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Ask HN: Switching to a career in software development in my 30s?

by nosecreek on 11/11/21, 3:28 PM with 9 comments

Like many others, the pandemic has me thinking of a career change. Programming has always been of interest to me, so I’m seriously considering making a move in that direction. Realistically, how difficult will it be to make this change from a totally unrelated field, and what do I need to do to prepare myself?

In particular, I’m wondering about education. I see anecdotes all the time saying, “you don’t need a degree to become a programmer,” but many job postings list a CS degree as a requirement. Either way, I have no doubt that there is a lot that I’d need to learn before I could start applying for jobs. I’ve started working on the “Front End Development Libraries” certification on freeCodeCamp.org – is something like this enough to get me a junior level position somewhere? Are there other courses/programs that would be better? Should I instead be looking at going back to university to get a four-year degree? Or am I better off doing one of these online bootcamps and focusing on building my github portfolio by creating some hobby projects/contributing to OSS?

Some things I do already have that may help me along the way:

* A bachelor’s degree and some graduate work in an unrelated field (theology)

* In university I ran my own business creating WordPress website for local small businesses; so I am/was quite comfortable with HTML/CSS and somewhat competent with Javascript/PHP/MySQL. Unfortunately most of this was 8+ years ago, and I know a lot of things have changed in that time.

* Many of my hobbies include elements of programming: maintaining a blog I built in 11ty, home automation using Home Assistant, etc.

  • by johntdaly on 11/11/21, 3:59 PM

    Normally I would recommend learning how to program and then trying to get a job that is related to your field. Both of those don’t apply to you. You know how to program but your knowledge is not up to date and your field of study makes it hard for you to find a programming job where knowledge of theology would be a benefit. I don’t know of any type of programming job where you can leverage your subject expertise in theology. Maybe you have some other expertise you gained by working that can be leveraged?

    Anyway. You still can look into the jobs available to you locally and find out what technologies are being used and concentrate your study on those fields. Also see what meetups you have going on and participate.

    Other then that I think with your knowledge you might be better off going for a project manager position in tech.

  • by zaphar on 11/11/21, 4:29 PM

    I would ignore the CS degree requirement. In my experience there are plenty of shops that will happily look at someone with no degree as long as it's supplemented with some other way of showing you have relevant experience.

    If you want to look at a career change I would say you need to do the following:

    1. Start learning the current state of the art. You might be surprised how much of your previous experience is still relevant.

    2. Build some things that are a little more ambitious than maintaining a blog or home automation. Feature those things in your resume. If you can show the code you wrote when building it on Github/Gitlab/Bitbucket or something then that's a great way to provide a substitute for academic credentials.

  • by danesparza on 11/11/21, 3:51 PM

    many job postings list a CS degree as a requirement

    Realistically, certain types of programming positions probably do require some kind of CS degree, but as somebody who pathologically learns I haven't found my lack of degree to be an issue in the last 25 years of my career.

    Should you go to university / code bootcamp / learn on your own? I would evaluate how you enjoy learning. If you are a cover-to-cover learner, you might consider going back to school. If you enjoy a bit if instruction and then you'd like to jump in, consider 1-2 bootcamps (you'll probably learn different things from each). If you're a bit of a self-starter, go to a bookstore (or Youtube) and focus on getting the basics of a language down (like Java, Python or C#) -- and see where you want to go from there.

    Your Javascript / PHP / MySQL skills probably haven't stagnated as much as you think.

    You've already got the right hobbies to make this interesting and easier for you -- you got this.

  • by sethammons on 11/12/21, 12:55 PM

    Disclaimer, employee / hiring manager at Twilio. We have a path for non traditional candidates:

    https://www.twilio.com/company/diversity/hatch

    I just hired (well, offered; still waiting to hear back) someone who went through a boot camp and has a background in theater.

  • by noahc on 11/12/21, 12:46 PM

    Search for church content management system companies, etc and apply for jobs on their dev teams. You would have valuable product insights.