Mid Life Career change to IT/coding???

[Paladin]

https://www.cnet.com/news/silicon-valley-middle-class-earns-seven-times-the-us-average/

Is it possible? Or must you be in your 20s to get an entry level offer/internships?

What's the best way to see if you're cut out for it? I used to HTML back in the mid to late 1990s for fun and enjoyed it.

What's the best way to make the transition? take classes at local Jr College/CSU? online? bootcamp(?) 3-month cram schools?

Any thoughts/help appreciated!

[FF90]

Get A+, Network + and Security+ certifications, and then start your training indepth training, you need to decide where you want to specialize too. i.e web design, networking, programming, servers. etc

[Quiet]

Check out Code Academy. It's a good resource for learning.

[TacFan]

Most of it is outsourced these days

[sholling]

Mid-life? IT is a field where age discrimination is the rule rather than an exception. In IT, no matter how cheap you are willing to work, skill level and experience are not nearly as valued as youth. Programming suffers from the same prejudice only worse due to a strong preference for cheap young middling-quality outsourced H1b labor. I'd look into other career options.

[Dragunov]

Mid-life? IT is a field where age discrimination is the rule rather than an exception. In IT, no matter how cheap you are willing to work, skill level and experience are not nearly as valued as youth. Programming suffers from the same prejudice only worse due to a strong preference for cheap young middling-quality outsourced H1b labor. I'd look into other career options.

I don't find this to be true at all. I work my butt off. I'm 56yrs old, been doing I.T. for 40 years, no joke. My phone doesn't stop ringing. I always get jobs the younger guys/gals want.... Here's the kicker; My labor rates are higher than most of their's. I'm also a walking, computer encyclopedia. That helps a lot too.

Experience DOES count for something.

[SmokeTheClay]

Might want to start doing QA

[tradecraft]

Bootcamp.

[sholling]

I don't find this to be true at all. I work my butt off. I'm 56yrs old, been doing I.T. for 40 years, no joke. My phone doesn't stop ringing. I always get jobs the younger guys/gals want.... Here's the kicker; My labor rates are higher than most of their's. I'm also a walking, computer encyclopedia. That helps a lot too.

Experience DOES count for something.

My experience and the experience of Disney, SCE etc employees says just the opposite. There is room for a few consultants at higher ages and rates but that because the puppies have taken over. BTW my experience only goes back to CP/M ~1978 so I've been around the field awhile and stay on top of tech. Bottom line, you may be an exception but offering hope to someone middle aged with no industry experience is setting them up for an expensive failure - especially in the Bay Area. I've seen a heck of a lot of very experienced 40s and 50s developers put out to pasture over the years in favor of cheap Indian non-talent.

OP, incomes may seem high on the linked page but the cost of living in Silicon Valley is astronomical. You'd probably be better thinking about how much you could make relative to cost of living in other fields elsewhere.

[hermosabeach]

Start programming on the side. Is this something that you are able to do full time?

I would look for coding classes and coding projects.

A friend is an IT admin. He got one job making around $200k with a casual BSing interview.

Other jobs they have you whiteboard with a bunch of people to determine your code skill and though process.


Life is long

If you have the skill and desire, you are young enough to restart a few new careers

[jdfthetech]

I recommend https://www.freecodecamp.org/ to learn coding to most of my friends. It's got a great structure and really does a good job starting out slow and moving you up to actual programs. It goes over basic HTML to start, moves to CSS then gets into Javascript and eventually gets you into Java front end development.

Another alternative may be http://automatetheboringstuff.com/ if you're interest is more in scripting / automation / getting stuff done using the Python language.

Udemy also has lots of different courses in different languages. You can't go wrong learning java or C#, both of those are in demand and the logic you learn will help you in most other programming systems.

[Robotron2k84]

The lifecycle of popular languages is now measured in years numbering less than 5. A good generalist can program in any language because they have the CS skills to abstract algorithms and control flow from syntax and functional paradigm. Not only that, but they also understand and have advanced skills with networking and database design. If this is your desire, there is still no way around a CS degree.

Good generalists are probably 1% of the total programmer population, the other 99% turn out code that doesn't survive more than a few months in use. This led to the Agile methodology to promote coding like any other business where people have a range of skills. Develop in a way to maximize code turnover to average out the weakness of the average coder.

The good coders make upwards of $150K/per year around the Bay (often several times that), but the entry level folks still hit below six figures and that's difficult to deal with when housing is so expensive, your commute is with all the other tech folks and you are working 12-14 hour days at the office plus any number of off-hour support calls, depending on position.

It's a terrible way to work and leads to countless bugs and security vulnerabilities. Back when coding was done by people familiar with the bare metal instruction set, they understood the job of the CPU and memory intimately and probably memorized the buggy instructions and how to get around them.

Nowadays programming is not an art, it's a race to the bottom and every new language is a further abstraction that demands increased resources for minimal gain. Or the other way: everyone learns to code the lowest common denominator languages, JavaScript and whatever the popular scripting language De jour is: ruby, python, rust, swift, C#, PHP, yada yada.

Not trying to discourage you, OP, but there is no glory in programming anymore, with maybe the exception of AI. Been here almost 30 years in all aspects of computerdom and one of my hats is always in the code circus-ring.

My suggestion would be to develop your interests as a hobby and find what you like. Do some novel projects, post them to GitHub or make a few phone apps and get traction in the hobbiest space. You're going to need a portfolio anyway to get good positions, so that prospective employers can see what you've done.

A good trial that I recommend for anyone looking to do serious systems work is to design and build a stock market recommendation or trading application. This exercises all major aspects of programming, data acquisition and manipulation, database storage and retrieval, networking connections, algorithm implementation (of which several are detailed in free media), accounting, distributed processing (hopefully) and time-critical stateful systems. Language doesn't matter, and VMs are cheap so systems don't matter much either. But building one from scratch takes research, design, thoughtfulness and attention to detail, all of which will serve you well in the future, if this is indeed your future field.

Good luck!

[the86d]

Get A+, Network + and Security+ certifications, and then start your training indepth training, you need to decide where you want to specialize too. i.e web design, networking, programming, servers. etc

I don't know, most people I know that went for those certs get circles run around them, at least where I work, especially by those who know Linux too, and have just a bit of tinkering going on at home for learning purposes.

However in the corp. world, in positions classified as what one might call "silo'd", many can barely do their job, or know just enough to do their job. It depends on the company. Some larger facilities have firewall rules pushed/"updated" that break VPNs, preventing people from doing their jobs, and they have no clue...
Nobody seems to know crap, and teams that get paid less then them have to tell them where issues exist, and find the team that handles those issues, so it can be frustrating being in the middle.
NSFW, but true frustration with "IT specialist" incompetency: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EDJGTGBgFc4
/bitterness_of_Corp._life_and_knowing_more_than_one 's_job...

[Dragunov]

My experience and the experience of Disney, SCE etc employees says just the opposite. There is room for a few consultants at higher ages and rates but that because the puppies have taken over. BTW my experience only goes back to CP/M ~1978 so I've been around the field awhile and stay on top of tech. Bottom line, you may be an exception but offering hope to someone middle aged with no industry experience is setting them up for an expensive failure - especially in the Bay Area. I've seen a heck of a lot of very experienced 40s and 50s developers put out to pasture over the years in favor of cheap Indian non-talent.

OP, incomes may seem high on the linked page but the cost of living in Silicon Valley is astronomical. You'd probably be better thinking about how much you could make relative to cost of living in other fields elsewhere.

You make a good point. I don't live in Cali. Didn't think about that.

[Subotai]

Here I sit, mid-50's. In IT since the late 80's. There is no job security in IT. I'm in a government job, don't make that much, but I have a job. Not planning to go anywhere except other government jobs. Would I choose IT now? No. The constant learning you have to do, the outsourcing, etc.