Ask HN: Is it possible to start of as a programmer at almost 40?
I am almost 40. I have been programming as a hobby so far because I could never get a job as a programmer. I am ok with Java and now learning Go which I totally love now and some JS. Is it possible to start of as a professional programmer at almost 40 ?
Update: Thanks everyone for your honest and insightful feedback. It helped me truly to stay upbeat about starting as a programmer at 40.
62 comments
[ 21.7 ms ] story [ 409 ms ] threadIt's a lot harder than I expected.
I'm interested to see what other people have to say.
Lambda's are anonymous functions, by the way. They're not scary at all :) Here's one in Clojure:
It takes one parameter, called "x", and returns it multiplied by two. This function is not bound to any variable name, but just passed somewhere "on the fly".Hard to generalize bc people learn differently but for me in-person hack-events are one of the best ways to learn. 30 minutes with a better programmer always trumps 30 off-on days with a book.
You would be better to get a degree in something you enjoy doing and find easy, while on the side build interesting projects on the Internet. Those projects can be used as your portfolio to get a job and you have a degree in something you didnt have to work too hard at. Rather you worked hard at teaching yourself how to design, code and creating cool things on the Internet!
Who cares about age overall, because it's nothing you can control and no doubt you are going to run into a lot of younger douchebags. Those douchebags will one day grow up to be nicer people, as well you'll grow up to the point of not letting other people's negativity affect you/make you lose focus of your goals!
From a 38 year old start-up guy who is still learning! Started my first idea at 31.
1) People who have been programming for years and years. That way, you have enough of these tiny examples of how people have done things. Now at school, a higher layer of abstraction showing how all this stuff is connected comes up and it is amazingly insightful.
2) People who are lucky enough to find the right kind of mentors in school. The kind who will force you to relate the theory to practical examples.
At this point, if you don't have both enough work on the practical examples and on the theory, the only advice I have is to be prepared to work very hard, ask dumb questions and persist at it. Eventually, you will go into industry where it might initially seem as if the stuff you studied didn't have any context. Go back in a few years and re-read your notes, it will help you understand where the connections you subconsciously made in school have helped you.
About 12 months in, you (hopefully) realise that those concepts are actually pretty crucial, and the extent to which you can succeed as a working programmer is the extent to which you can see the application of those abstract concepts in your daily work. The good news is, that gets much easier with real world experience. You'll go back, reopen the books and say, "oh, it's just a stack. fine."
The exception to all of this is State Machines. They are the most important thing. If you see something in your code that smells like a state machine, for the sake of humanity, please, make it one explicitly.
The most important thing is passion. If you have it, it'll make learning anything 10x easier.
I'm a 23 year old programmer and see this stuff too. I also feel like I could never be as good as some of them. But it doesn't matter :) I've been working full-time freelance for 5 years now and you can always find jobs that are fun, challenging, but not out of your skill level. I'm sure this is the same when working for a company. Some companies need child geniuses, others need passionate people who work hard and like to learn.
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I made God's Temple because God picked me because I'm the best programmer on Earth.
* People Skills - This is critical in almost every programming job, understanding what and why to do is more important is more important than how. Good communication is the path to that and many programmers get this wrong.
* Writing - Being able to take a ton of ideas and organize them into coherent, modular sections.
* Discipline - One thing that I have far more of at 35 than I did at 22. It is a critical component to learning as well as working through problems correctly (not half-assing it)
Plus eigenrick's suggestions also specialize to your domain; for instance, if you were in construction (which I saw someone post a very similar question from once), not only do you know the construction world, you know how to speak their language, at both conscious and subconscious levels. You can comfort & reassure a construction buyer more than any random schmoe ever could. And so on.
I think there are a few reasons for it:
1. There are a lot of startups where the glamor of the industry means that they can easily pressure 20 something fresh out of school folks who are probably also suffering from imposter syndrome that the only way to learn is to work insane amounts of hours. I have no problems with working hard on improving yourself but a work life balance and doing productive work are not the same as that. I still remember one startup where one of the co-founders took pride in telling me that a guy in his team spent 30 days sleeping at work. Fuck that noise. As a person more experienced, you are probably well aware of that balance. However, as a junior developer, you are probably not as productive as someone else your age.
2. Money. The nature of American society means that people don't talk about their wages. Programmers while being well paid compared to the rest of America are not at least initially as much as they should be. As an older person, there may be a perception that you won't work for ridiculously low amounts of money and be cool with that.
3. Culture fit. A company of people who conflate having similar interests (board games, craft beer or whatever other bullshit your tiny subculture may have) with being able to collaboratively build amazing shit can easily convince themselves that someone who doesn't fit into that profile will not be a good fit.
I wouldn't want to work for anyone like that anyway. People who make blanket blaming statements need not have me apply.
Check out this inspiring article http://joshuakemp.blogspot.ru/2013/11/how-blacksmith-learned...
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/03/education/edlife/how-to-ge...
> How to Get an A- in Organic Chemistry
Contemplating a midlife career change from science writer to doctor, I spent eight months last year at Harvard Extension School slogging through two semesters of organic chemistry, or orgo, the course widely known for weeding out pre-meds. At 42, I was an anomaly, older than most of my classmates (and both professors), out of college for two decades and with two small children. When I wasn’t hopelessly confused, I spent my time wondering what the class was actually about. Because I’m pretty sure it wasn’t just about organic chemistry. For me, the overriding question was not “Is this on the test?” but rather “What are they really testing?”
The author of that essay is a journalist with no academic background in hard science. Sure, she's probably done well for herself to be able to go back to school at the age of 42...but she's going into a very rigorous field (becoming a doctor) and she has two small children.
I guess people can debate what's really harder to get into, programming or medicine (given equal amounts of time and freedom to pursue)...but the one nice thing about programming is that if you have lots of time, you don't have to spend much money doing it or go through formal institutions and certifications. If someone likes what you've built, even if that someone is you, that's progress.
I don't think your age is so important, instead this bit could be; I think the reasons you kept programming as a hobby only are the most relevant for the discussion. Was the pay too low compared to your current job? Was it too hard to interview in you area ? Was it a question of starting with 0 professional experience ? Or wasn't it just in your priorities to try to land a programming job ?
At any age you'll be able to switch fields. But did the reasons you didn't do so until now became somewhat irrelevant ?
In a lot of fields your reliability as a worker and ability to collaborate will be valued at least as much as technical skills. You might get weird mixes of management and programming jobs, but it might be a good way to start as well. I hope you'll find what suits you.
* convincing someone to pay you commensurate with your age and experience over a 22 year old kid who needs one third the money and benefits
* convincing the hiring manager that you're not in it because you are desperate or going through a midlife crisis
* convincing the hiring manager that you won't mind being at the bottom of the totem pole, both at work and in society (programming is not a prestigious career to 90% of people)
notice how much convincing there is to do, despite the facts? if you go down this road you will be battling perceptions, not reality.
Your other two points were reasonable though.
That is, the facts implied that the poster was owed a salary that reflected both is age, experience, and his need for a greater salary.
Other people sometimes argue that employers don't like to employ older people because the demand more money. I always found this argument strange because that would still imply that given the same salary, the employer has no preference either way, and so the employer has no reason not to offer the lower salary to the older applicant.
How does that work exactly?
1) 35k as a 40 year old 2) 100k as programmer with no experience
have you ever hired anyone in your life above the age of 40? well i have. this is all the stuff that is UNWRITTEN, and UNSPOKEN in the workplace, because writing or speaking it is extremely illegal. this is why HN exists, so you can get real life opinions instead of the smarmy, PC, CYA bullshit you will hear in real life.
Thanks @beachstartup for bringing out these key points.
basically if you aren't in management or ownership, you are the bottom of the totem pole. this is by definition. if you look at an organization chart - who's on the bottom?
Also, let's ignore all the people in the world who don't even work at large, prestigious, and highly profitable companies in the first place. They don't matter and aren't to be considered even part of society.
You are thinking inside of a bubble and ignoring everything outside it. You're constructing a highly exclusive slice of society with developers at the bottom, million-dollar attorneys in the middle, and rock-star CEOs and billionaires at the top. There exist thousands of towns and small cities, each with many, many thousands of people, where 95% of jobs are worse than almost any given programming job in a larger city and very significantly worse than a programming job at, say, Google or Facebook.
I retrained as a programmer in my 40s. My experience is that I can seriously out-perform most developers who are 20 years younger than me, because I know how to deal with people and business issues cold. And I know how to stay focused and eliminate distractions in a way that I didn't when I was in my 20's.
Go for it!
If you can blend non-programming expertise with a growing ability to develop reliable software, you might be able to make youself employable sooner rather than later.
If you can't find anyone willing to hire you because of your lack of professional experience, find a team you like and offer to work for them for free for three months. If you show promise, and you get along with the team, they'll want to hire you when the three months are up. And if not, you'll get feedback on your skills and learn what kind of teams to look for in the future.