Ask HN: Can you switch to a programming career despite nearing 40?
You can, but it would require a lot of hard work at very low pay. My recommendation is to try to use your existing skillset for a tech company, and then try to transition internally. The right company may even provide free&#x2F;before-tax tech education.<p>Some points to consider:<p>1. Your age is a big disadvantage. Ageism is pervasive in tech, especially for entry-level coders. Someone your age who had started at 22 would likely have been in a management role for ~10 years already.<p>2. It&#x27;s very, very hard to get a comprehensive understanding of the work that most programmers do: web and&#x2F;or aging enterprise applications.<p>Web is an enormous hairball with many layers of history, competing standards, frameworks, philosophies, and target environments.<p>I&#x27;ve been building web software for ~24 years, since I was literally a child. I started doing it professionally ~18 years ago. When I meet someone from a bootcamp, their understanding is probably 1% of what mine is, which is totally reasonable.<p>That said, I <i>still</i> regularly bump into aspects of programming and web technology that are completely foreign to me and would definitely be useful for me to understand. For example, I have essentially no experience with the HTML &lt;canvas&gt; element, which is a huge gap!<p>3. Programming is not something that most people enjoy as a career, even if they absolutely love it as a hobby. It can be tolerable to continually bang your head against the wall trying to figure something out if you care about the outcome. It is much, much less tolerable if the outcome is fixing some mostly-broken, legacy garbage for a client in a boring industry.<p>Keep in mind that this type of work (maintenance&#x2F;drudgery) is often the most accessible and secure type of employment for starting programmers. It&#x27;s definitely possible to get a job at a startup, but at your age, the austerity and gambling involved in startup life is potentially not acceptable.