Great story! I've always programmed, but went through the same nonsense in Calgary as you!
On finally learning to program at the age of 40
141–150 of 169 posts
Re: On finally learning to program at the age of 40
#142Yeah so first off - great! It's a super rewarding skill to have and I'm grateful to be a programmer myself. Turning that skill into your profession is going to be tough. I say this because I've been programming professional for 20 years or so and I'm currently interviewing. The process of getting a coding job has gotten extremely hard and demanding. 5-8 years back it was solely based on the interview; if you knew you…
It's still reasonable in the enterprise world. There is a life outside of Silicon Valley. I like a lot of other enterprise devs know if I studied for a few weeks for the interviews I could get a foothold into that universe, but it's just... meh. Not worth it. I like my life.
Yeah this is Denver where historically this kind of stuff never happened until recently.
It's also possible because of covid employers are being more careful/suspicious in their hiring process?
Having interviewed and hired countless programmers in past jobs I don't see the value in these kinds of exercises.
Re: On finally learning to program at the age of 40
#143Earlier quoted context omitted.
I started at 39. I had been looking for a new career to transition from video editing. After the third time my employer restructured my role, I took a voluntary redundancy (basically volunteering to be laid-off) and started programming full-time. I did an online bootcamp and never looked back. Five years later I'm a Senior Software Engineer, and hoping to upgrade to principle engineer by end of the year. Sometimes I…
> ...Sometimes I suddenly feel like a fraud... I feel this way sometimes too, despite having a traditional CS degree and being in the software industry my entire professional life. Apparently impostor syndrome is more common than we think. Personally I've come to believe there are very few people who "fit like a glove", and everyone else has varying degrees of this. Edit: On rereading this it might appear that I am t…
"feeling like a fraud" is pretty common, it is formally called "imposter syndrome".
It is usually just your mind playing tricks on you; there is a delta between your internal picture of what a "real" programmer (or senior manager, or whatever position) looks like and your internal image of yourself.
One solution is to duck type yourself until the feeling goes away. Another is to start to recognize that some of your internal definitions might not be shared by others.
I'll leave it as homework to decide which internal definitions matter the most here.
Re: On finally learning to program at the age of 40
#144Earlier quoted context omitted.
I thought for a moment I blacked out and posted to HN without knowing it. I too am a 38 years old attorney who learned CS/Programming late in life. I haven’t had any success in finding relevant job openings for my particular coding knowledge, but I keep looking. Just knowing you exist gives me hope I may still be able to break into tech, at some level. And given that Hurricane Laura just decimated my city ( and my ho…
If you're capable of becoming a lawyer you're capable of becoming a programmer. 38 ain't that old. But why drop being attorney?
Can't speak for the OPs reasons, but some evidence suggests that law schools have created an oversupply of people with law degrees, which impacts career possibilities.
one source which supports my worldview: https://www.thecareercookbook.com/hello-world-6/
Re: On finally learning to program at the age of 40
#145I can sympathize. I always knew how to program since my teens. I'm 45 now, and didn't really start doing professional programming till I was in my late 30s. I worked hard for about 6 years to build up enough experience to feel confident doing this.
Now I'm at the point where my current job is pretty boring and we don't grow enough to bring in harder problems. But I also really don't want to move out to SV to work on Neuralink, sats, robots. Even though those problems are one that would be super interesting.
Re: On finally learning to program at the age of 40
#146I've been writing software pretty much my entire adult life.
But I was a manager for 25 years, which meant that I had to work on coding during nights and weekends. I got a lot done, but I really feel as if it stunted my development. Also, I was deliberately working on software that was designed to be taken over by folks with limited skillsets, so the tech edge was blunt. This turned out to be exactly the correct thing to do. That work has taken off in a big way, and is now being extended in new ways, by some talented and up-to-date engineers.
So, three years ago, I left the company I'd been working at for 27 years, dumped a bunch of my money into a couple of companies, and started to re-educate myself.
It's working out very, very well. Far better than I imagined it would. I may never get paid a dime for any of my work, ever again, but I am producing some of the finest software I've ever written. I've learned a ton, and I'm really just getting started. Over the weekend, I started work on a project that may or may not end up in open source, but will likely be one of the most ambitious projects that I've done. The last three years have helped me to get to the point where I have no issue diving in.
I'm pretty psyched.
Re: On finally learning to program at the age of 40
#147I remember discovering QBasic as a kid and being totally absorbed in it. I couldn't understand what an array was, so that halted my progress. I rediscovered it as a teenager in highschool and wound up making a basic platform game with a mess of shitty spaghetti code goto statements and drawing lines on the screen. It was great. My dad wanted to encourage me but didn't know how, so he got me a C++ book from the librar…
> My dad wanted to encourage me but didn't know how, so he got me a C++ book from the library but it just made no sense and I couldn't get anywhere.
Such a nostalgia trigger. My parents were not in IT, but had parent-friends (I was friends with a kid at school, my parents and the kid's parents became friends instead of reluctant chaperones) who were in hindsight mainframe system programmers. Ironically, from hearing about the work, my parents tried to dissuade me when they figured out I was fascinated. It wouldn't pay as well as a Real Engineering Job like mechanical/chemical/electrical yet would demand the same kind of rigor to study so why not just shoot for that REJ or chemistry/biology for med school?
But man, as a kid, once you're hooked molding your own world in code, the amount of sheer mind-numbing work you're willing to go through to get that dopamine hit when some piece works makes a hash of any of that advice. The only block is just the ability to ask around. Elementary school was not the time for K&R or IBM PL/I product manuals or IBM 360 manuals with no adult supervision when I was given access to the mainframe. I. Was. So. Lost. Just the editor was hard to remember rules for.
Back to BASIC on the rickety school teletype (driven by a timeshared mini) I went, and my befuddled parents had no further idea how to channel the energy I put into it without spending money, as well-intentioned as they were, so they got one of the new-fangled IBM PCs at a family budget-busting cost and let me have at it. Forever grateful to them they did that. The seed grew from there. I cannot wait to see what the kids with Google these days that get that same bug bite come up with in the next few decades. It will be glorious.
Re: On finally learning to program at the age of 40
#148Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you don't mind me asking, why would one give up a cushy, well paid attorney career and choose software engineering? Software engineering compensation _tops out_ below where an experienced attorney compensation _begins_. The least I've ever paid a lawyer was $250/hr.
I started as a lawyer then switched to programming. Law is cushy in the sense that you work in a nice office. But the constant stress, endless "emergency" deadlines, missed anniversaries and celebrations, unreasonable clients, pressure to bill bill bill, then to earn earn earn... Then there's the work itself. I was in litigation, handling lawsuits between enormous corporations. The first few years of my career were s…
Damn, I always felt like a failure for not going into medicine or lawyer and now I feel like I may have chosen the right path. I did well in school but didn't have the 13 years for medicine or the $300,000 for law school... instead I got my little Computer Science bachelors.
If you're early on in your career, I'd recommend the free only Computer Science degree (DIY route -> https://github.com/ossu/computer-science) and eventually getting a Master's if you want to go into management (or alternatively just load up on certs)
Re: On finally learning to program at the age of 40
#149I can sympathize. I always knew how to program since my teens. I'm 45 now, and didn't really start doing professional programming till I was in my late 30s. I worked hard for about 6 years to build up enough experience to feel confident doing this. Now I'm at the point where my current job is pretty boring and we don't grow enough to bring in harder problems. But I also really don't want to move out to SV to work on…
> I'm at the point where my current job is pretty boring and we don't grow enough to bring in harder problems
This is usually the point at which I job hunt. Honestly, I need a place where new and interesting problems keep propping up. I don't think I'll ever settle but I do always leave on good terms.
Re: On finally learning to program at the age of 40
#150Now I feel like I need to apologize for TAing a class that taught Logo to college freshmen. This was a CS class for non-technical natural science freshmen, so it was full of pharmacy, biology, geology students etc. It's primary purpose was also to (in 14 weeks!) teach the barest detail of all of computing, from basic circuits (~1week) to Logo programming (IIRC Teaching Logo to 18 year olds that had never in their lif…
Your last point is a good one. I started in math and had to take a few CS courses (which I ended up switching into), but I had almost no exposure to subjects outside those two. At least here in Canada, it feels like electives are de-emphasized and there's little opportunity to explore other subjects. I'm happy with the way things turned out but wish I could have taken a broader course load.