Ask HN: Starting a career as a programmer in my mid-40s

You might find building a 3d printer or CNC system a natural route into software; tweak the firmware on the open options for those.

If you want to get to throwing fun things around as fast as possible look at game modding or creating your own games with some of the scriptable game engines. gentler intdroduction with quicker rewards.

Just a couple ideas that popped up first. What kind of programming are you looking to do? do you get excited by the possibility of squeezing a few more bits out of noise than current data compression algorithms can? Or do you want to make the perfect digital emulation of a furry dolphin avatar? There's shared knowledge there but further indication of your interests can help.

String manipulation is the gateway drug to programming, as it requires no dependencies and the sky is the limit for arbitrary logical games.

Biggest challenge will be choosing a language and executing the program!

You want to start a career in IT or in software development? Those are two very different tracks (and I can only give you advice on the latter).

My spouse is doing a CS Master's degree from a UK redbrick. Full time it would take a year, and you can do it remote thanks to the virus.

If you're already an engineer you'll probably be able to do it somewhat easily.

As for getting a job, the market is hot right now, we'll see if it still is in a year's time.

I'd consider a coding bootcamp, the good ones give you a very minimal brand, but given your business and engineering experience my guess is that it's all you'd need to make the switch fairly seamlessly. You may take a compensation hit.

There are an enormous number of opportunities for software engineers right now, the market is hotter than I've ever seen it. We desperately need people to be retrained, cross-trained, any version of trained.

Build a tool that you want to use. Could be a TODO or note taking app, alarm clock, a tool that scrapes your favorite site, anything. But find something that you are going to enjoy building and using.

Then understand the technology stack you will need to build it. Then learn about that stack from Coursera/EdX. Finally build that tool and reap your fruits. :)

Given your business background, maybe look at getting into analytics and reporting. Usually these areas have some low code options where you can do a lot with just some SQL knowledge. Knowledge of the business can be helpful here.

Make friends in the industry or working at companies in roles that you want to join. You will have to tap these connections to get interviews and consideration for jobs, once you have some education to put on your resume. The industry is not easy to jump into completely cold unless you are a 20 something coming out of college with a bachelors in CS or similar. It's not impossible to get a job, but it's much more difficult to get that initial foot in the door and past the huge machinery of HR resume keyword and experience scanning.

You might consider taking a familiar spreadsheet and converting it into a program in a language like Go. Use the free Essential Go ebook as a guide to how to write the code, and your spreadsheet as motivational context.

Before the how, can you give us some thoughts on the Why ? Why are you interested in doing this at age of 44 ? Money is probably a factor but I am curious. You can of course do anything at any age and 44 is really not that old to start a new career. But the why is critical because you have spent all these years in a trade and now willing to reboot so you have to be willing to give up a lot and start from the bottom which may still be better than where you are currently but we don't know.

The field is huge, and if you take a wrong turn, you could waste months.

What is your goal? Earn more? If so, then look for jobs in your area and see what is “hot”. The role you call “programmer” is nowadays called “software engineer”. Do a search for that, make a note of requirements from every job you can find (top 50 jobs). Google every common keyword and see if you can figure out which programming language is “hot”. You will also need to decide what you want to do with that language: desktop, web (backend) or web frontend (I’d recommend to stay clear from fullstack and low level).

The road ahead is rough, but I’m sure you can achieve what you want, if you ask the right questions before mindlessly diving in.

Look into web3/blockchain/NFT technology, most of it has been around less than 2 years so experience is less of a hard requirement than in other fields of software engineering.

  - Modern JS / Node.js
  - Solidity / Ethers (https://docs.ethers.io/)
  - Rust
  - Solana / Anchor (https://project-serum.github.io/anchor/getting-started/introduction.html)

I did this early 40's

Don't focus to much on certifications or qualifications. Do focus on a portfolio. Find things that scratch your own itch to work on and learn

Consider iOS development, if for no other reason than the amazing and freely available CS193p from Stanford. I took that route from 0 to FAANG in my 30s.

As others have said, focus on a portfolio. Start with a course like C193p and then build a few good quality products.

Short path:

- "Learn Python the Hard Way" by Zed Shaw. 52 exercises to teach you just enough Python to be able to continue.

- Next, an excellent course by Reddit's co-founder, Steve Huffman, CS253. It was discontinued from Udacity, but is available on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLAwxTw4SYaPlLXUhUNt1w...

It will take you through the basics of the internet, HTTP, browsers, requests, cookies, databases, caching, hasing, passwords, by having you build a web application. Granted, it's on Google App Engine, but still, most of the router syntax out there is similar (webapp2 from web.py, similar to Flask, Tornado, and others).

You will learn a lot, and you'll see the result right in your browser by having a live web application. You can then take that knowledge and develop tools for yourself and others and put them online for all to access and use.

If you want to do it better and "leap-frog", read Brett Slatkin's "Effective Python: 90 Specific Ways to Write Better Python". This book will make you write code as if you had been coding for years... But, that's only doing it "right", you need something to do right in the first place: you've been in business, strategy, and operations, and you've been trained in mechanical engineering: I think you are in no shortage of ideas and things to code, so have a it.

You're in an excellent position of having been at the intersection of a bunch of cross pollinated fields, and you'll have a new skill to bring them together and do wonders. All the best!

If I were you I'd try to combine programming with what you're already doing (finance/business). Like learn Python and how to extract data or something, thats easily added to your current knowledge. Then later you can learn some basic web development and build nice dashboards. There are some jobs out there for finance people who can program - That's what I'd go for if I were you. It's a shame to let all your experience go to waste by learning something like systems programming or android development, don't do that I think. The "How" is really easy, simply google/udemy/coursera/etc etc. But spend some time on figuring out What first.

See my quickest path to 6 figures: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29025003

One shock of programming at job vs class-based learning is the art of working in an existing codebase with many other coders and stakeholders. You might like programming for fun, but might not find it as fun to do it as a job.

This means things like

- reading and understanding an existing, complex codebase

- solving your problem in a way that doesn’t harm existing functionality

- refactoring old code to solve new problems or to be more reliable

- common workflows using version control

- writing testable code that can evolve over the years

- negotiating technical scope with stakeholders

- navigating technical risk and technical debt

I think this stuff is teachable, but it’s hard to give someone a project where the existing code base must keep working (or else the company goes under) but also here’s 4 features to implement in a given aggressive timeframe. Much of having a job coding is about these kinds of decisions.

I say all this so you can decide whether this is what you want or if you just like coding as a hobby.

Nowadays the IT world is so huge you have to narrow it down a bit. People working in FANG in the Bay Area do very different things to the helpdesk of your local school district. You should narrow down what exactly you mean. Things like the former will be very difficult to achieve, things like the latter should be easy.

Do you have a training/learning curriculum ready?

You'll need to study the following.

* Computer science basics. The fundamental building blocks for computation. The bread and butter of algorithms and data structures. There's no way around this.

* You'll need to learn at least one or two programming languages in order to create actual computer programs and their related tooling.

* You'll need to learn at least one computational platform and its APIs and tools and generally how to build software for it. For example one of Windows, Linux, Android, Mac or web. Choose one.

* You'll need learn how to apply software to solving problems in any particular domain.

* You'll need to learn a ton a about the tools and practices of the trade. Distributed computing, databases, embedded, debugging, tools chains, design patterns, frameworks, APIs, libraries etc. Not all are applicable. What you should focus on depends on what what you want to work with and in which domain.

Preferably instead of MOOCs you’d take a course at a bootcamp that places you at an internship or gives you a real world coding project. In the best case you’re going to be judged against new grads who’ve already had 6-9 months of cumulative internship experiences doing real world coding. In the worst case you’re being judged against other coders with 20 years experience.

I would start with data jobs. Your existing skill set is already extremely valuable and a quick dip into Python and SQL is sufficient to qualify you for analytics engineering jobs. Once you are in, it won't be hard to migrate into data engineering jobs.

In my humble opinion, and also having helped lots of friends both in and out of tech, one of the best ways to learn is to find a couple of really good books on programming and read them cover to cover (got this idea myself from an article on learning programming). One thing is you need to find books that are tutorials and not references (as a mechanical engineer, you probably have seen the difference yourself). A good place to start is Python, and then possibly C programming - the reason is for C requires you to learn a lot of the internals of a computer - Hmm, you probably had to take a programming course back in college (Fortran?) so you maybe able to pick up Python quickly. Although, some people don't like to just book learn and need a course to keep them on track.

... if you want guided instruction (besides just online courses), to do things on the cheap, you can also audit classes at your local college - just find some key courses in Computer Science and ask the professor if its okay to sit in. I did this for two years for a second interest of mine, music-theory.

If someone asked you the best way to become a good mechanical engineer, I bet you’d tell them to start building something.

If they asked you what to build, you’d tell them to build something that’s useful. Better yet, build something you would use.

If they asked what resources to use and learn from, you’d tell them whatever resources necessary for the task at hand. To focus on the practical more than the theoretical, while filling in gaps of time learning theory.

If they asked you what to do when something fails, you’d tell them to build it again until they build it right.

And when they ask you what to do when they’re done, you’d say: “now go and build something else”

I started programming at the age of 8, I am now 50.

The first thing to ask yourself is weather you can sit down and consternate for 10-12 hours without talking to anyone.

Second you should practice (not unlike practicing for a marathon) . Start easy and go up.

Third, try to become apprentice to some professional programmer, and learn from him (even for free), try to help him with some tasks.