Am I too old for this?
I’m often reading things online where someone in their 30’s or 40’s asks the question ‘Am I too old to become a programmer?’
Well a computer does not know or care how old you are so I guess what most people actually mean by this is ‘Will someone employ me as a programmer at the age of X’?
Having done some research, it seems that the average age of a programmer is 38 years old. I know quite a few people who started later than this and I know LOTS of programmers who are older than this. In fact, in my last position, I was considered to be one of the youngest and I am in my 40’s!
Another thing that I’ll point out is that I have never been asked my age by any of the companies that I have applied to. In fact, in the UK where I live, you can only ask for a person’s date of birth if a role requires that the person be a certain age e.g. to sell alcohol.
Of course I can only speak for myself but, in the tech world, I’ve found that the only things that matter are ability and attitude. This is great because, unlike age, these are two things that we control.
Companies need good developers in order to succeed and they need you just as much as you need them, so it is highly unlikely that age would become a factor for any hiring manager who has the opportunity to hire someone with the above-mentioned attributes.
Another possible concern might be whether it is too hard to learn programming as you get older. Or whether it is possible to do when you have family and already work full-time. The answer to this is ‘How much do you want it?’
There are people in my mailing list that have learnt at night / weekend / early morning whilst raising a family and working a full time job. There are people who graduated in their 30’s and are now working at the big tech companies. This is an industry which (on the whole) does not discriminate. Again..ability and attitude are your best friends.
And so the other main concern would be the lack of experience on a CV. It’s a valid concern but one that can be addressed. Even though it is not paid experience, you can still build things, build up a Github profile with cool projects, or contribute to open-source. You’ll probably get sick of hearing me say this but I welcome pull requests for every single project that I build in my videos (I’ve just created a dev branch in my Docker + PHP project for this very reason).
This week I’ve been speaking with a student on my Object Oriented PHP course who has been programming since the age of 18 and has decided to give OOP a shot at the tender age of 75. I think I’ll be doing something similar when I’m that age. You can’t stop someone that loves learning.
Just in case you are interested, here are the demographics for my mailing list
P.S. As promised, my Docker + PHP course is now available on garyclarke.tech and enrollment is FREE. This is the full course plus ~40 minutes of exclusive bonus content which includes using multiple docker compose files, a Symfony adapted version, and Laravel Sail. The code examples are also attached to each lesson…which is really handy! Check it out here: https://www.garyclarke.tech/p/learn-docker-and-php
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