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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?

#121

Post by a_techwriter_00 »

For a moment, take away the fact that this is your dad. Imagine a friend of yours with a background of "well, I took CS101 as a freshman" wanted to go into business with you. The pitch is that you use your experience and business contacts from being a thriving contactor in order to find and make deals and then you give the work to your friend to program the implementation. What sort of knowledge gap would exist between "learned the basics n years ago" and "someone you'd feel comfortable outsourcing work to in your real, actual professional life"?

Spell out everything that your hypothetical friend would have to go and learn for you to feel comfortable giving him even the most junior-level coding responsibilities or vouching for him as a "yeah, this guy can do the job" to a professional contact of yours. Write it all down, show it to your dad, and spell out the effort involved. That's what he's looking at learning in order to be taken seriously in the marketplace.

(I'd venture that some kind of consulting/contracting is what he'd wind up doing, both because I don't think many companies would take a resume like his seriously for a junior developer position and also because I don't think someone who's been at the top of the org chart would tolerate going to the bottom of the org chart for very long.)

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

#122

Post by ProZsolt »

rookie_knight wrote: post #102
malloryerik wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does working remotely seem to affect ageism in software development?

Honestly, have been long tenured (comfortable) at my current job for the whole of pandemic so only have second hand experiences through my direct reports. But on the whole I think remote work has made this problem kind of worse. When I was new I could walk over to someone, gauge their mood or how busy they are and have a direct conversation. Even if I lacked the ability to communicate my problem clearly it was defini…

If you're not working fully async, you can always ask the person to schedule a call where you can discuss X if you can't come up with one simple question.

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

#124

Post by AlphaGeekZulu »

cgfloat wrote: post #60
AlphaGeekZulu wrote: post #54

I definitely believe it is possible to learn programming at the age of 61. Certainly not for everyone - some people are not the programmer-type at any age. But if the curiousity and the will are there and the brain is still working fine - yes, definitely! I learned Rust at age 55. But! Programming is not only about learning a language. There is this huge background of methods, practices, technologies (network/ip/sock…

If you started programming at age 16, I'm not sure the fact that you learned Rust at age 55 is relevant here -- as you say "Programming is not only about learning a language". With your 39+ (=55-16) years of experience, I'm sure you have learned the background that made it quite easy to learn Rust at age 55.

Yes, absolutely!!

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

#125

Post by WalterBright »

WalterBright wrote: post #123

I suggest working as a consultant/contractor, where age is not a barrier. P.S. I'm older than your dad! And I program every day. I figure I have a good 20 years left as a programmer. The only thing that can stop your dad is if he quits.

Contributing to Open Source has no barriers to entry, and is a great way to learn, build a resume, and have professionals review your contributions.

For example, I have no idea who half of the contributors to the D programming language are. I don't know their real names, age, sex, country, religion, politics, nothing. I don't know if they live in a mansion or in their mom's basement. I only know them by their contributions. It's as close as one can get to a pure meritocracy.

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

#126

Post by Cymen »

If my 61 year old dad asked me how to get into programming, I'd recommend they go to a company that was involved in the Software Craftsmanship model that had a long apprenticeship period. I'd recommend this because I've had prior experience working in such a company (8th Light -- Chicago office) and I think that such an environment would set them up for success because while the learning is very self-directed, there is a lot of oversight and involvement in a constructive way by other developers who want to see the apprentice succeed. That isn't to say you couldn't find the same thing at another company but the Software Craftsmanship approach, if done well, would not be as random as the ad hoc experience you might get on the job at another company. A further benefit of working at a consulting company like 8th Light as, if you progress past the apprenticeship, you would be working on a variety of projects in an environment that is focused on doing the job well so the exposure would be a to a wider breadth of the industry (more languages/stacks/team dynamics/etc).

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

#127

Post by lkxijlewlf »

rookie_knight wrote: post #79
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…

The flip side of this is true as well. Ageism is a real problem in our industry. People are just more patient with young college grads and more willing to help them out. As somebody who transitioned to SWE in a big company(FAANG) after a decade of wireless communications research, I found out despite all the processes and supposed practices a big company has in place to onboard people from different backgrounds, you…

Anecdotally, ageism seems to mostly exist in FAANG-type companies, web dev, and startups. If you look around at other industries like logistics, transportation, etc. there's less ageism.

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

#128

Post by lkxijlewlf »

mywittyname wrote: post #47
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…

> could be tricky trying to coach an older person unless they have genuine humility Bingo. This goes for young people too, but is more important as we age or rise through the ranks. Accepting advice from an "inferior" with grace, humility, and thankfulness is key to gaining respect and learning at the rate necessary to stay on top of a field. I've taught things to people who were a million times more intelligent than…

> Bingo. This goes for young people too, but is more important as we age or rise through the ranks.

This is more personality in general than age. There's just as many cocksure youngers as there are grumpy olders and neither want to learn from you.

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

#129

Post by [deleted] »

TheRealDevonMcC wrote: post #42

As a 61-year-old with almost 50 years of programming experience who recently got a new job, I can testify how almost no one wants to hear from an old person. I program for fun, too, and could be doing that full-time if I weren't working. I'm only employed now because I'm proficient in an older language (APL). Never mind my decades of experience in many other languages and extensive domain knowledge in finance, not th…

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