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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?

#161

Post by yumraj »

lkxijlewlf wrote: post #127
rookie_knight wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Ageism is higher in companies in domains/work with lower barrier of entry, such as the ones you also identified like web dev, mobile apps and so on.

Ageism is less in domains that require domain expertise and hence have a higher barrier to entry for a newbie. Look at systems engineering, hardware, semi conductor, deep science and so on.

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

#162

Post by nmaley »

I'm a 69 year old who made a conscious decision 12 years back to leave sales and management and return to my technical roots. Now I'm in a solution architect role where I'm expected to constantly stay abreast of the latest technologies. The pay is good. I don't have to do much coding, but I do some anyway to keep my hand in.

My advice to your Dad is to aim for a job in consulting and analysis rather than coding. Get some certifications in a SaaS platform like Dynamics or Salesforce or whatever. That way he can leverage his business experience and people skills. I've found that people who combine experience with solid knowledge of a software platform get quite a lot of interesting job offers, even if they are older. If he later finds out he has an aptitude and interest in development then he can go down that path after he has mastered the functional stuff.

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

#164

Post by RickJWagner »

tychonoff wrote: post #158
alberth wrote: post #137

Personal anecdote… My father worked into his 80s and I saw firsthand how once he hit 60 years old how much harder it was for him to land a new job. As such, I’ve always gone out of my way to ensure such folks get a fair shot in my ~25 years of being a people manager. And every time I’ve hired someone 60+, even if they are new/junior for the role - it’s worked out in spades. The unique perspective, what’s seems like a…

I'm a 73-year-old Canadian programmer with no formal education in computing. After completing a PhD in pure Mathematics, I started working the next day writing scheduling algorithms in Fortran on an IBM 4341 (my supervisor played poker with the company President, so that helped). Although I picked up Fortran quickly, I had to study scheduling algorithms because my specialty was mathematical logic. Then I became a uni…

Late 50s veteran here. The 4341 was my first machine (running DOS/VSE) back in 1990.

Those were fun days! (Weren't they all. The 4341 was soon replaced by client/server setups, which then fell to J2EE, which then fell to distributed setups like k8s....)

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

#167

Post by reactspa »

inglor wrote: post #46

Some anecdotes: - One time I posted on HN that I am willing to tutor people from Gaza for free (am Israeli). Got contacted by a Nigerian man (over 50+ years) instead. He successfully did FCC and a few other courses and got a job (with minimal mentoring) in the field. - One time I had a student at a program I volunteer in for a minority group who was almost 70, they successfully completed the program and got a job. -…

Clarification needed please: What's "FCC"?

Thanks.

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

#169

Post by cosmodisk »

jacobyoder wrote: post #71
mywittyname wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Accepting some advice or input on an individual item vs having someone 'manage' you are different beasts. As I come up to 50, and work with a group of folks ranging from 28-32... the age and experience gaps are highlighted often. I'm happy to contribute, and I do occasionally learn something from someone (often some specific tool I'd not seen before). But there's a resistance to 'learn' from me. We're 'equalized' on…

I found myself in an interesting position: on one side I manage a group of people,where most of them are much younger. So it's nice to be able to tell that that you do x and you'll get y. For instance, I made someone a team leader recently and did tell that it is likely that they'll get some resistance from others because of it. Fast forward 3 weeks and now I have to deal with the exact thing I mentioned. On the management side, we do have a wider range of people in terms of age and seniority. It's so refreshing to be in a meeting where someone says: yep, I've done this 20 times previously, these are the common mistakes we are likely to make. I don't want everyone to be my age in the company,a mix of varying experience is great.

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

#170

Post by templarchamp »

Since the question is a bit open-ended, here are the possible options.... If he wants to do programming for fun, which is not the case, I think age does not matter. Actually programming for fun is a good place to start - get a feel - and then monetize the skill accordingly. I believe with his management skills, like 20-40% technical skills is all that is required to be a techno-functional-engineering manager (depending on the organization). Since he is new to programming, he does not have the "baggage" of outdated/irrelevant skillsets (CORBA anyone?) - so that is a good thing. Barrier to entry is low which is good - so it is a good idea that if he wants to take this up! I think the challenge would be, with his management skills, it would be hard to swallow how some managers mismanage...
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