At the age of 38, am I too late to change career to front end dev work?

Yes. It's not any harder to learn this stuff as you get older, in my own experience, despite what people sometimes think.

Only personal experience, but: I found learning complex technical concepts far easier in my late 20's than I did as new college entrant at 18-19. Including all the math.

So, not sure why people like to say that you learn this stuff easier when you're younger. For me, it was exactly the opposite.

If you want to do front-end, don't worry about those coming out of uni/college. Front-end is a specialization that very few places teach.

There is a huge range for front-end. You have people doing basically cut-up for marketing sites to people building front-ends that can scale up.

My four big buckets I look for from a Front-End are:

* Technical, can you make it work

* Maintainable, can someone else keep it running and update it

* Scalability, can you scale the solution up to millions of people (to be honest, most front-end don't need to worry about this)

* "Precog", can you anticipate the issues that arise from users and their wide range of browsers + OS + hardware

Do you have a solid business career in accountancy, and wanna switch to grunt js work?

Is excellent if wanna do development, but why not apply your experience instead? Also in all this 10 years you have build some contacts to get your foot in.

I know that accounting and crud apps are not "sexy" and boring.

But you know what is worse and more boring?

Using js!

Jah, sorry, I can't resist.

But honestly most "front-end" work is not amazing at all.

Maybe building visualizations, charts and stuff like that. But pages and apps in front-end is alike build forms, but harder, more complicated and with less performance than native code.

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I'm in the process of build a point-of-sale app, and I will envy to have you background instead, or have a partner with that skills.

So, I'm telling you:

You have valuable skills that are higher than Js. Js/html/css is just a tool (that pay, because the front-end work have become more crazy and requiere more effort triying to be somethings is not made for), but in itself not become yet-another-front-end-dev when you already have a better position to offer.

Ara you joking mate? As long as you are/get good enough (I don't mean Facebbok/Google/etc good, just able to develop usable stuff) in a relevant field, you'll find good jobs and good pay in IT in most developed countries. Not sure of how the pay compares to accountancy, but if really want to change career....

I've coded my first "Hello World" at 26yo and now at 36 I'm working as an iOS contractor and making 6 digit figures (in £) and couldn't be more thankful to past me!

Few random thoughts as I've gone (and am still going) through same experience.

1. Zed Shaw of the "Learn Python the Hard Way" said programmers are dime a dozen. What's really valuable is a programmer who has experience from another domain such as history, engineering, medicine etc (and accounting in your case). I cannot recall exactly where he said it but I remember reading it and chuckling to myself.

2. Are you sure you want front-end dev work? Why not back-end? Exactly what skills are in demand? I recommend you watch this video on state of tools available in web dev including front-end, back-end, and DevOps as of 2016. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sBzRwzY7G-k

I should warn that the shelf life of front-web dev skills seems to be much shorter than IT. In fact here's a list of tech skills, ordered with longest to shortest shelf life IMHO. Not sure about DevOps but my feeling is it has longer shelf life than programming...

IT > DevOps > Back-end > Front-end

Going into IT years ago, I knew I needed to keep learning new stuff to stay relevant. I slacked off a bit (due to family situation) and paid the price. With dev work, you need to spend even more time to learn new stuff to stay relevant. Often, you will have to spend your personal time to do so.

3. You should keep your day job as you try to break into coding. You don't want financial pressure to stress you out. And that means you will have to squeeze out every available hour of your life and devote it to studying/practicing. That means no weekend activities, no TV/video-game at night, etc. The less you do such things, the faster you can switch into dev career.

4. Do you have the environment that will allow you do real productive studying/coding/studying? If you have kids, can you avoid school pickup/dropoff? Will you have big chunks of time daily to devote to coding practice? Personally I need at minimum 30min - 1hr before my brain switches on and gets productive.

Basically your family around you have to pretend as if you had 2 full time jobs or you were studying for Bar exam or in med school. And they should expect what 6 months to a year of this.

Do you have a desk where you can set up 2 x 24" monitors and your laptop with a comfortable chair? Or maybe a standup desk?

5. Get github and own web server (DigitalOcean, Linode or Amazon AWS) going and start posting your work. Curate what you post on Github. I use bitbucket for personal projects and use github only to post what's reasonably presentable. You probably don't have contacts in the industry. And that means finding a job almost exclusively based on job postings. And because of your lack of prior experience in the industry, you will often get passed over for others who do. So your secret and only weapon would be examples of your work that is easily accessible to recruiter/hiring-manager. Especially for dev work as there's no certifications to get like in Windows or Linux world.

Setting up github/bitbucket means learning Git. Not really coding but you will need to know it for a dev work nonetheless.

Setting up website on Linux to host your code is another non-coding task but still valuable skill to have.

6. Your first job as a dev may not be that dream job. What I've learned is that jobs posted on jobsites almost always have more negatives than positives. If it was really a desirable job with good environment, someone would've referred their friend/ex-coworker. So set your expectation accordingly for your first dev work. You can either turn it into a better job or move on to a better job/company. Whether the position is discouraging or not, once you get in, kick as_. That will open more doors, either more responsibility, or a different company or even freelance work.

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Epilogue

I started down the path of switching from IT to dev because I wanted freedom of remote work, freelance, start a product/website to make income on the side, etc. None of that has come to fruition except for remote work but no regrets. I no longer have to open boxes of laptops, stick on inventory tag and add it to inventory excel list, get interrupted with help requests every 10 min, or worry about where to keep spare packing material (because manager wants tidy work space but not providing adequate storage space) to have available for overnighting that laptop to replace a broken laptop of a remote worker.

Well there I go, spent another hour doing something else other than practicing coding.