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Ask HN: Starting a Career in Programming at 61?

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Re: Ask HN: Starting a Career in Programming at 61?

#31

Post by elthor89 »

I don’t know his motivations to become a programmer.

However with his experience as a CEO, CFO. He might want to look into becoming a Data Engineer, BI consultant, Data Scientist or Data Analist.

With the experience you mentioned he might be better at understanding how the “business” thinks and what they need. Therefore a lot of his domain knowledge could be applied while being in a technical role.

Most of the roles I mentioned involve some programming but often that can also be drag and drop tools.

Good luck!

Re: Ask HN: Starting a Career in Programming at 61?

#32

Post by maininformer »

If I were you, I would ask him to study up and then give him parts of my projects(you said you're a contractor) and we can see if it works out or not. If it does in a couple of years or four he can be a contractor himself under your mentorship.

Maybe thats what he's asking anyway ;)

Re: Ask HN: Starting a Career in Programming at 61?

#33

Post by awb »

2 things: age & language

1 - age

> 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.

There’s a significant age bias in the tech community that might be hard to overcome.

He is in a protected age class though: https://www.eeoc.gov/age-discrimination

Just make sure he knows his rights during the hiring process that it’s not acceptable for a company to not hire him based on age.

2 - language

Learning a new modern language like Node/JS will be a brutal race to the bottom in a highly competitive marketplace.

However there are some jobs that pay great money to folks who know older languages like COBOL, Perl, etc., maintaining old systems. And I’m guessing he’ll find the work and coworkers more relatable. These jobs are just much more scarce.

A question he might get from having an impressive C-suite resume and applying for programming jobs is: why? So just be prepared to answer that.

And probably have him build one or two personal projects so he can make sure he likes the process and has something to showcase.

Good luck!

Re: Ask HN: Starting a Career in Programming at 61?

#34

Post by Delphiza »

Does it make sense for him to try and become a professional programmer. No. Not at all.

However, using programming tools and concepts to provide more value than his younger Excel-munging peers. Definitely, and will help him figure out what he is good at.

Subscribe to Datacamp and start learning python. Get some of those Excel spreadsheets that executives like to drown each other with and start doing some business analysis on them in jupyter notebooks. He can definitely find an edge doing financial analytics, financial forensics, that sort of thing.

We (programmers) would be shocked at how bad those business spreadsheets are. He can use his experience, and desire to learn, to find plenty of work munging executive financial and other data using programmers tools.

Re: Ask HN: Starting a Career in Programming at 61?

#35

Post by TSiege »

This is just a random thought, but if he has challenges facing ageism (which I think will be the case unfortunately)he could try two modes of approach. 1) He leverages his C suite experience to start ups and help them w/ product fit. 2) he uses his age, and perhaps relearns some older legacy languages and can work as a contractor helping maintain/migrate away from older systems.

My thinking with these is he needs to use his age/experience as a bonus not as something to ignore. For option 2, he'd fit the target demo that people are looking for, he'd just need to work on relearning those languages to do it which might be tricky

Re: Ask HN: Starting a Career in Programming at 61?

#37

Post by paxys »

Putting aside age discrimination for now (which is very real), a good thing to figure out is how good he is at programming. Can he get to the point where he can solve easy problems on sites like leetcode or hackerrank in a mainstream programming language (not basic or pascal)?

Re: Ask HN: Starting a Career in Programming at 61?

#38

Post by MentallyRetired »

lbriner wrote: post #16

It's great that he is still up for working! 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 per…

Was going to recommend a technical management role. This is a good call, imo. You only need to know how website/apps work, not the code itself.

Re: Ask HN: Starting a Career in Programming at 61?

#39

Post by 3pt14159 »

My advice is to find someone that's done this before and have a good long chat with them. The advice from random hackers in their thirties isn't going to be all that useful.

That said, here is my take:

I know that if I were hiring him it would be easiest if it was for a role that had programming plus something that involved his past. That way I may have a junior software developer, but since he's writing code for our financial models in Excel his history as an CFO really comes in handy. You get the idea. I wouldn't throw this guy knee deep into Node / Python / React / CSS / HTML / Shell / Docker / AWS and expect him to thrive. Pick something focussed and relevant and he can slowly shift towards where he would be happiest.

Re: Ask HN: Starting a Career in Programming at 61?

#40

Post by devoutsalsa »

lbriner wrote: post #16

It's great that he is still up for working! 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 per…

Also thinking out loud...

I started teaching my self to code w/ the intent of getting a coding job at age 38, and I got my first coding job at 40. Breaking into coding was brutal for me. I couldn't get taken seriously as a junior. I just had to keep grinding until I was good enough that someone would take me seriously as a mid-level.

The way I did that was go super deep on learning Ruby super well. Then I found a company that needed someone who was really good w/ Ruby. They were willing to overlook my lack of depth in other areas because I had a skill that was critical to them. After starting the job, I had to work super hard to brush up on junior & mid level skills just to do my job at a good enough or better level.

After less than two years, people started thinking I was actually better & more experienced than I was. I could talk a really good game because I had spent so much time learning while I was getting experience, and then I started getting taken seriously for senior level roles. People saw my physical age & just assumed I was more senior & experienced than I was, so being older was actually an advantage to being taken seriously.

After about 5 years of coding, I finally felt like my work life balance was somewhat normal. I could start having a life again, stop learning quite so hard, etc. Now I'm just a normal, boring senior software engineer making a median-ish USA salary.

So I guess I'd say if OP's dad's path would be similar to mine, I'd ask him if he really likes software enough to spend a couple years learning to code & finding a job, then grinding for a few years to get to normal, and then enjoy 5 years of being a competent team member. It's certainly doable, but I think it's worth how bad one really wants this path. I think getting into software just for the money is not how I'd want to spend my 60s, but I'd absolutely do it if I found the coding enjoyable enough to self-teach & grind on learning for as long as it took.

It's also possible that other opportunities would open up just because of dad's knowledge of software. Just saying he likes to program, even if that's not his profession, could open up opportunities at a tech company doing other things, such as QA, support, scrum master, etc.

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