Ask HN: Starting a Career in Programming at 61?

Make sure the machine and monitors don’t become a reason to stop the process of learning and doing.

Approach this as a series of goals and don’t expect overnight miracles.

Make copious notes. It could be useful to focus on programming for a particular field or set of applications, if he has core knowledge. For example, tools that could have helped him in his previous roles. Don’t worry if these aren’t original nor large.

Be organized but don’t let the organizing obscure the hands-on coding and use of the tools.

Find sympathetic people and groups, for support, mentoring, ideas, and reference. I suspect that he has developed good strategies for networking and communicating with people and groups. Now is the time to take advantage of those skills.

I know that he knows that he doesn’t feel like he’s 61 and that’s important. In my experience the roadblocks are erected by reacting to other peoples inevitable ageism. Ageism is real. But it’s not going away, so work around it and work with it.

Having groups to work with, and support each other helps immensely. So, approach programming as a member of a group and don’t try to do everything himself.

Languages and platforms? That’s a different discussion, and I’ll avoid the inevitable arguments in this open forum.

And document the process and journey. Make the documentation process part of the journey too, of course, and use the IDE and YouTrack to help manage this process too. Other people will want to know about these experiences.

Is this about finding work, or finding software/programming work. If your dad wants to find work, he's better of, in my opinion, to stick to his field. He held considerable positions in the past, what did change about his industry that's making it hard now to find work?

The market for Software developers is hot right now; but it is quite difficult to find a job as a junior. Add to that ageism and companies are really picky when hiring.

Here are things your father is probably good at: Accounting, Taxes, Employment, Customer/People relations, Signing contracts (maybe gov. contracts), Figuring commercial real-estate & local regulation, Getting a credit line, Handling a lawsuit/the court, etc... All this stuff is experience a junior dev doesn't have and probably doesn't need.

By starting as a junior dev, your father is throwing all of that out of the window. What he needs to do (if he's looking for work), is to figure out how to branch into some industry that can make use of this knowledge.