
Indian army man learns to code at age of 65 and now have 110 customers - prasad_lingawar
https://www.linkedin.com/hp/update/6261057287436230656
======
happy-go-lucky
> Yesterday I met this amazing guy Kuldeep Sahni, he is a retired lieutenant
> colonel of Indian Army. At the age of 65, he started learning to code. In
> less than 6 months he built his hospital management system especially for
> Army hospitals from scratch. Now his hospital management system is used by
> more than 125 hospitals across India. He is 68 now and still has the passion
> for learning. No wonder, age is just a number. He is such an inspiration to
> young generation and entrepreneurs. A big salute to this man.

> He is looking for .NET freelancers to scale his initiative, if anyone in my
> network is interested please let me know.

For those who have no LinkedIn account, that's all of the article. I googled
for the army man, found no relevant info. With so many customers, they must
have a website. Seems to be a click bait :)

~~~
prasad_lingawar
Hey, He is not on LinkedIn. He has only Army hospitals as customers and he has
a standalone application/Software. All the customers he got were from word of
mouth and personal connections so did not bother to create the website.

Plus he is not doing that for money.

------
Diederich
In 2000, I taught an unaccredited programming course at my local community
college. It was once a week for four hours on Saturdays. The language, Perl,
was an elective. The choice of language and scheduling guaranteed a rather
diverse group of students.

One fellow in his late 40s was a security guard at the college, and so classes
were inexpensive for him. He was particularly drawn to my class because there
were a number of Perl related jobs in the area at the time.

During my office hour after the class, we sometime chatted and I discovered
that he had been working at a local manufacturing facility for almost 20
years. That facility had shut down some years earlier and all of the jobs
moved overseas. (1)

He was a pretty bright guy, and though he had almost no technical background
before he started taking classes a year earlier, he was passing my class.

I asked him about his hundred of ex-coworkers that had also been laid off. Few
if any were making as much progress as he was toward building a new career
from scratch in the second half of their lives.

Some people can learn radically different, technical skills later in life. I'm
now in the second half of my life and I'm learning new things every week,
though I've been deep in technology since I was 10 years old.

A better question is this: of the hundreds of people laid off from that
factory, and the thousands laid off in that particular region, how many would
be able to find tech jobs if even half managed to get the proper training?

1) The building lay idle for a couple of years, and then was bought by a large
multinational company based in the area, and turned into its primary
Information Systems location.
[https://www.google.com/maps/place/David+Glass+Technology+Cen...](https://www.google.com/maps/place/David+Glass+Technology+Center,+Bentonville,+AR+72712)

That's where 90% of the tech jobs in the area were, so over the next 9 years I
would occasionally look up his name to see if he'd hired on. Once he finished
his training I was going to surprise him at his desk! Alas, his name never
came up. Not surprising in retrospect, since most of our positions wanted some
experience.

~~~
cholantesh
>One fellow in his late 40s was a security guard at the college, and so
classes were inexpensive for him. He was particularly drawn to my class
because there were a number of Perl related jobs in the area at the time.

>During my office hour after the class, we sometime chatted and I discovered
that he had been working at a local manufacturing facility for almost 20
years. That facility had shut down some years earlier and all of the jobs
moved overseas.

There is a concierge in my building who was the lead engineer in a textile
factory for about 20 years back in Poland. When he immigrated to Canada, he
was unable to transfer credentials and had to take the concierge job to make
ends meet. He once said to me, "This job has turned out to be a lot less
temporary than I hoped." He was only half-joking.

Seems like I meet a lot of middle-to-senior aged people in security in the
same boat as him, which I find both fascinating and distressing.

------
Pica_soO
My dad is a farmer, and he spends most his remaining years in front of a TV.
How i wished i could teach him coding.. his body is almost done for when it
comes to movement- but coding, that could be possible.

The problem is not the teaching- i could do that- its bringing someone back
from a defeatist mindset. Whatever I do - the bank & robbers always win. How
do you get that out of someones head?

------
ramshanker
Once a primary school teacher of mine said, "If you are excellent in one
language, you will be good in any other".

And being an Army guy already imparts a plenty of good qualities / habit. No
matter they can learn anything they wish to.

------
hackermailman
Forced sign up to Linkedin to read article.

Use archive.is

~~~
prasad_lingawar
Hey sorry, did not know about this. I will keep this in mind for future posts.

------
unixhero
Good to know there's still hope :)

