example).
>That's great that this is getting upvoted at HN. I started studying software development last November, at the age of 37. A few times, in my own and other people's posts stating that we are learning to code, there was more negativity in the comments than I would expect from HN.
Ignore the naysayers.
I started to teach myself programming around my 35th birthday. About a year and half later, at the age of 36.5 years, I got my first professional programming position. It was nothing sexy. It was doing maintenance programming on LOB applications in a corporate IT shop. But it got my foot in the door. And I kept on teaching myself, absorbing as much I could about every technology I encountered. My career has been on an upward trajectory ever since.
This is a dumb question, but what stack do you use as a "software developer"? I'm a front-end developer who works heavily on javascript web apps, but I have a hard time describing myself as a "software developer".
Not to rain on anyone's parade, but it would also be useful (probably more useful) to see stories of older people who have tried and failed to become developers.
It's nice to see the success stories but I'm always wary of survivorship bias. If there are ten people who couldn't make a go of it for every one of these stories, it puts a different view on things.
(I say this as a 37 year old freelance writer currently learning Elixir and React in the hope of shifting careers.)
Same probably goes for younger people as well, though. The difference being that most people pick the career paths they stay on in their 20's. I've seen many drop out of computer science curriculums and gone to become a carpenter or whatever. Promoting the possibility for change later in life is a wonderful thing and societies should encourage and make that possible. Nobody should feel trapped in their past, but obviously they still need to put in the work.
Edit: Not to mention the amount of people who apply to universities and never get accepted. There's plenty of room for failure and pessimism if someone wants to take that angle, and someone is always left out of something, no matter how hard they work. That's also why society should enable an equal springboard for everyone. I want the best and brightest to become the doctors and scientists of the future. Not the ones who had the most leisure time in their hands to be able to study and get accepted to programs.
I think it doesn't really matter. Programming is not a physical impossibility for a vast majority of people. Like I could train for years and never be able to bench press 400lb because of genetic limitation but learning to program doesn't have that limitation. Learning to program like most skills just takes time, effort and dedication. I think if you fail at it either you weren't as interested as you thought or you may have been trying to learn a language that just didn't vibe with you.
Programming also seems like the only profession people just assume they can pick up in a year. No one wakes up and says I'm going to quit my job and become a doctor, or a professor, or lawyer in 3 months to a year. If they are making that type of career switch they go in with the expectation that they will have a lot to learn and it is going to take more than a year of concerted effort. Not everyone is going to become a software engineer at google or apple but there are plenty of well paying programming jobs.
Sorry for the long post I just get frustrated when people want to look at others failures as a gage for their own capabilities. Believe in yourself and put in the work, the results will come.
“He who who says he can and he who says he can't are both usually right” – Confucius
I decided to learn programming at 38, started at 39, and now at 41 I am in the process of releasing a commercial version of software I created.
I moved into this field from medicine, to have greater control over my life, scratch my entrepreneurial itch and broaden my horizons. I have no regrets.
You can do it if you really want to, and at any age.
I started learning Swift in my fifties and by god am having a blast. Already finished an iPad app for my daughter and there is no better gratification than seeing her playing and learning with it.
I started later in life, after being a stay at home mom for 10 plus years. I went back to regular school and now I'm working as a Software Engineer. I need to look up more concepts and ask more questions but I'm getting there. It's a long road but one worth walking.
I've been a programmer for 27 years, and I still look things up constantly. Not just API details. Everything. If I was mainly doing things I can do off the top of my head, I would suspect I wasn't doing as much as I could be.
> I need to look up more concepts and ask more questions....
More compared to who else? And who is keeping count? I have found that the most important questions you can ever ask are "why/why not?". You can never go wrong with that pair.
Exactly. If you've found some success and a knack for it, that's really what matters especially if you can find job opportunities. Code speaks for itself, regardless of age and other factors. I've seen a lot of unexpected people demographic-wise succeed. It's totally possible.
Kudos to these people. A lot of the time when I hear people ask "Is it too late to do x" it sounds like they are asking for an excuse to not try.
I know for certain older workers will face subtle and not so subtle discrimination which makes it incredibly unfortunate that companies don't focus on it more in their workforce diversity initiatives. Is this a problem companies are less willing to confront? Compared to say, gender and race diversity?
I think it's more a question of career feasibility. Learning to dev takes years of making and learning from mistakes.
You have to be able to give up whatever job and lifestyle you currently have and take up a junior position for a few years which some people just can't afford to do, what with kids and bills and whatnot.
The real question is probably 'how long before I can achieve a decent salary if I start from scratch?'
I've dabbled with programming off and on since the 80s, but never really did anything work related until I was 38. I got transferred from the NOC to a sys admin position just as everything here became devops all the time. Really focused on learning python, aws and Jenkins. Now 41 and I just got promoted to being a senior software engineer at a very large tech company.
I actually credit hacker news for a lot of it because repeating what I read here makes me seem a lot smarter than I am, I think.
I honestly don't think it matters. You're going to hit a salary ceiling at about the 8-10 year mark no matter when you start. So unless you're already at or near retirement age, it's not too late :)
I'm 36, started programming at about age 6 or 7 (thanks largely to my mother being a programmer and helping me learn the basics), and still spend a lot of my free time on personal projects. I actually didn't start programming for a living until age 26 (did a stint in the Army right after college).
I haven't had a significant raise in the last 4 years. In fact, I made a higher salary (albeit in a higher COL area) 5 years ago. Early in my career I was getting 20%+ pay bumps just for switching jobs. That doesn't happen anymore. More often than not I have to make my salary expectations clear from the first conversation with a potential employer lest I waste a lot my time only to receive an offer 30% lower than my current salary.
It's the point I'm thinking of leaving the field (I'll never stop programming in my free time, though) and finding something else with some actual upward mobility.
Is making more every year that important? At some point, you reach an asymptote where you're not particularly more valuable than the prior year and then your pay goes up with inflation rather than the 10+% per year that it was going up early in your career (when your value was going up 20+% per year)
I'd be curious to hear the field you choose that has better compensation prospects than the salary ceiling for software development, especially if you're going to be doing development in your free time because you love it. Hell, just get paid to develop for your day job and be stuck at "only" a decent 6-figure salary.
I thought that starting out as a developer at 42 was a bit too old. I felt much better when the new guy I started with admitted he was going to be 50 at the end of the month.
How is it going? I would like to know more about other people's choices in a similar situation.
I am 37, studying web development (mostly Javascript) for 4 months now. I feel I learned a lot of the language itself, but I'm struggling with other important components of being a good developer, like proper use of git, comments, tests, etc.
I'm 25, I started (properly) learning and liking coding about a year ago. Seeing people who are 4-5+ years younger than me with more knowledge and experience is discouraging. It doesn't help than in a job interview I was told "Why should we hire you when there are people younger than you with more experience"
>"Why should we hire you when there are people younger than you with more experience"
"I'm not sure why age is relevant or necessary in your question. But thank you for showing your contempt for older people. I'll be excusing myself now. Good luck in finding a candidate and filling your position. I have a blog article to write."
I'm one of the guys in that blog post. I feel incredibly lucky I got a job in this field at my age - my employer was very kind to hire someone in his mid 30s with no professional experience.
It worked out for me, and I'm 36. At 25 , you are just getting started in life. You're going to be just fine.
That's a strange thing to say in an interview. If I were hiring a junior developer, I'd favor the applicant who has more life experience and would assume them to be more grounded and reliable than someone in their early 20's.
This seems to conflate "you can become a dev" with "you can be hired as a dev" after the age of 35, 40 or 50.
This isn't to say it's not worth becoming a dev at a later age -- coding is an increasingly crucial skill for entrepreneurs -- but it seems cruel to entertain the myth that older devs get hired by the handful.
There was recently some advice (on HN?) that if you really want to make money, you specialize in 2 things, not just 1, and not Jack-of-all-trades. So having a first career and then moving into a second one is one way to do that.
Last year we hired a couple junior programmers, even though we were only aiming for 1. The second programmer impressed us so much with her code samples that we were tempted to hire her as well. But what really cinched the deal was that she had uncommon business sense and knew enough to tell us about it. She has been the best junior programmer that I've ever worked with, and I have no doubt she'll be an amazing senior programmer some day.
Counter that with "what happens if you get diagnosed with cancer and the next week your on chemo" This happened to a young guy in our team at my last bit one place and to my project manger earlier in my carrear
One of the great things about programming compared to many professions is that the requirements to start are pretty low: you need a machine and (realistically) Internet access, and a willingness to search for examples and answers. It doesn’t require you to clear space in your garage, or invest in large equipment, or go anywhere far away, or have a company backing you to acquire the necessary training; you just start. Even better, progress can be realistically made in spare time without necessarily abandoning whatever job got you this far, assuming you aren’t working 90-hour weeks.
It is also one of the few disciplines that is included in part-time degrees at some universities. This means you can even be taught radically new things in the field without necessarily giving up your day job.
I absolutely feel that it is harder to learn a new career as you get older. You have much less time as an adult than a traditional college student, and my brain doesn't retain things as well as it did 18 years ago. Also, the repercussions for failing to successfully transition into a new career are much more severe for someone approaching 40 than someone in their early 20s.
There was significant risks associated with my decision, financial burdens (loans, credit card debt accumulation), and also some opportunity costs of not earning income for over a year. I quit my primary job, leaving me with no safety net. It was scary at my age to do this, but by taking on such huge financial risks I was more even motivated to succeed - to fail would have been devastating.
As of now there's no such thing as programming species, natural or genetically engineered. Like any other skill, programming is learnable. One's age should not be a barrier to learning it as long as they enjoy their mental health[1]. Some skills are easy to learn and some are hard and take many years of practice before one can do it with some mastery.
We learn skills out of necessity or out of passion, sometimes out of both. Whether we become good at something depends on a number of factors, and obviously there're efficient older workers and incompetent younger workers in every industry, and this dualism applies to programmers as well.
A computer is a means to an end. People in disciplines such as biology, mathematics, sociology learn and use programming as a tool to solve their day-to-day work-related problems because it helps boost their productivity.
I'm nearly 40 and just started my first software development job.
In my case, I already knew Python and Ruby from working in ops, so it wasn't completely new to me as was the case for the people in the article. What is new to me is having larger programming tasks that require focus and teamwork. The nature of ops tends to involve a lot of context switching and as a result most of my projects were small and self contained. Learning how to collaborate with others on the same code base is a big adjustment.
I am also incredibly impressed with how patient my colleagues are. I know "how to code" broadly, but that's not the same thing as "how to be a software developer." I'm fortunate enough to have the opportunity to learn as I go.
I started 2 months ago, trying to follow the courses of Edimburgh Software Engineering ( http://www.drps.ed.ac.uk/16-17/dpt/utswenm.htm ). At the moment I'm doing Haskell, Linear Algebra and Computational Logic, but I see that everybody just do some courses with a more practical approach (Python, NodeJs, Ruby on Rails, etc.) I have some web development knowledge (manage several drupal sites and have 2 linux servers online) and have some mathematics knowledge (I am economist). Do you think I should also take the fast path? Am I loosing my time by learning maths, logic and Haskell? I'm 36
Software is the path I chose to achieve many different short/mid term goals for my life. Finding an ok paid job, exploring another form of freedom of mind, the ability to create things I want, guiding/teaching my kids better with deeper understanding and know how of the development of human-control-machine-to-achieve-result (even though I only have a tiny piece of knowledge of it), sensing the new opportunities, etc.
While I'm still struggling with the first one, I found the rest are all very well achieved.
To all late starters: keep going as long as the resource is available and good luck to all of us.
edit: typo and replace "tech" with a more detailed description.
In my opinion, this question is not answerable because:
- it calls into question the individuals motivation and ability to materialise that motivation - this is impossible to measure.
- there is no such thing as a "software developer". We write software, this is true; however software is so ingested into society that one software engineer may be performing an entirely different role to another. And different roles naturally demand differing skill sets - this is impossible to specify.
So, without meaning to offend, bundling up the entire aged population and asking if they can do a job that is hugely variable is a bit of a non-sense.
[+] [-] aczerepinski|9 years ago|reply
I went through an intense several year period of studying jazz music beginning around age 16. I remember the discipline it required and the speed at which I was able to progress.
When I got into programming at age 33, it felt exactly the same. The discipline, the hours, the speed of progression; all very similar. Having devoted many thousands of hours to mastering a skill in my teenage years and again in my 30s, I'm not aware of any differences in capacity to improve at one age over the other.
I attended a boot camp and had ~25 classmates all over the age spectrum. Some were smarter than others, some worked harder than others, but there was no age correlation on either of those observations. I also didn't see any age correlated patterns in success in the job market. Some old and young students got jobs immediately; some old and young students had to fight it out a little longer.
If I lose my passion for software at age 40, 50 or 60, I would be very open to pursuing something new at any point in my life.
[+] [-] soneca|9 years ago|reply
It is always a mix of: "quit now, it take lots of years to become a developer worth of its name", "don't do it, software development is not the glamorous job you think, it's awful" and "give it up, you just won't be hired for a good job that easily".
An impression I often have is that there are developers who have some kind of resentment reaction to the "everyone can/should learn to code". Like new kids sneaking in your own private club. Outsiders trying to be like you. There is only one type of developer: that kid that started to code when he was 12. All others are impostors and wannabes.
I'm glad that there is this support sentiment for stories like this as well.
[+] [-] wccrawford|9 years ago|reply
However, if you have an aptitude for it, you can get a low-paying job (still way more than minimum wage) pretty quickly, so I think it's an investment that pays off rather quickly.
If you don't have an aptitude for it, well... I dunno that it would ever work out no matter what, so I guess there's not much point in talking about that?
But like most things, you have no idea if you have an aptitude for it before you try it.
I do recommend that everyone learn to code. I also recommend that they learn to draw, play music, manage people, and many other skills. It'll make you well-rounded and give you a chance to find out what you really like and excel at, and I've found that most skills are useful in ways that you didn't expect, and you'll use them forever.
[+] [-] jorgeleo|9 years ago|reply
On the other hand, in theory, an older person has that emotional maturity that yields the intellectual development. So something that might take years for a young guy to learn, it can take weeks for an older guy to understand.
When creating software, professional development shows in the ability to tackle more and more complex problems. Learning the latest framework is secondary to that. And that concept is scary for some people, just look at the type of questions that some post in quora about the topic.
Bottom line, don't worry about your age, sometimes older is better. Don't worry about people negativity, in Spanish, there is a saying: let the dogs bark, it means we are walking.
[+] [-] watwut|9 years ago|reply
A lot of it is much easier then people make it out to be and quite a lot seniors know much less then they pretend to know. At least, that is my long term observation. A lot of the "it is too difficult you aint got no chance" is just habitual posturing - if it is difficult then I look smarter.
Whether job is awful or not depends a lot on where exactly you work. The worst parts of the job are related to internal politics - whether between development team itself or between development and management or even development team and customer. It is bad when team believe you are lazy unless you work 80 hours a week and dont even try to organize things so that the work would be possible within normal working time (e.g. late meetings, expectation of instant mail answer etc). It is bad when developers fight over who is going to be the lead. It is bad when another developer insist on having everything his way and micromanages or badmount people behind backs. It is bad when there is a mess (e.g. no common standards) and no leadership.
None of that is something that you could not encounter in any other profession. It tend to be somewhat bad in agile teams, since those do not have clear responsibilities to team members (leading to either constant power struggle or strongly enforced conformity). However, as a new kid on the block, you wont have opinions all that much anyway, so you should be fine.
[+] [-] UK-AL|9 years ago|reply
You probably won't be a development job with a large amount of responsibility any time soon as you build up your skills. You will be fairly junior for quite a few years, and you will have to actively have to develop yourself to move on to be better jobs.
Software development has been glamorized by the media, yet the vast majority of programming jobs are pretty boring crud business applications. About as interesting as book keeping or filing invoices.
If you accept those things, and still feel interested then yeah sure become a developer.
It's not about stopping people becoming developers, its about giving realistic views of development so they aren't disappointed when they switch.
[+] [-] kdamken|9 years ago|reply
Will it be at google? Probably not. But who cares? You'll still be making good money doing something interesting. That's more than a lot of people can hope for.
[+] [-] matwood|9 years ago|reply
I think the key for an older person is to embrace the skills they have, and apply them to software.
Finally, I'm of the camp that anyone can become passable at most anything if they have the drive. Software is no exception. Becoming great at something is a different story because it requires many variables to line up perfectly.
[+] [-] randomdata|9 years ago|reply
Absolutely. The benefits developers enjoy in the workplace (decent pay, ease of finding work, etc.) are directly a result of relatively few having the necessary ability to do the job. More people with ability means more competition, which starts to erode those benefits. These are benefits that anyone is keen to lose. The "everyone should learn to code" movement pushed by the big tech firms squarely targeted at reducing their labour costs, and there is concern that it will actually succeed once it has had enough time to come to fruition. The reaction you have experienced seems quite expected, but not for the reasons you were thinking.
I would even suggest that it is basic human nature to try and mitigate the competition, and not just within the workplace (romantic relationships being another example).
[+] [-] rhapsodic|9 years ago|reply
Ignore the naysayers.
I started to teach myself programming around my 35th birthday. About a year and half later, at the age of 36.5 years, I got my first professional programming position. It was nothing sexy. It was doing maintenance programming on LOB applications in a corporate IT shop. But it got my foot in the door. And I kept on teaching myself, absorbing as much I could about every technology I encountered. My career has been on an upward trajectory ever since.
[+] [-] magic_beans|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Veen|9 years ago|reply
It's nice to see the success stories but I'm always wary of survivorship bias. If there are ten people who couldn't make a go of it for every one of these stories, it puts a different view on things.
(I say this as a 37 year old freelance writer currently learning Elixir and React in the hope of shifting careers.)
[+] [-] greenmana|9 years ago|reply
Edit: Not to mention the amount of people who apply to universities and never get accepted. There's plenty of room for failure and pessimism if someone wants to take that angle, and someone is always left out of something, no matter how hard they work. That's also why society should enable an equal springboard for everyone. I want the best and brightest to become the doctors and scientists of the future. Not the ones who had the most leisure time in their hands to be able to study and get accepted to programs.
[+] [-] fatalogic|9 years ago|reply
Programming also seems like the only profession people just assume they can pick up in a year. No one wakes up and says I'm going to quit my job and become a doctor, or a professor, or lawyer in 3 months to a year. If they are making that type of career switch they go in with the expectation that they will have a lot to learn and it is going to take more than a year of concerted effort. Not everyone is going to become a software engineer at google or apple but there are plenty of well paying programming jobs.
Sorry for the long post I just get frustrated when people want to look at others failures as a gage for their own capabilities. Believe in yourself and put in the work, the results will come.
“He who who says he can and he who says he can't are both usually right” – Confucius
[+] [-] unknown|9 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] jacquesm|9 years ago|reply
Interesting pick for a first language.
[+] [-] Lordarminius|9 years ago|reply
I decided to learn programming at 38, started at 39, and now at 41 I am in the process of releasing a commercial version of software I created. I moved into this field from medicine, to have greater control over my life, scratch my entrepreneurial itch and broaden my horizons. I have no regrets.
You can do it if you really want to, and at any age.
[+] [-] jventura|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ionised|9 years ago|reply
Doesn't have to specific.
[+] [-] 77pt77|9 years ago|reply
Are we talking doctor (plenty of debt if in the USA) or some other occupation?
[+] [-] Entangled|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] markdown|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sonabinu|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] psyc|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Lordarminius|9 years ago|reply
More compared to who else? And who is keeping count? I have found that the most important questions you can ever ask are "why/why not?". You can never go wrong with that pair.
Keep doing your thing.
The only truth is your code. :)
[+] [-] moonshinefe|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lebanon_tn|9 years ago|reply
I know for certain older workers will face subtle and not so subtle discrimination which makes it incredibly unfortunate that companies don't focus on it more in their workforce diversity initiatives. Is this a problem companies are less willing to confront? Compared to say, gender and race diversity?
[+] [-] test1235|9 years ago|reply
You have to be able to give up whatever job and lifestyle you currently have and take up a junior position for a few years which some people just can't afford to do, what with kids and bills and whatnot.
The real question is probably 'how long before I can achieve a decent salary if I start from scratch?'
[+] [-] empath75|9 years ago|reply
I actually credit hacker news for a lot of it because repeating what I read here makes me seem a lot smarter than I am, I think.
[+] [-] jcadam|9 years ago|reply
I'm 36, started programming at about age 6 or 7 (thanks largely to my mother being a programmer and helping me learn the basics), and still spend a lot of my free time on personal projects. I actually didn't start programming for a living until age 26 (did a stint in the Army right after college).
I haven't had a significant raise in the last 4 years. In fact, I made a higher salary (albeit in a higher COL area) 5 years ago. Early in my career I was getting 20%+ pay bumps just for switching jobs. That doesn't happen anymore. More often than not I have to make my salary expectations clear from the first conversation with a potential employer lest I waste a lot my time only to receive an offer 30% lower than my current salary.
It's the point I'm thinking of leaving the field (I'll never stop programming in my free time, though) and finding something else with some actual upward mobility.
[+] [-] sokoloff|9 years ago|reply
I'd be curious to hear the field you choose that has better compensation prospects than the salary ceiling for software development, especially if you're going to be doing development in your free time because you love it. Hell, just get paid to develop for your day job and be stuck at "only" a decent 6-figure salary.
[+] [-] SuperGent|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] soneca|9 years ago|reply
I am 37, studying web development (mostly Javascript) for 4 months now. I feel I learned a lot of the language itself, but I'm struggling with other important components of being a good developer, like proper use of git, comments, tests, etc.
[+] [-] drunkkcunt|9 years ago|reply
I'm 25, I started (properly) learning and liking coding about a year ago. Seeing people who are 4-5+ years younger than me with more knowledge and experience is discouraging. It doesn't help than in a job interview I was told "Why should we hire you when there are people younger than you with more experience"
[+] [-] jrs235|9 years ago|reply
"I'm not sure why age is relevant or necessary in your question. But thank you for showing your contempt for older people. I'll be excusing myself now. Good luck in finding a candidate and filling your position. I have a blog article to write."
[+] [-] ClaytonB|9 years ago|reply
It worked out for me, and I'm 36. At 25 , you are just getting started in life. You're going to be just fine.
[+] [-] csorrell|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] omginternets|9 years ago|reply
This isn't to say it's not worth becoming a dev at a later age -- coding is an increasingly crucial skill for entrepreneurs -- but it seems cruel to entertain the myth that older devs get hired by the handful.
[+] [-] barking|9 years ago|reply
One thing you'll likely have in your favour is knowledge of another domain to a degree that perhaps no other programmer has.
Even so you might have to go the start up route and then unless you have strong marketing skills you're unlikely to do well.
"Is it just you? What happens if you die?" is a question you'll get over and over.
[+] [-] wccrawford|9 years ago|reply
Last year we hired a couple junior programmers, even though we were only aiming for 1. The second programmer impressed us so much with her code samples that we were tempted to hire her as well. But what really cinched the deal was that she had uncommon business sense and knew enough to tell us about it. She has been the best junior programmer that I've ever worked with, and I have no doubt she'll be an amazing senior programmer some day.
[+] [-] tonyedgecombe|9 years ago|reply
Never had that question in 20 years.
[+] [-] walshemj|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] makecheck|9 years ago|reply
It is also one of the few disciplines that is included in part-time degrees at some universities. This means you can even be taught radically new things in the field without necessarily giving up your day job.
[+] [-] ClaytonB|9 years ago|reply
There was significant risks associated with my decision, financial burdens (loans, credit card debt accumulation), and also some opportunity costs of not earning income for over a year. I quit my primary job, leaving me with no safety net. It was scary at my age to do this, but by taking on such huge financial risks I was more even motivated to succeed - to fail would have been devastating.
[+] [-] happy-go-lucky|9 years ago|reply
We learn skills out of necessity or out of passion, sometimes out of both. Whether we become good at something depends on a number of factors, and obviously there're efficient older workers and incompetent younger workers in every industry, and this dualism applies to programmers as well.
A computer is a means to an end. People in disciplines such as biology, mathematics, sociology learn and use programming as a tool to solve their day-to-day work-related problems because it helps boost their productivity.
[1] http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs220/en/
[+] [-] JeremyNT|9 years ago|reply
In my case, I already knew Python and Ruby from working in ops, so it wasn't completely new to me as was the case for the people in the article. What is new to me is having larger programming tasks that require focus and teamwork. The nature of ops tends to involve a lot of context switching and as a result most of my projects were small and self contained. Learning how to collaborate with others on the same code base is a big adjustment.
I am also incredibly impressed with how patient my colleagues are. I know "how to code" broadly, but that's not the same thing as "how to be a software developer." I'm fortunate enough to have the opportunity to learn as I go.
[+] [-] mrwebmaster|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] LiweiZ|9 years ago|reply
While I'm still struggling with the first one, I found the rest are all very well achieved.
To all late starters: keep going as long as the resource is available and good luck to all of us.
edit: typo and replace "tech" with a more detailed description.
[+] [-] laythea|9 years ago|reply
- it calls into question the individuals motivation and ability to materialise that motivation - this is impossible to measure.
- there is no such thing as a "software developer". We write software, this is true; however software is so ingested into society that one software engineer may be performing an entirely different role to another. And different roles naturally demand differing skill sets - this is impossible to specify.
So, without meaning to offend, bundling up the entire aged population and asking if they can do a job that is hugely variable is a bit of a non-sense.