How I learned to code in my 30s

Not that wrong, imho.

> my mom discouraged me from majoring in CS because she literally thought programming was too easy to justify 4 years of classroom training, and she thought that the job market for programmers would quickly saturate.

This part is real wisdom. The best developers I know (and I myself, which I consider an above average programmer) learned how to program by themselves (before, during or after high school time). And it is not uncommon to find people with CS degree unemployed or with difficult to reallocate with the current state of tech, at least here in Brazil.

Hmmmm... in a handful of industries I might say yes, but in many others I would say no.

I see an abundance of discrimination against younger in many industries. Either they are looked at as lacking knowledge, experience, or both. Often times this perception is justified, but often it is not. Of course, there is no legal recourse since age discrimination in the US is mostly (always?) for people 40 and older.

That said, the ageism in technology in the Bay Area and a few other areas is peculiar and does not seem to be particularly widespread outside of these regions (at least in the US). This ageism seems to follow a few patterns:

1. People in the capital class working young people hard for low pay... because they can. Most older folks won't put up with it for justifiable reasons. These are often terrible places to work and are often terrible businesses as well.

2. Really smart and creative young people who want to work with similarly-minded people without having to manage a potential or real generation gap. This is probably closer to being justifiable when at a very small scale, but it's still potentially illegal, especially as scale increases. This is the sort of headline discrimination that is seen in the Bay Area -- a 20-something superstar typically doesn't have the "soft skills" necessary to manage someone a decade or two older. Few people at that age do, but this is especially true for folks who spent their younger years developing their non-managerial specialist knowledge.

3. "Culture fit". Some (many?) younger folks in the Bay Area seem to want to extend their college partying years. This means that older and potentially more conservative or parent-like figures are not particularly welcome. I think that this is not uncommon at any favored destination of recent high-achieving college graduates (as well as wannabe high achievers).

If someone in their 30s or 40s wants a job in tech, one easy way is just to get away from the areas that are flooded with high-achieving recent college grads. The areas that are flooded with these types have very real ageism problems. The areas that have few of these folks (most areas) largely don't have ageism problems -- if anything, younger applicants are more likely to be perceived negatively. Admittedly, the latter places are often less cool (i.e., not Bay Area, not NYC, not Austin, etc.), but these places have jobs.

The "Sorites paradox" is something like: how many grains of sand form a heap? if you remove or add one, is it still a heap?

So, exactly what exactly makes you a programmer? that varies a lot depending on who you ask. Someone said a programmer should be able to detect and report a bug to a hardware manufacturer. Some others say that "learning" (partially, because most programmers don't know every single aspect of a programming language) a general purpose or Turing-complete language makes you a programmer.

I define an "X programmer" where X is backend, frontend, data, whatever... as someone who can not only implement a feature, but do it through understanding rather than through a heuristic of trial and error or reusing code. Also, a person that is able to troubleshoot what is going on if some of the underlying systems is not working as expected.

http://www.minedminds.org