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!

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.

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.