This article didn’t touch on the biggest obstacle for career changes: Giving up seniority.<p>The reality is that someone switching to software development mid-career is going to have similar programming knowledge to anyone else who has never had a programming job before. If they’re willing to truly accept going back to junior status with junior pay and defer to team leads and managers who might be younger than themselves, it’s not a problem.<p>But that’s easier said than done for a lot of people. It’s hard to go back to being a junior and it’s hard to be managed by someone much younger than yourself. I’ve worked with a lot of great engineers in their 50s who had no problems reporting to someone in their 20s, but I’ve also worked with some grumpy old guys who wanted their 2-3 decades of work experience to be the trump card in every dispute.
I went to a dev boot camp (Fullstack Academy) in my 50s, took a job in Silicon Valley, moved my family out here from NYC, leaving a career as an advertising creative that was lucrative and high-status but hateful to me.<p>Moving out here was a gigantic fail that basically ruined my health and my life. It’s been heartbreaking.<p>Much of the blame for that is mine, and not all of it is due to ageism. But I always find it shocking that people minimize ageism, give excuses for it (older people have families and therefore don’t want to work as many hours etc.), or flat-out deny it exists.<p>Shortly after I arrived here, my boss moved on to another job, leaving me with a new boss in his mid-20s. This new boss made no secret that he hated older people. He made jokes about older workers in staff meetings that, were he to make such jokes about women or people of color, he would have been subject to lawsuits that would have bankrupted him and the company.<p>After I was laid off, I had the lovely experience, over and over again, of seeing young interviewers’ faces freeze into going-thru-the-motions masks as soon as they saw that I was middle-aged.<p>Once I even had the bitter experience of having the 45-old-ish hiring manager phone me on the drive home, telling me she wanted to hire me but could not go against the consensus of her barely post-adolescent staff.<p>Again: Much of my situation is my own fault. I had generally bought into the bullshit 70’s fallacy that “if you believe in yourself you can do anything you want to,” bolstered by the fact that (being young and reasonably talented) I mostly to that point <i>had</i> done anything I wanted to.<p>Having said that: Young people are bigoted against old people, regardless of older peoples’ abilities or willingness to work. It has always been thus. And it is worse in tech than any other profession (including advertising!!!), and worse in SV than any other place.
As someone who started programming professionally at 25, and stopped professionally at 60, here is my experience: At 25, I could do a decent job of "drinking from the firehose". I could learn new things very quickly, and retain what I learned. At 60, the time it took to understand stuff grew longer, and the ability to retain it basically disappeared. I was programming in Ruby on Rails, and learning about a new gem or a new test environment was 'fine', but the next day, I needed to return to the documentation at length to refresh myself. It made being productive super difficult. I still do very small hobby projects, mostly using stuff I learned 10 or 15 years ago. This might not be true for everyone, but guaranteeing that 'anyone' can program at any age is just not true. Especially not in an environment where you need (a) a language, possibly 2 or 3 (b) a framework, (c) a test framework (d) an IDE, (e) a production environment (f) a source control system (g) a problem tracking system. YMMV. You need to check it out for yourself if you're considering it.
I'd say in some circumstances yes you can be too old depending on where you're trying to get a job. For me as a 40'ish year old with 3 kids (1 an infant), 3 dogs, a busy home I can't dedicated the time a 20'ish year old could with no responsibilities. Can I work for a FANG? or start-up? Probably not. I just depends on the culture. I love to code. I envy my earlier years where time wasn't as valuable and I had the freedom to try new things.<p>There's the inverse too of being older programmer with more responsibilities at home. It's lost on my wife when I explain to her look I want to spend time with you but watching the kardashians isn't good together time - so that I'd rather work she would take offense. Time is precious.
The short answer is no. The honest answer is depends. Lots of thing can be barriers for becoming a professional programmer. Age is one of the factor associated with lots of negative things. Your thinking could be slower than your prime time, and you might have much less energy to be focused on learning and coding. Your memory probably won't be that good. Even your eyes can become a problem, and your backs, necks. Also you might have more distractions in life.<p>I am not saying those will definitively prevent all old people from becoming a professional programmer. But let's be honest, there are lots of negative things associated with being old and you will need to overcome them. There could be a few advantages though, but I think disadvantages are becoming more significant after 60.
What I find about older people who complain about ageism in tech is that most of them really just wanna be in management or admin and not do the grunt work of actual dev or ops. That or they insist that they are relevant despite knowing only the same frameworks or methodologies that haven't been in vogue for 15+ years, and only now they got laid off.<p>I hate to generalize, but never in my experience (I am over 40) have I ever even seen a resume with potential ever get turned away due to age.
Too old to change careers into software dev? Probably not, a very good friend of mine started out as a nurse and then retrained at 30. But too old to compete with others in your age bracket for senior positions when you show up as a 60-year-old fresh from a 6-month cybersecurity diploma after not coding since the 80s? Yeah maybe a little. It's important to set your expectations according to current relevant experience.
Frankly, ageism in tech is real. They rather hire some younger guy without personal commitments (aka family). Sure, it’s changed in the past decade but I see it playing out all the time. Once you hit 40s and you have domain knowledge (and bank account) you are better off building your own thing. And to be honest, building anything below a few hundred thousand user base is not that hard at all and pretty much streamlined enough for one person to excute in 2022.
Not only age but tools as well. Particularly the web market is like a mono culture right now. It's not about knowing fundamental anymore. Right tools for the right job is a lie behind "you are willing learn" the wrong tools. This prevents professionals to enter as well. I'm 30s something, write 5-6 programming languages, full-stack, good at design, and I find it's hard to live in this industry already!
When I see this question asked, I immediately mutter, _yep_.<p>It isn't that anyone is too old, though, it's that they are asking permission.<p>If you want it, make it happen.
TFA hits the most important point: know your strengths. After about 20 years consulting, I moved back into development. I wasn’t a great developer then, and am far far better now.<p>But my coding skill isn’t my strength (somewhat slow, very defensive), my subject expertise (SELinux, ICAM, risk assessment) is.<p>If you have specialty skills, you can be well rewarded, even if you are slower than the youngsters.
Why add the word "professional" as some sort of attribute to skills like certified? Age is not a limiting factor to being proficient with programming skillsets. If I learn PHP is in 2 weeks, go on fivver and get paid to do jobs over the next year, can I consider myself a professional? Unfortunately middle management is the biggest barrier and problem for those older, no matter the skillset. So go be a professional or whatever, just don't work for someone else call yourself whatever you want.
"If you have the right skillset" is the key part. Speaking from my own experience as a hiring manager – in many years of hiring, thousands of applications and hundreds of interviews I have never once come across an older candidate switching careers who could write basic React components, solve leetcode medium/hard problems or design systems at scale in an interview setting. That is the bar every tech company out there will expect you to clear, regardless of age.
Having been at this for a few years I’ve seen a couple of unfortunate trends.<p>When i started out it was very common to find women and older people in the workforce doing programming and related roles quite happily.<p>We then seem to have gone through a period of the uber-geek / nerd and ended up with a very “bro” culture that totally alienated women / people with a life outside work. Horrible.<p>Fortunately in the post Covid world and with a dearth of talent to hire this seems to be retreating somewhat.
You might be TOO OLD if you believe the pundits who are telling us that Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence based systems have (nearly) reached the point that a user can simply ask for what they need and the ML & AI system will program it for you. These folks believe that artificial intelligence will soon replace programmers completely and there will be on need for professional programmers. They are wrong.
Here we're in Vietnam, where there's no real tech unicorn at all. The issue is in the quality of architect/tech leader.<p>One must be really open minded to continuous learning, learn your weakness, fix your mistakes consistently with this in mind: There's no easy problem, all depends on context of problem.<p>That's why it's a real issue with old programmer here, as most of companies tend to "go fast and break thing".
If you want to be self employed and have the skills then sure, why not. But if you want to go into the treadmill as a junior, feel entirely out of touch with the rest of your team and will be expected to keep up with learning new tech every 3 months then maybe focus on your strengths already developed and use programming as an extra tool in your toolbox rather than as the main means to generate income.
I didn't know there were a "prime" moment for being programmer. I know that if you're too old, but too old, you may have cognitive trouble, but in general, if you dedicate yourself to become good at it, why not? the market will put you in place anyways. Go for it!
Lots of companies would not mind. As long as you can do the job. Unlikely at big techs or startups but tons of small companies need programmers on the long term and not people they can squeeze in their coding trough while they are still young.