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Elevator pitch: "i've spent X years doing , but i have a better way because it "
I don't think it's vastly different from someone younger who wanted to shift career into tech without previous experience. 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…
FYI I’ve been a software engineer for like 5 years, but took the past 1.5 years off.
I am almost his age and despite decades of professional experience I am unable to get a job. Of course, its likely that I'm doing something else wrong as well.
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 am almost his age and despite decades of professional experience I am unable to get a job. 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."
Assuming he is currently employed I wonder if taking on some programming work as part of his existing role might be a good way to slide into it. If he knows and uses Excel then writing VBA would be a good first step.
I am almost the age of your dad and I have been a professional software engineer since 1986. In the first years I worked with Pascal (VAX-Pascal and Turbo-Pascal.) From 1990, I mostly used C and C++. The last two years I have been working with C#. Now that I am getting a bit older, I noticed that it takes me more time to get know a developing environment and all the libraries/packages that go with it. It is a big lea…
I've been programming for 20 years - the amount of environment / config / tooling stuff to deal with just keeps getting bigger and bigger.
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.