On finally learning to program at the age of 40 • Hacker News Board

Re: On finally learning to program at the age of 40

#131

Post by markus_zhang » Tue, Sep 08, 2020, 3:37 PM UTC

I'm on the same boat.

Kind of weird (and again in the same boat as OP) as I was probably among the few in my country to actually have access to a brand new IBM PC back in the late 80s as my father got it from the university as part of the research grant. Most of my friends were lucky to own a NES at that time. But I never got the idea to learn programming.

Even as I was super interested in games and game programming (idea eventually hit), I again decided NOT to take CS as my major back in the university. It looks like I'm trying to stay away from my hobby. No idea why.

Then finally a few years ago I suddenly decided to teach myself C++ and from there I gradually built up my knowledge here and there. C++ hit me as a very good language to begin with (not a good idea btw), at least on the side of game programming. As I'd like to program retro RPGs, custom engine came as a natural thing as the earlier games were very easy on graphics. Anyway I did program a half done map editor and game for an Ultima spin-off and that was pretty much it. Eventually I got myself a couple of nice jobs so I didn't have much time for programming at the moment, but still trying to get a bit done here and there, mostly data structure and algorithm as I want to get a bit deeper before working on any medium size game project.

Anyway I don't want to turn this into a professional job as that might be tedious (I work in a game dev company). Working on side projects could be very fun!

Re: On finally learning to program at the age of 40

#132

Post by slumdev » Tue, Sep 08, 2020, 3:37 PM UTC

jaeming wrote: post #97

darkteflon wrote: post #12

I'm in this boat. Finally started programming in 2018 at age 38 after a lifetime of playing around with computers as a hobby (thanks, dad!) and a first career in a completely unrelated field, as an attorney. The linked article is about learning for pleasure, but there are also challenges associated with trying to enter the field as a second career. The technical complexity, of course, and the scale of what needs to b…

I started at 39. I had been looking for a new career to transition from video editing. After the third time my employer restructured my role, I took a voluntary redundancy (basically volunteering to be laid-off) and started programming full-time. I did an online bootcamp and never looked back. Five years later I'm a Senior Software Engineer, and hoping to upgrade to principle engineer by end of the year. Sometimes I…

> I did an online bootcamp

> Five years later I'm a Senior Software Engineer

> hoping to upgrade to principle

> Sometimes I suddenly feel like a fraud

You're not alone. Without a broad and rigorous education, it's hard to imagine being anything other than an advanced journeyman after only five years.

Re: On finally learning to program at the age of 40

#133

Post by anodyne33 » Tue, Sep 08, 2020, 3:43 PM UTC

throwaway17_17 wrote: post #23

darkteflon wrote: post #12

I'm in this boat. Finally started programming in 2018 at age 38 after a lifetime of playing around with computers as a hobby (thanks, dad!) and a first career in a completely unrelated field, as an attorney. The linked article is about learning for pleasure, but there are also challenges associated with trying to enter the field as a second career. The technical complexity, of course, and the scale of what needs to b…

I thought for a moment I blacked out and posted to HN without knowing it. I too am a 38 years old attorney who learned CS/Programming late in life. I haven’t had any success in finding relevant job openings for my particular coding knowledge, but I keep looking. Just knowing you exist gives me hope I may still be able to break into tech, at some level. And given that Hurricane Laura just decimated my city ( and my ho…

Have you had any eDiscovery experience in the past? I was an analyst for 15 years and AI is really coming on strong now. I've seen, in my job search, a few places where a JD coupled with a little CS knowledge could be useful. A buddy of mine is a patent attorney and quit his firm job to start his own shop doing natural language processing against the US and foreign patent databases. He didn't get his hands into writing the software but he's had to develop a reasonable understanding to guide his process and sell it.

Re: On finally learning to program at the age of 40

#134

Post by Reedx » Tue, Sep 08, 2020, 3:49 PM UTC

darkteflon wrote: post #12

I'm in this boat. Finally started programming in 2018 at age 38 after a lifetime of playing around with computers as a hobby (thanks, dad!) and a first career in a completely unrelated field, as an attorney. The linked article is about learning for pleasure, but there are also challenges associated with trying to enter the field as a second career. The technical complexity, of course, and the scale of what needs to b…

> I like to think it's an opportunity. If you're able to combine domain expertise from your first career with a solid grasp of CS fundamentals and a good day-to-day working knowledge of your toolchain, that can make you a pretty rare interdisciplinary candidate. Perhaps that then informs how you market yourself and to whom.

Indeed, you're in the best position to solve attorney problems with programming.

But another approach to consider is augmenting or skipping the candidate part and build it yourself. Identity a problem you had, solve it and sell the solution/tool to other attorneys. Even if the selling part doesn't do well enough, you'll learn a lot and have a valuable resume booster.

Re: On finally learning to program at the age of 40

#135

Post by ghaff » Tue, Sep 08, 2020, 3:51 PM UTC

swyx wrote: post #112

VamosArgentina wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I'm not worried about learning to program but about companies not hiring her as a junior/trainee because of lack of experience at her age

30 is still fine, ageism exists but 30 is hardly old

If someone goes to grad school, especially if they had 2-3 years of full-time work mixed in there, they can easily be pushing 30. I basically did a career change at about that age into the computer field as a product manager.

Re: On finally learning to program at the age of 40

#136

Post by guyzero » Tue, Sep 08, 2020, 3:53 PM UTC

So while I learned to program BASIC at 10 or so on a Commodore PET, there were plenty of adults who were also learning BASIC for the first time in that same wave of early home computers. I had a friend whose dad (an optometrist) was very into programming their TI 99/4A. And I'm pretty sure my high school computer science teacher hadn't been programming a lot longer than I had (although he was a good teacher).

So in a lot of ways, learning programming as an adult is a tradition that is as old as home computers. You're never too old to learn something new.

Re: On finally learning to program at the age of 40

#137

Post by Ataraxy » Tue, Sep 08, 2020, 3:54 PM UTC

ajuc wrote: post #59

I think Turbo Pascal was the perfect language to learn programming. It has a simple core, a static type system without much bells and whistles but that's more solid than the C crazyness, it doesn't force the student to learn 10 different concepts at the same time before writing HelloWorld (unlike Java and other OO languages), but it teaches thinking about types and not only values (unlike scripting languages). Sadly…

As a senior in HS it was the very first year our school had programming as a class and it was only for Turbo Pascal so I learned the basics of programming through that. It didn't really stick though (at least consciously) and a few years later I ended up self teaching myself PHP then Ruby then JS through necessity/curiosity.

The very next year they changed it to C++ and I wonder how things would have turned out differently had I been a year younger.

Re: On finally learning to program at the age of 40

#138

Post by renatoakamur » Tue, Sep 08, 2020, 4:02 PM UTC

On the same boat too. My first language was QBasic on a 286 on 90's.. I studied CS when was 18 but life put me on another direction and I worked on entertainment (music events) for 10 years until a crisis on my 30's. After that, I tried to be a designer but when doing my portfolio online I felt more pleasure coding my site than doing the works itself. Now I'm actively coding for the last 6/7 years and doing another graduation (IT Management).

Re: On finally learning to program at the age of 40

#139

Post by pmiller2 » Tue, Sep 08, 2020, 4:10 PM UTC

guyzero wrote: post #136

So while I learned to program BASIC at 10 or so on a Commodore PET, there were plenty of adults who were also learning BASIC for the first time in that same wave of early home computers. I had a friend whose dad (an optometrist) was very into programming their TI 99/4A. And I'm pretty sure my high school computer science teacher hadn't been programming a lot longer than I had (although he was a good teacher). So in a…

I learned to program on a TI 99/4A, and my high school “computer science” teacher was actually a math teacher who took some interest in computers. I wish I had been able to take a fuller CS curriculum in HS.

Re: On finally learning to program at the age of 40

#140

Post by pmiller2 » Tue, Sep 08, 2020, 4:18 PM UTC

jaeming wrote: post #97

darkteflon wrote: post #12

I'm in this boat. Finally started programming in 2018 at age 38 after a lifetime of playing around with computers as a hobby (thanks, dad!) and a first career in a completely unrelated field, as an attorney. The linked article is about learning for pleasure, but there are also challenges associated with trying to enter the field as a second career. The technical complexity, of course, and the scale of what needs to b…

I started at 39. I had been looking for a new career to transition from video editing. After the third time my employer restructured my role, I took a voluntary redundancy (basically volunteering to be laid-off) and started programming full-time. I did an online bootcamp and never looked back. Five years later I'm a Senior Software Engineer, and hoping to upgrade to principle engineer by end of the year. Sometimes I…

I got my first tech job later in life, as well. I’m now in a similar position as you, except that I don’t think I’ll be trying for principle/staff level for another couple years yet.

I definitely feel like I’m able to bring significant value, and I’m on a team where almost half of us have masters degrees in CS, while I have just a BA in math and a couple years clocked in grad school (math again).

I tell you what, though: I live for those times when I can make something work easily because I’m able to leverage my math background. It certainly makes understanding recursion fairly easy (many math definitions are recursive), and my graph theory courses help on occasion. I was once even able to help solve a problem that involved calculating the area of a general polygon specified by coordinates, which nobody on the team at the time really knew how to approach.