
Software developers who started after 35, 40 or 50 - clubminsk
https://belitsoft.com/php-development-services/its-not-too-late-become-software-developer-after-age-35-40-or-50-top-10-true-great-success-stories
======
aczerepinski
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.

~~~
kemiller2002
I think you're absolutely right with this. I've never seen age make a
difference on someone's ability to learn programming.

The only thing I think that young people possible have over older ones is the
amount of available time. In general, people in their 30's, 40's, etc. have
family commitments that someone in their 20's probably does not (not married,
no kids etc.). This is probably what gives them a slight edge, but it has
nothing to do with age per se.

On the flip side, people who are older are generally more mature also, and
realize that if they really want something they have to work for it. Honestly,
now that I am almost 40, learning stuff (around programming, math, really
anything) is so much easier than it was when I was in my 20's, because I
understand the discipline that is required to do it. I'm more efficient at how
I spend my time, and I see connections with what I already know making it
easier to grasp concepts.

~~~
aryamaan
What advice you would give to someone in their 20s who often find themselves
at loss of motivation or drive.

~~~
criddell
In the back of his Ruby book, Zed Shaw gives some great advice that I think is
worth reading:

[https://learnrubythehardway.org/book/advice.html](https://learnrubythehardway.org/book/advice.html)

I think the standout piece of advice in that is to use code as a secret weapon
in another profession.

~~~
verisimilidude
That advice, using code as a secret weapon in another profession, is great.
But it comes with a huge caveat: it can bite you in the ass. I've automated
myself out of my own editorial/publishing jobs twice now.

No regrets though. My mantra is that if you're not striving to automate
yourself out of your own job these days, then you're holding something back,
and not truly contributing your most valuable work.

~~~
hahajk
If a person demonstrated that he can create software that can do the job of a
human at a fraction of the cost, why on earth would a company get rid of that
golden goose?

~~~
verisimilidude
I've had a lot of time to think about that (been unemployed for a couple
months now), and have come up with a few reasons.

* All of your reputation within an organization can vanish following the wrong change in management (especially executive management) or organizational structure. A new manager may take for granted all the great things you automated if he/she never saw the prior pain and inefficiency. That new manager may then look at you, see someone who doesn't have a clearly defined role anymore, and fail to understand the long-term value. You can only sell yourself for so long; if you can't pull another magic rabbit out of your ass for the new management, and quickly, then you'll be gone.

* Once you've automated yourself out of your own job, naturally people will notice and you'll start getting invited to work on other problems throughout the organization. In domain professions, which are often occupied by folks who have been doing things the same way for decades, this can be hugely intimidating and even threatening for others. I've been aware of this throughout my work and have always sought participation and consensus from those who might be affected by my work, but some minds are easier to win than others. Combine a few of these bad apples with the above change in management, and poof.

------
soneca
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.

~~~
wccrawford
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.

~~~
lexandstuff
In my limited experience, you don't need to have an "aptitude" for programming
to get good at it. It just requires a lot of time and patience.

~~~
greenmana
Many are too easy to give up on things on the excuse that they're not talented
or have "aptitude", be it programming or playing an instrument etc. Most
complicated skills require a lot to develop, and the ones with patience and
persistence often do better than those with just more talent.

------
Veen
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.)

~~~
fatalogic
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

~~~
Veen
I see your point, but I think you may have missed mine. Let's say there are
ten successful older programmers interviewed. Seven of them went to coding
basecamps, two of them went back to school, and one of them was entirely self-
taught. I, as someone who wants to be a developer concludes that going to a
coding boot camp is the best way to become a developer later in life.

The problem is that there might be 1000 people who attended boot camps and
went on to work in McDonalds for every one who got a developer job — 0.1
percent became developers. But maybe only ten of the self-taught people work
in McDonalds for every one who got a programming job. It would be smarter to
self-learn in that situation.

But, if all you ever see are the successes, you have no way to decide which is
the best course of action.

------
Lordarminius
This is a fantastic article.

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.

~~~
ionised
May I ask what the software you created was?

Doesn't have to specific.

~~~
Lordarminius
Sure.

Simple accounting software for (very)small businesses.They dominate the
landscape in my country. It is implemented as SAAS. I will introduce it on
Show HN soon.

I also plan on starting a news site for Business, Finance and Policy (think a
limited sort of 'Bloomberg' for Nigeria and eventually West Africa.) All the
local business sites I know suck.

~~~
jxm262
I wouldn't mind helping out with a news site :) Im also taking a trip to Togo
this summer , so could be a good way for me to learn more about what's
happening in the region

~~~
Lordarminius
Not a bad idea. Please shoot me an email.

------
Entangled
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.

~~~
markdown
Did you know how to code (in other languages) before diving into Swift?

~~~
Entangled
30 other languages but that's irrelevant to the joy of learning something new
and applying such knowledge.

------
sonabinu
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.

~~~
psyc
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.

------
lebanon_tn
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?

~~~
test1235
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?'

~~~
sokoloff
Don't most junior devs make a large enough salary to compete with mid-career
wages for other professional roles? (I haven't seen this year's offers, but
I'm pretty sure we're right at $100K for new college hires in the Boston
market.)

That's about 1.5x the median _household_ income here.

If that is the factor that keeps someone from switching careers, I think they
have more of a lifestyle problem than an income problem.

To me, the issue is how to replace the "years of experience and learning from
mistakes" (even structured college course and internships are incredibly
valuable experience and that's going to hard to layer on top of a full time
career before the transition). Contributing to open source projects is one
obvious way, but doing that on a large scale is time-consuming as well,
especially layered on top of another professional career outside of software.

This is no worse than if I wanted to transition into aerospace engineering, or
automotive, or oil and gas. It's very much more possible than transitions into
those fields, but it's still going to be a long row to hoe.

~~~
ryandrake
Not only that, but tech seems to be one of those weird fields where the fresh
junior hire makes about as much money as (or more than) the person with 20 or
40 years experience. If anything, switching IN to tech is probably a good
short-term decision financially, but staying in it is of dubious value.

I got out of software engineering after about 10 years, in large part because
of the compensation ceiling, thinking project management or product management
would have a better career trajectory, and boy was I wrong. The ceiling is
present throughout tech unless you're a senior or C-level exec.

~~~
sokoloff
I have a software team of around 100 people. I approve the comp planning for
the org and I don't see what you describe in the dataset that I have in front
of me. (I know that's only an N or 1 [or 100].)

Our squad leads make more than junior engineers. Our senior engineers make
more than junior engineers. It's not a factor of 3 like in some other
industries, but it's also on a much higher initial base.

If "making 3x more than the new college hire" is your primary goal, software
engineering might not be for you.

If "making a crapload of money at a job that's so good I'd do it for free
anyway, and having little to worry about financial security" is your primary
goal, software engineering is gig that's tough to beat, IMO.

20 or 40 years of experience? I'll pay those two people the exact same (on
average). Tech changes quickly enough that general software experience
matters, but no one has 40 years of experience in .Net, JVM, or Javascript. I
think that general software experience plateaus around 15 years or so, so I
don't see much of a reason to think the employee with 20 or 40 years of
experience is in any way more valuable than the employee with 15 years of
experience. If they aren't any more valuable, they haven't earned the right to
any greater comp, IMO. They drift upwards with inflation and the general
market, just like everyone else.

~~~
ryandrake
Wow, thanks for your honesty and sharing your team's numbers. They match up
with my "gut feeling" about what happens with tech industry compensation:
Steep ramp up from zero to ~5 years, much less so for the next 10, then pretty
much plateau. I wonder if the way we [don't] reward experience in the software
industry contributes to the "shortage of engineers" perception that keeps
coming up in related discussions.

~~~
dozzie
> I wonder if the way we [don't] reward experience in the software industry
> contributes to the "shortage of engineers" perception that keeps coming up
> in related discussions.

Probably not. As an industry, we simply don't have many people who have 20-40
years of experience, because 20-40 years ago the field wasn't that big.

We're yet to learn how to put a proper price on experience once we have enough
experienced programmers for everybody to see how much better than the
youngsters crowd they are (or are not) and when the job market starts to
demand them (if this ever happens).

------
empath75
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.

------
jcadam
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.

~~~
sokoloff
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.

~~~
MisterBastahrd
Yes, because nobody has a crystal ball that can guarantee them a future where
they'll continue to make that kind of money throughout the rest of their
careers.

Yes, because the business-types who run the world want to see a steady stream
of promotions, or else they come to the conclusion that not only are you NOT
worthy of more money, but you probably aren't worth what you're currently
making.

I have friends who were forced to become third party contractors because the
only vertical movement for their salaries within the corporate structure
required them to become managers, which was an undesirable move for them. So
they contracted out to their previous employers instead at more than twice
their previous salaries.

~~~
sokoloff
My point is you can pick another line of work where your pay looks like: 50K,
55K, 60K, 65K, 70K, 75K, 80K, 85K, 90K, 95K, 100K, 105K, 110K, ...

Or you can pick software where your pay might look like: 100K, 108K, 116K,
124K, 132K, 140K, 142K, 144K, 146K, 148K, 150K, ...

The software pay sure is plateauing. That seems awful, but who is better off?

~~~
MisterBastahrd
It's really not all that good, because you aren't thinking in terms of
careers. A (real) engineer goes to school to be an engineer, gets his license
to practice engineering, and from then on is largely assured to receive
increasing salaries from that point onward. Sure, the tools may change, but
real world experience on actual engineering problems is seen as irreplaceable
by employers.

A developer by contrast is judged by the tools he uses just as much as his
tenure, and his tenure becomes a net negative after a period of time. Because
wages rise faster and stagnate faster, corporate types see them as replaceable
sooner. This might not mean much to people who hop from job to job every year
or two, but for a lot of people, they just want a place to work and feel
secure.

I know a hell of a lot more 80 year old lawyers, accountants, doctors, and
engineers than I do 50 year old developers.

~~~
sokoloff
There are places to go find a secure, long career.

I'm coming up on 14 years at my current company (developer to executive) and
there's a developer working here who is longer tenured than me and still
happily coding away. Of course, there's some element of luck of finding a good
place, with a good business model, good leadership, good execution, not
getting hit by a meteor, etc, but it's clear that not everyone job hops every
2 years.

You won't find me as an 80-year old technologist, because I'll have made _way
more_ than enough to retire 25 years before then.

------
SuperGent
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.

~~~
soneca
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.

~~~
hackermailman
All those things are covered in any university 'Software Engineering' course

[http://web.mit.edu/6.031/www/sp17/classes/05-version-
control...](http://web.mit.edu/6.031/www/sp17/classes/05-version-control/)

[http://web.mit.edu/6.031/www/sp17/classes/03-testing/](http://web.mit.edu/6.031/www/sp17/classes/03-testing/)

[https://stellar.mit.edu/S/course/6/fa16/6.170/materials.html](https://stellar.mit.edu/S/course/6/fa16/6.170/materials.html)

~~~
QuantumGravy
"Covered" isn't saying much. When I took my Software Engineering class, those
topics amounted to no more than a couple slides each in a lecture. Even if my
university's curriculum wasn't a joke, the idea that a single class, typically
taken one's senior year, is sufficient for any of the above is laughable. No
one I knew or shared a single project with used version control or testing for
the duration of my sad education.

------
drunkkcunt
This was motivating.

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
>"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."

------
omginternets
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.

~~~
moonshinefe
We hired a mid-40s dev recently and he's great, I think a lot of it is
contingent on where the person lives and what the demand is. I'm not in my 40s
yet but I've found the older the developer, as long as they have a passion for
it, the more measured they are and more willing to put their ego to the side
and adapt.

Maybe they won't keep up to the clip a 20s-30s year old will be with learning
new tech, but I think there are both pros and cons between a young person and
an older person.

------
barking
Might be hard to get a job though.

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.

~~~
tonyedgecombe
_" Is it just you? What happens if you die?" is a question you'll get over and
over._

Never had that question in 20 years.

~~~
cyberferret
I'm 50, been programming for >30 years, and never had a client ask me that
either, but recently I've found _myself_ asking that a lot of the time.

I am at that stage where I know that I cannot work as fast as I did 20 years
ago, and that my endurance for all night programming sessions is not like it
was. Add to that back and shoulder problems, and degraded eyesight from
sitting in front of a monitor for years, and I am thinking about what happens
to my clients and my work if I am forced to take a break for health reasons.

I've spent time talking to a lawyer (and some of my clients) about putting
source code in escrow with them, and letting other family members know where
they can find a list of critical logins for all the services I use in my day
to day work. Call it a 'work will' if you like, but I want to ensure that if I
am not able to do the work anymore, for whatever reason, I want my clients to
be looked after.

~~~
JustSomeNobody
But, really, these are things that should also be done when you're younger.

------
makecheck
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.

------
ClaytonB
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.

------
happy-go-lucky
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.

[1]
[http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs220/en/](http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs220/en/)

------
JeremyNT
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.

------
mrwebmaster
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](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

~~~
lowken10
I've been programming professionally for 15 years (C# & SQL Server) and I've
encountered exactly one Algebra problem in my entire career.

Now some jobs require the most advanced math on the planet. For example the
guys that developer the SQL Server query optimizer and absolute math gods and
they have to be.

However for 95% (my own made up statistic) of software development jobs
advanced math is not a requirement.

------
LiweiZ
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.

------
laythea
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.

------
hopfog
I almost finished a Bachelor in Business and Economics and worked abroad in a
completely different field before starting my career as software developer.

If you have the interest you will pick up the stuff you need for the job fast.
Even though many of my colleagues have been programming since childhood I feel
that their growth curve has leveled out compared to mine, at the point that
we're on par in some areas.

------
kemonocode
I think it's great this article is getting so much attention, considering the
huge amount of bias and "ageism" that exists in the field.

Just because you can be an entrepreneur before 30 doesn't mean you'll have the
life experience to be good at it, and many junior-level software development
jobs expect a level of commitment that's unfeasible for people who "have
gotten a life".

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z4chj
Really unfortunate that it pitches php development as a way to get started as
an older developer. As if an older developer doesn't already feel antiquated
and behind, let's make it worse by teaching them an established technology
that is not usually the language of choice for companies on the bleeding edge
of technology, which i, I imagine, where these people are hoping to be

~~~
cr0sh
I'm not sure that's really a problem; if anything, it might be a smart move.
PHP due to its large installed base, might become the legacy software niche
similar to COBOL. While the younger generation might not want to touch it,
older developers might have no problem with it - provided such opportunities
are still available.

------
dustingetz
i thought the argument for agism was that, once you hit around 30 your salary
is peaked because it only takes 5-10 years for a college grad to catch up to
the state of art. and the counter-argument is that if you are so good you can
make high risk projects successful, your salary is bounded by the business
value of the project

------
pklausler
I believe that anybody with the aptitude for abstract thought can learn
programming and mathematics at any age, and that anybody without the aptitude
for abstract thought is never going to become competent at programming or
mathematics no matter how early they start or how hard they work at it.

------
dghughes
I was expecting to see people like me who try programming every few years
(since 1983) but never got into it. My fingers say yes but my brain says no.

The people shown in the article were unexpected I think they are even more
interesting to jump right into programming from a jobs that you wouldn't
expect.

------
gaspoweredcat
bottom line, if you can read and type you can do it

~~~
LoSboccacc
Eh, that's quite a stretch. I guess people that always were logical thinker
can pull it off, while people that were not can't learn it even at 14, 18 or
23.

~~~
wccrawford
I think it depends on what you're aiming for. If you just want to make
Javascript work on some sales page, it's probably enough to just be able to
type and spend some time learning.

If you want to write the next Facebook, Pokemon Go, or Visual Studio, then no,
it's not enough to just be able to type. There's a lot of planning and logic
involved in them that isn't obvious to non-programmers and non-logical people
just don't have the aptitude for.

------
phodo
Being a young engineer may make you marketable. But having deep domain
expertise and engineering talent at a later age gives you extraordinary super
powers.

------
richev
Inspiring article, but suffers from confirmation bias.

------
skookumchuck
Anyone can contribute to open source projects, or start their own. On the
internet, nobody needs to know you're a dog.

------
65827
Man, I couldn't imagine that. People stare at me like I'm a martian Elmer Fudd
and I'm only 31, really hope to be out of this town by 35.

~~~
softawre
this town = the valley?

Some companies have older average ages, just have to know where to look.

