Ask HN: What do you say to someone who wants to get into software development?

> it's really not that hard

I think this is a myth that people who learned a long time ago and learned over a long time say. It is hard - there's a lot of complexity involved. It does a disservice to other software engineers.

> ” Am I wrong? Is software really not that hard, and able to be learned later in life?”

What? Of course you are wrong. It sounds completely alien to me why someone would even have such doubt. It sounds arrogant too.

Anyway, to your question, tell people to try for themselves for some time and let them discover if they have joy coding something. Joy is important.

It is completely ok to get into software development for the money, but if you don’t enjoy the daily work of programming something the chances of you get a rewarding career out of it are slim - personally and financially.

Software development is different from some fields in that you have to continuously study software development. That does not really happens with most office jobs (marketing, HR, finance, sales) and happens in a much slower pace in field jobs (plumbing, carpentry, etc). That’s why joy is important.

It is very possible that someone could discover the joy of programming later in life.

My personal recommendation is to go with www.freecodecamp.org. Try it for a couple of months and try to identify if you like going through the tasks. And if you get happy after solving a particular trick one.

freeCodeCamp is free, well done, with very small tasks that allow you to adapt to any schedule you might have for studying.

People discover new interests all the time. Usually driven by crossover they have with other interests.

Computing is now such a ubiquitous part of life that it's interesting to a much broader set of people than it once was.

I won't assume this is true of you, but I'd say this assumption a lot of programmers have that they've always been intrinsically interested in computers is cart before horse. It's probably more that computers were relevant to other things they were interested in - themes like math, gaming and sci-fi - and that provided the hook. The intrinsic interest came later.

Being real about it, these were some of the only major themes that computers were relevant to until relatively recently, and that's a decent explanation of why we see a concentration of people with those interests in the industry today.

As the relevance and impact of computing broadens out, massively, we should expect and welcome a much wider array of people becoming interested in it where in the past they wouldn't have been. It's not that they are coming to it late, they are exactly on time for it to align with their interests, just as it was for you.

You should use the benefit of your experience to encourage and help them to get started!

Many things have difficulties and complexity. I would phrase it not as "software isn't hard" but that "it is no harder than many other things". This specific questioning is not often employed for many other equally complicated and difficult fields, which I think is a bit unfair and often acts as a gatekeeping mechanism that has led to diversity problems in the field.

> It does a disservice to other software engineers.

How does that phrasing affect any other engineers?

A few friends have asked me about this, idly wondering whether they should join a bootcamp or whatever. I enjoy teaching, and am quite good at it, so I give them an offer: a free 1-2 hour 1:1 introductory programming lesson. About half the people take me up on it and none of them have yet subsequently applied to a programming bootcamp. One person maintained a baseline interest and I occasionally give them more free lessons, which I find is a nice group virtual activity to maintain a long-distance friendship.

A lot of the time this voiced desire to get into software development is really approximately the same seriousness as a new year's resolution. Some flash of desire for self-improvement that quickly dies, before or occasionally after the first attempt. I also see something similar from software engineers who want to get into my subfield(s) - they'll ask very specific questions about which textbooks to buy, videos to watch, etc. for every tiny topic. I'll answer them, but have no real belief they'll achieve their goal. Often the goal is felt to be satiated upon spending money to order a textbook. I myself am not immune to this phenomenon, of course, as the hefty physics textbook sitting unread on my desk can attest.

Entertain their desires, encourage them, but give them opportunity to gracefully fail without destroying their savings and mental health by flaming out of a bootcamp.