Ask HN: From zero to IT career, what is the fastest path?

The relative strengths is ability to change vs stability.

Generally here, the development skills vary more between individuhals than between age groups. Straight out of university, young developers tends to have done smaller projects (1-4 team members, 100 man hours each) and have excellent technical knowledge about latest toolkits. They will be able to solve very difficult technical issues and have an agile mind. They do not have experience from issues arising in larger projects (10-100 developers) due to legacy code, support agreements, management issues, project methodology, and they haven't even tought of corporate culture and office politics yet (sometimes for the better). The love for "my new stuff is better than the old code" can lead to design decisions which causes untested technologies to be used in the wrong places. Young developers often have no kids and sometimes no spouse, which makes them work long hours,and be very flexible in crunch times.

Older developers tends to have spouses and kids and responsibilities. This sometimes is a problem, but it can also force them to release the code as soon as possible, instead of doing a third or fifth round of optimisations and improvements. Older developers have seen the office politics and shenanigans several times and try to avoid them or even handle them. The older developer may sometimes be lazy and stick with older tools instead of new technologies, which can make products look and feel like they were designed last decade. But in large corporations, it's better with a released working code that looks old but is stable, than code which isn't stable.

Money-wise it's a toss-up. The extra experience from older programmers comes at a premium cost, which most of the time makes me assign junior programmers for the bulk of the work and senior ones for architecture etc.

Don't learn to program, program to learn. Of course this is just an adage. You won't learn good practice only by trial and error; that's reinventing the wheel. Still, writing (and rewriting) a non-trivial project in one's spare time is the best way to learn. It's comparable to learning a foreign language - you need to have live conversations, not just study grammar and memorize vocabulary.

Create some app of your own - or several - and opensource it once it is of fairly solid quality. That's a ticket to getting a proper programming job, even if you're in your 30s or 40s.

Do not overestimate the role of a technology stack that you happen to choose.

This is great advice, I think. Wordpress and Drupal are both growing very fast. They are easier for beginners to get involved with than a language like node.js, because the beginner is not starting from a blank screen. The software provides a structured and documented API for them to learn from.

And especially in Drupal, there is a lot that you can do without writing a single line of code, just by installing and configuring modules. This is often called "site building" expertise, or sometimes a junior "developer" (despite the near-lack of actual development). And there is actually demand for it, because real developers find that work tedious and boring; but it is a huge part of building almost any Drupal website.

The way to get involved is to find local meetups and start chatting people up. I know of at least a few people in the DC area who went from nontechnical jobs to senior Drupal developers making 6 figures this way--just showing up every time, working on volunteer stuff, and eventually getting some contract work or an entry-level position. From that point it's all about hard work and delivering.

Yeah. Like, who needs full stack engineers nowadays anyway? :)