Can you start a successful tech career later in life?

I'm in a similar situation to yours. Although I did start programming at around 13 (BASIC and Z80 assembly on a Sinclair ZX Spectrum), I moved into product management and marketing (in the technology industry) around a decade ago. I've always been a programmer though. I have CS degrees both undergrad and at grad school and even as a marketer I would write code at home to explore technology and as means of recreation -- just not for work.

I recently quit my job to run my own business, and I returned to programming for a living once again. Some observations on the differences between the 22 year old me in grad school and the 41 year old me as a programmer:

In terms of raw stamina to power though writing code, 22 year old me won hands down. I recall taking about 45-90 days to churn out a 35KLOC piece of Java code, One sprint during those 90 days was a 48-hour non-stop effort. I still have that code, and although it still works (with some changes) it's not the best code I've written. 41 year old me can barely manage 10 hours a day of coding before being too tired to continue. But I'm an order of magnitude more effective in getting the job done. And several orders of magnitude better at estimating how long a programming task will take. This happens because I've developed an intuition over the years for avoiding design and coding paths that are 'risky' -- no threads in my code, for example.

To address your point of perception of others that you are moving downwards, there certainly seems to be a perception of it. Early in my business endeavors, I'd pitch my services directly as a contract programmer, and I found that folks would be very reluctant to hire me - especially as the resume had several years of marketing and product management on it. I also suspect they may have inferred that I was expensive. Not true. But that was the perception.

I changed tactics a little later. I would pitch similar services as a firm (with me as founder), and sales process went swimmingly! Now the resume, with a decade of experience in management at large tech companies and the MBA, would open the door to the CEO/SVP level.

In addition, many of my early referrals came from folks in my network who knew me as a 22-year old and were in CEO/VP positions themselves, and were glad to refer me to their colleagues.

So, my advice to you, would be to not handicap yourself by competing on the same playing field as your younger competitors. Simply competing on pure programming prowess, even if you're good, would take away your strengths. Just change the game. Use the management experience you have to your advantage.

One of the best examples I know of is someone we hired at Viaweb, Jonathan Yedidia.

http://www.disneyresearch.com/people/jonathan-yedidia/

He had a PhD in physics and then became a professional chess player (44th in the world IIRC). He hadn't done much programming, but I knew him from high school and figured someone as smart as him could learn to program pretty quickly. Which is exactly what happened. Now he's a CS researcher.

I don't think your comment is appropriate in this context. The GGP said that he was a manager for awhile but didn't like it. I doubt that the reason he didn't like it was because of some meme about not liking it.

The typical reasons why a developer might not like management are because you're spending more time with people instead of code, you're looking at the product at a higher level rather than dealing with the details of coding, you have to deal with more politics, and you might not have the tools to be successful (i.e. current set of employees were hired before you, not enough budget, other business decisions aren't compatible with success, etc.)

Come on, you're not losing options, you just maybe have a lower % chance on average. Like any of these discrimination situations you're just at a disadvantage. Unfortunate and needs fixing but easily beatable.

I was the direct manager for software engineers at a big public hosting company. Being a line manager was miserable. I thought going into management I'd have more ability to influence things but I had less. I had no time to write code, and so I wasn't taking part in technology decisions outside of approving with whatever the team decided, and they are smart people, they didn't need any hand holding. I couldn't influence anything at all with the director who managed me, all I did was communicate whatever he wanted to the engineers. I couldn't influence other teams. I basically sat in meetings, listened to 1-1's and just relayed information. Another team had someone struggling and so I got to do a bit of mentoring there, but I didn't have to be a manager to do that. It just seemed like I was always fighting with HR for my engineers, fighting my boss for my engineers, trying to get other teams to respond to my engineer's needs. It sucked. I think the people on my team were happy with me, but I want to write code. I want to make things. Engineering has a career track that makes sense, when I looked at managers who were my peers I saw politics, and one-upsmanship. I just want to make good products. I don't want to play mind games. I want to do the best I can. I don't need to rise up the ranks. I just want to learn and do cool things with software.

It was a great learning experience though, because before I became a manager I thought that was like a natural progression, something that I had to do, something that I felt I couldn't shirk from, something where people recognized me for my skills, but in reality it's just a shit job, a dead end, unless you're one of the few who advances up the latter, because you know what, all of my managers and my manager's managers were all just relaying their manager's will down the pyramid.

When you are a software engineer you see things you do create value. You build things that work and do stuff. When you're a manager, I have no idea what I contributed. What did I do last week where I earned my pay? I have no idea.

Anyway, I'm glad I survived and am back to writing code. It involved getting a new job at a new place as soon as possible before I got too rusty. I was writing code at home all that time so that helped.