Ask HN: Starting a Career in Programming at 61?
A bit more context, in case you are interested: he has worked as an executive at multiple companies in the past decades (CEO, CCO, CFO). As he grows older, he has noticed it becomes increasingly difficult to find work, even though he would love to continue working for the years to come. I think he feels inspired by seeing me thrive as a contractor, with access to a global marketplace and seemingly endless working opportunities.
He learned to program when he was a student, probably Pascal or Basic, but as far as I know he has never needed to use that skill in his professional life (though I assume his excel-fu is excellent, because that is the preferred "programming language" in a business environment).
I have no idea what to advise him, so I'm curious to hear your thoughts. Maybe I will even send him the link to this page so he can read along!
185 comments
[ 4.8 ms ] story [ 207 ms ] threadHe was late 60s.
Even before the microcomputer revolution, back in the dawn of timesharing, there have also been "non-professional programmers" who write software to put wheels on their scientific, engineering, business, literary, accounting, medical, mathematical, artistic or whatever skills they have.
To be a professional programmer you're really going to have to learn how to whip other people's bad conceptual models into shape, track down difficult bugs, not use an O(N^2) algorithm when an O(N) algorithm is available and N is large, understand the difference between C++ compilers and whatever details turn up to be relevant in a particular case. (e.g. You're never going to know all of these things but you have to find out the ones that are relevant to your project!)
The non-professional programmer is going to be more focused on the problem domain even though they still sometimes might need to figure out something technically hard to make their system work.
Finding a business position that's a good fit for him would be a much easier way to stay employed until retirement than switching to programming.
I've been programming for 20 years - the amount of environment / config / tooling stuff to deal with just keeps getting bigger and bigger.
I would recommend him taking one or a few bootcamp classes to bring him up to speed, maybe focus on one area in particular (e.g. web development) then find a smaller dev shop where he could come in and support in a junior support role to start with and then take it from there. Maybe develop a few pet projects to build his portfolio in parallel.
It's not impossible but maybe manage his expectations a little bit that he's going to have to start more or less from scratch.
FYI I’ve been a software engineer for like 5 years, but took the past 1.5 years off.
I would look for companies that describe themselves as:
- Website design agencies
- Creative agencies (look at their webpage if they also have development and not purely design)
- Design & Development agencies
You should be able to find a handful just through a Google Maps search.
Reach out to them and ask if they could use some junior development support, and if there's a particular area they need support in.
One approach would be product or industry specific. Maybe he'e really intrigued by applications of GIS and that could lead to exploring specific companies in that space and the talent they need.
Another would be open source. Maybe he's really interested in databases and could dive deep into that part of open source and find out what things he wants to do.
No guarantees with either route, but the older you get, the worse the odds are if you are just a person with programming ability like many others.
Of course, its likely that I'm doing something else wrong as well.
The thing to sell is your experience. i.e. "consulting". The market is smaller, but the rates are higher, and the value you can deliver is orders of magnitude greater. That's a good thing (and a good feeling!) Nice to say, "I cost my client x, but I delivered 10x to them in cost-savings/profit."
Also, I wonder you should create your own 'Ask HN' to uncover whether your approach to job finding may have flaws, since there are many older IT workers out there who are finding work.
Of course it could be your age/something you're doing - I don't want to deny your experience with the situation - but also sometimes things just don't work out.
Another practice is applying en masse, if you're not already doing that. I used to apply sequentially to jobs, picking only the best fit and going through the interview process one by one. A waste of time, bulk apply to dozen of job listing (and directly to companies) and pick the first company that throws in an offer (and which also seems decent during the interview).
Elevator pitch: "i've spent X years doing <highly specific business thing Y that everyone does in excel>, but i have a better way because it <1, 2,3>"
Show him Cypress or your preferred choice for integration testing and see if writing simple integration tests piques his interest. It's close enough to engineering that he should get a feel for what the job is like while being "relatively" easy to learn in a few weeks.
At risk of getting flamed...
It's tricky I think because even if he can learn to program to a suitable standard, I think the reality will be that people will see him as a "junior" but you will have a different working dynamic since it is easier for an e.g. 30 year old to coach someone who is younger if they are doing it wrong but could be tricky trying to coach an older person unless they have genuine humility, otherwise your dad might feel patronised or be offended by some youngster without the experience to coach well.
Another avenue, if it is just the industry he likes rather than programming specifically, he could probably get more distance by utilising his exec skills to do a technical management role like Product Manager, Product Owner or Project Manager. He could then get as much exposure to the programming as he wants without needing to produce as much of it as would be expected of a dev.
Don't know, just thinking out loud.
I started teaching my self to code w/ the intent of getting a coding job at age 38, and I got my first coding job at 40. Breaking into coding was brutal for me. I couldn't get taken seriously as a junior. I just had to keep grinding until I was good enough that someone would take me seriously as a mid-level.
The way I did that was go super deep on learning Ruby super well. Then I found a company that needed someone who was really good w/ Ruby. They were willing to overlook my lack of depth in other areas because I had a skill that was critical to them. After starting the job, I had to work super hard to brush up on junior & mid level skills just to do my job at a good enough or better level.
After less than two years, people started thinking I was actually better & more experienced than I was. I could talk a really good game because I had spent so much time learning while I was getting experience, and then I started getting taken seriously for senior level roles. People saw my physical age & just assumed I was more senior & experienced than I was, so being older was actually an advantage to being taken seriously.
After about 5 years of coding, I finally felt like my work life balance was somewhat normal. I could start having a life again, stop learning quite so hard, etc. Now I'm just a normal, boring senior software engineer making a median-ish USA salary.
So I guess I'd say if OP's dad's path would be similar to mine, I'd ask him if he really likes software enough to spend a couple years learning to code & finding a job, then grinding for a few years to get to normal, and then enjoy 5 years of being a competent team member. It's certainly doable, but I think it's worth how bad one really wants this path. I think getting into software just for the money is not how I'd want to spend my 60s, but I'd absolutely do it if I found the coding enjoyable enough to self-teach & grind on learning for as long as it took.
It's also possible that other opportunities would open up just because of dad's knowledge of software. Just saying he likes to program, even if that's not his profession, could open up opportunities at a tech company doing other things, such as QA, support, scrum master, etc.
I would suggest that he become a business advisor to small companies. His expertise is invaluable and he could be useful immediately.
Possibly, if his father applied himself, he could find himself a niche in which he would be adequately competent within 2 years. To include being a freelancer or independent developer.
As you alluded to, because of his father's business background, he might do really well in sales for a software related company or starting his own business.
> Being a CEO, CCO, etc... We can assume his father is an intelligent and successful person.
Being unable to continue working as a CEO/CCO suggests he's not currently very successful, and to put it lightly, CEO "intelligence" (whatever that means) doesn't necessarily translate to the kind of intelligence necessary for software engineering
I had a friend ask me same thing as OP. He was 50, out of work at the time (had been in a trade before) and wondered if he could get into programming. I don't want to discourage anyone from learning to program because you can do a lot of cool stuff, but to be seriously industry useful isn't a matter of months and a few online classes but rather some dedicated years.
And (this might be an unpopular opinion) it's much harder if you don't natively think a certain way. Some otherwise smart people find programming pure torture and the chance of them going through the years needed is pretty low.
Bingo. This goes for young people too, but is more important as we age or rise through the ranks. Accepting advice from an "inferior" with grace, humility, and thankfulness is key to gaining respect and learning at the rate necessary to stay on top of a field.
I've taught things to people who were a million times more intelligent than I and 20 years my senior. I gained so respect for them after seeing how quickly they learned, and how appreciative they were of having my time.
One thing I gleaned from the experience of working with these guys was how letting someone teach you something is a great way to impress them.
I've done many of these projects before, and will raise issues. "Let's just see how it goes!" and "well... we might make some mistakes, but that's how we learn!" And I'll say "but I thought we were supposed to be learning from each other?" "yes!". "Why does no one ever want to learn from me?" I've done XYZ longer than these colleagues have been adults, but I'm never asked for stuff, people avoid my input, etc.
What's more interesting is that a couple of folks on the client side of the equation (contracting house) have been added who are older, and ... they're quite open to picking my brain. We mesh quite well, and have pairing sessions and learn from each other (but I'm giving more than taking in those cases). With the younger crew... there's just a real standoffishness, and focus on 'team' and 'learning from each other and our mistakes' but... they're willing to make mistakes (repeatedly) vs taking my input to avoid those mistakes in the first place. The client's new person seems to have picked up on this and is raising some issues.
For a while, I really thought it was something wrong with me, but as I jump around between clients/contracts/etc, it seems to be more age related. The larger the age gap, the less impetus there is to work 'together'. And... I'm trying to think back to when I was 25... how open would I have been to 50 year old colleague's input? If they were 'management', I'd have to. Otherwise... possibly not? Hard to remember that far back, other than that I thought I was invincible :)
It's not so much that "these young kids won't listen" that's annoying, but this mantra of "we're all here to learn from each other - that's how we grow!". Except... if it's me. Then you choose not to learn from me. Or older people in general. Just drop the "feel good we're all a team" facade, because it doesn't represent what you're actually doing. The disconnect is the problem, not the actual behaviour.
When I was in my 20's, my mentors were all 50+. And, quite often, I would have to hit the wall before the good advice they gave me made sense. I realized later that I was really irritating to them at many points. It took me, like, 4 times hearing "You might want to think about that" from my main mentor before I started mentally translating that to "Dumbass. You're about to hit the wall. Again."
I am not a smart man.
They stuck with me because the magnitude of my vector was large (ah, the province of youth--boundless energy), so, even if I had a significant amount in a useless direction, I also had a significant chunk in a useful direction. And I would learn--I rarely made the same mistake (but I was quite good at making new mistakes ...)
However, if the people around (not just the kids) really don't understand that you're an expert at what you do, you really should think about getting a different job. If the consultants are willing to pick information from your brain, that's a good sign that you really do know what's going on. In return, you should make use of their people network--poke at the consultants you think are good. And right now is a good time to be making such a job change.
Ageism is a thing. On the flip side, the number of greybeards in this field continues to increase year on year--the people who learned computers as kids in the 1980s are now hitting their 50s.
Good luck and hang in there. You're not alone.
This is more personality in general than age. There's just as many cocksure youngers as there are grumpy olders and neither want to learn from you.
If the constraint is instead that programming looks fun but you want to get exposed to as much of it as possible, I mean, I would suggest that OP’s Dad start building an indie game or so? Doesn't have to be a bestseller to sharpen thinking about design and aesthetic and underlying mechanics and state and data structures... I work in web but the amount of framework churn and such is kind of something I wouldn't force others through.
If you did want something more webby, you would want to practice with something you find interesting... If you wanted, maybe something that touches a lot of other technologies. If you think about writing your own GitHub, you start with git repositories and cloud hosting and deployment, you can move into CI/CD type workflows pretty easily, maybe that is a better way to start off web programming?
The other thing I will say is, Big Tech companies are often places where you can get one role and then ask for their developer education tracks where they teach their accountants etc how to become developers if they want to pivot. Say for example, being a manager at Google but having some 20% project that lets you contribute code and get feedback. Bigger more established companies have fewer problems with ageism, because they are much more sensitive as lawsuit targets for those sorts of things, so they have to get their s** together.
Also worth saying, the prior job history is an asset. A lot of developers do not speak business-ese. If you are a solid programmer who can talk to C-levels, you are a potential CTO at the right sort of place. Because you can translate, and because you feel comfortable walking into a contract negotiation with some client as “okay, how can I not say ‘no’ to everything but push back on the really hard problems while ‘yes, and’-ing all of the tractable stuff to get them on board.” Consultancy is one of the ways to do that, but not the only one. But worth calling out that as an asset if it helps focus the journey more.
Ageism is less in domains that require domain expertise and hence have a higher barrier to entry for a newbie. Look at systems engineering, hardware, semi conductor, deep science and so on.
* women are unable to reproduce until a certain age.
* women stop being able to reproduce at a certain age.
* NOTE: we need not delve any further into the inherent ageism of female biology.
* women select men for mating for a multitude of reasons, of which includes the dichotomy of dominant men.. who (for young women) tend to be slightly older then the men of the woman's own age group.
* men compete with each other for dominance, and age is a factor. Young men have a strength advantage, older men potentially have more experience.
* dominant men who grow older, become less dominant, etc... are no longer as useful for mating.
* older dominant women tend to have different selection criteria, they tend to select younger males who are less dominant then the other males of their own age, yet more so then the men of the woman's own age.
* this is not an exhaustive list...
Older men & women tend to be less useful beyond natural selection, but evolution is a great starting point.
Ageism is everywhere, but I'm surprised by your anecdote that it's more intense in FAANG-type companies. I wonder why?
Perhaps the FAANG working environment is competitive? Perhaps men & women are competing with each other for a kind of workplace dominance? hrm.....
If he can sell himself not as a programmer, but as someone who does X with programming as a tool that they're going to use to do that, preferably where X is something that he has some expertise in from earlier in his career, he might be able to get people to look at him as an expert X instead of a novice programmer.
[1] https://www.kalzumeus.com/2011/10/28/dont-call-yourself-a-pr...
Someone who has been constantly hacking and building programs for fun on the side while working a different career, and finally thinks it might be fun to do programming for a living at 61: absolutely.
However it sounds like he doesn't have a prior interest in programming. Even for someone in their early 20s I don't recommend getting into to programming for the job (in your 20s this means being a software engineer for the money, for your dad it would be they like they type of schedule/work you have).
This isn't because of some ideal that "real programmers should be passionate", but because there is a reason that despite a massive rise in bootcamps it's still hard to hire devs: most people don't enjoy programming enough to do it for a living.
I love programming, love computer science and ultimately prefer data science work because I don't love software engineering work for 8 hours a day. So even someone who really enjoys programming might not necessarily love software engineering. If your dad was exposed to programming in college and then spent 40 years without ever picking it up again, it's likely he doesn't really enjoy programming and even more likely that he really won't enjoy learning all the tooling and frameworks required to work as a software engineer today.
tl;dr if your dad is the kind of person building a k8s cluster for fun on the weekend, or likes to hack together toy react apps in the evening: the he absolutely could transition. However it's fair more likely that he currently likes the idea of being a programmer much more than he would the actual work.
My dad did similar, after going back to school in his mid 50s and getting a CS/cybersecurity degree, he tried the engineering side for a bit but ultimately went into technical recruiting for a big enterprise, which is a six figure position.
Regarding programming, it depends if he just wants to work or work to earn money.
If the former, he could look at OSS projects that interest him, there are so many! He could make meaningful contributions (for the project and for him)!
If the latter, he can definitely give it a go but maybe not get his hopes up too much. He could start his own startup/blog/company though which might not be a bad alternative to paid work.
Also he could look at the no-code tools which would allow him to build stuff quicker than learning to program. It would probably be a step up from Excel already and he could see if he likes it and wants to dive deeper (some contractors are specialized in building stuff on top of no-code tools)
Anyhow, good on him to want a career change at 60+, I wish him all the best!
My grandpa learned programming, (BASIC, on a TRS 80) when he was 80 and got proficient at it quickly although it was just for fun.
Programming/software dev is not a field I would choose if I were trying to avoid age discrimination. It can be hard enough for 61 year olds who have been in the field for 35 years and have all that experience to find work.
I'd encourage him to do it as a hobby, but don't get his hopes up about being able to find steady work doing it.
However with his experience as a CEO, CFO. He might want to look into becoming a Data Engineer, BI consultant, Data Scientist or Data Analist.
With the experience you mentioned he might be better at understanding how the “business” thinks and what they need. Therefore a lot of his domain knowledge could be applied while being in a technical role.
Most of the roles I mentioned involve some programming but often that can also be drag and drop tools.
Good luck!
Maybe thats what he's asking anyway ;)
It is important to distinguish between needing to work and wanting to work.
1 - age
> As he grows older, he has noticed it becomes increasingly difficult to find work, even though he would love to continue working for the years to come.
There’s a significant age bias in the tech community that might be hard to overcome.
He is in a protected age class though: https://www.eeoc.gov/age-discrimination
Just make sure he knows his rights during the hiring process that it’s not acceptable for a company to not hire him based on age.
2 - language
Learning a new modern language like Node/JS will be a brutal race to the bottom in a highly competitive marketplace.
However there are some jobs that pay great money to folks who know older languages like COBOL, Perl, etc., maintaining old systems. And I’m guessing he’ll find the work and coworkers more relatable. These jobs are just much more scarce.
A question he might get from having an impressive C-suite resume and applying for programming jobs is: why? So just be prepared to answer that.
And probably have him build one or two personal projects so he can make sure he likes the process and has something to showcase.
Good luck!
However, using programming tools and concepts to provide more value than his younger Excel-munging peers. Definitely, and will help him figure out what he is good at.
Subscribe to Datacamp and start learning python. Get some of those Excel spreadsheets that executives like to drown each other with and start doing some business analysis on them in jupyter notebooks. He can definitely find an edge doing financial analytics, financial forensics, that sort of thing.
We (programmers) would be shocked at how bad those business spreadsheets are. He can use his experience, and desire to learn, to find plenty of work munging executive financial and other data using programmers tools.