Does anyone have experience of returning to software development later in life?

[Hades]

Background

Long story short it's been a bit of a crap year with some personal injuries and now being advised my job is at risk of redundancy. I've been through similar "at risk" periods at least 6 or 7 times in my career and always survived them. So I may be safe. But I'm at the stage with my job, especially having only just returned from 3 months sick leave, that I want a bit of a change anyway. So while I really don't want to be made redundant for financial reasons to support my family, part of me would welcome a new start somewhere.

I've been in the IT industry since 1987, having done various roles from testing to development to support and many management roles. More recently it has been on the support and service management side. If I am made redundant I have a choice to make; either get another similar job or take a massive pay cut for a while and go back to being a junior software developer. My redundancy package could be used to subsidise the cut in salary for a while and I'm no longer interested in chasing big salaries or high positions. Been there and done that in the past. Medium term we are going to downsize the house anyway, which would remove part of the need to earn a significant salary. I have always loved programming and even today I continue to dabble in it in my spare time. But with no recent commercial experience I would need to start near the bottom again.

Question

I am aware that there is a lot of ageism in the industry. So how realistic would it be to go back to being a junior developer again in my 50's after a couple of decades away from it commercially (but still keep my hand in as a hobby)? Has anyone tried it and what was your experience? Thanks.

 

[swillsy]

I would probably argue its the least ageist area to work in compared to other departments in most companies as it's more about your technical knowledge/problem solving rather than softer skills or how you look. I used to run a team with people aged 17 - 56 who all performed similar roles and right now there's massive demand for dev skills and didn't think twice hiring older guys/girls as long as I was reasonably confident they could do the job. So go for it and good luck!

 

[peterwalkley]

Looks like I'm similar age to you (55). I'm a developer and have been since I graduated - never wanted to move up the management chain and lucky enough to be in a field and level that pays the bills comfortably.

Your statement of "I have always loved programming" is a big plus IMO. Development is a job where you need to enjoy what you do in order to be any good and have the determination to push through the humps when stuff gets hard. What have you dabbled in ? What language(s) and what do the applications do ? I don't think age is a barrier as already mentioned, its more about what can you actually do. Have you looked at what modern developer interviews look like as that's the set of hoops you'll have to jump through.

There is a big jump from hobbyist to commercial development, BUT the industry is used to people coming in that need to bridge that gap in skills, so it shouldn't count against you all the time.

As an alternative have you considered something like a 'Development Manager' role ? You would be using your existing experience but not having to write code day to day.

 

[dowie]

I've been in the IT industry since 1987, having done various roles from testing to development to support and many management roles. [...] I have a choice to make; either get another similar job or take a massive pay cut for a while and go back to being a junior software developer. [...]

I am aware that there is a lot of ageism in the industry. So how realistic would it be to go back to being a junior developer again in my 50's after a couple of decades away from it commercially (but still keep my hand in as a hobby)?

I don't see why you'd necessarily need to take a massive pay cut or necessarily become a junior developer especially if you've got prior work experience as a developer and years of experience in the industry.

Sure there might be ageism at some startups etc.. but there are plenty of other companies out there, maybe some who require people with whatever skillset it was you had years ago as a developer.

Just remember not everything is some new project using the latest tech, there will be companies out there with legacy code (in some cases from 10 or 20 years ago) that still needs maintaining so if I were you I'd perhaps initially just look for something in line with the sort of developer job you had back in the day. Try that approach first before deciding you need to start from scratch.

 

[Hades]

Thanks @swillsy, @peterwalkley, @dowie. The reason for going back to a junior is that I appreciate I can't demonstrate current skills to anyone despite being able to pick it up again in a very short time. I started programming as a hobby as a 12 year old kid in 1981 with BASIC, assembler and C and have never entirely stopped. In the past I've professionally coded for banks in PL/1 (a dead mainframe language), COBOL (still a few jobs about but I hated COBOL) and Java (which I did love at the time). Recently I have used a lot of Python in my role to automate reports and also taught it to my teams to help them automate various tasks.

In my own time I've used a lot of Python (and Django), a bit of PHP and Go. So I have no doubt I could quickly pick up anything needed on the job. But it's demonstrating that to a potential employer which I guess will be the hurdle. It's good to hear that ageism isn't as bad as I thought. In my last few companies I rarely saw anyone over mid 30's in developer roles. But that's probably because the older guys were made redundant and the jobs moved to India.

Perhaps one angle could be to look for a job that has a more modern language as the main requirement, but also mainframe ability as a nice to have. You could put me in front of an OS/390 (z/OS now I think) today and I'd quite happily logon and navigate around.

Thanks for the feedback.

 

[throwaway4372]

Most companies will ignore anyone who hasn't been programming in recent years.
Most companies will ignore anyone over 40 for a hands on programming role.
Plenty of demand for Python so you might get away with it.
My advice would be to look for a hands off role somewhere that uses Python.

 

[Hades]

Most companies will ignore anyone who hasn't been programming in recent years.
Most companies will ignore anyone over 40 for a hands on programming role.
Plenty of demand for Python so you might get away with it.
My advice would be to look for a hands off role somewhere that uses Python.

This was indeed my concern. Thanks for the feedback too.

 

[dowie]

Thanks @swillsy, @peterwalkley, @dowie. The reason for going back to a junior is that I appreciate I can't demonstrate current skills to anyone despite being able to pick it up again in a very short time. I started programming as a hobby as a 12 year old kid in 1981 with BASIC, assembler and C and have never entirely stopped. In the past I've professionally coded for banks in PL/1 (a dead mainframe language), COBOL (still a few jobs about but I hated COBOL) and Java (which I did love at the time). Recently I have used a lot of Python in my role to automate reports and also taught it to my teams to help them automate various tasks.

LOL I was almost tempted to mention COBOL as my point was that current skills might not necessarily be a barrier given all the legacy stuff out there but I guess it's a bit moot if you hated it.

I worked in one company where there is (or was until a few years ago) a VB development team... plenty of them were old guys.

Some physics people still use Fortran, various banks will have a load of old C/C++ code and some have proprietary languages too (GS and MS have both had their own for years).

I guess if you did go for some generic Python or Go jobs then you might well find you're rather young compared to others but meh... maybe just avoid the trendy start-ups.

 

[Lopéz]

Salesforce Developers (decent ones) are in massive demand at the moment - there just are not enough developers to fill the positions that are needed.

Salesforce uses its own language (Apex) which is an object oriented language based heavily on Java; it also uses JavaScript.

Nobody will care about your age, a degree of maturity and business experience far outweigh your age in my experience.

 

[Hades]

Salesforce Developers (decent ones) are in massive demand at the moment - there just are not enough developers to fill the positions that are needed.

Salesforce uses its own language (Apex) which is an object oriented language based heavily on Java; it also uses JavaScript.

Nobody will care about your age, a degree of maturity and business experience far outweigh your age in my experience.

Thanks for the heads up.

 

[NickK]

You'll find that the job market in the last couple of years really demands you demonstrate programming capability. Todo this you're doing things like hackajob or hackathons, contributing to open source projects and integrating with programmers/senior staff on social media. It's about getting the relationship to unlock the roles before the horde (for smaller companies) and to have a social media advert for the large orgs where the recruiters/interviewer can review. Especially as people will want to know you can code given you don't have any in the last few years.

You sound like me - almost 50 and was programming BASIC in the 1970s, Assembler in the 80s and then did a software engineering degree before going all the way through the technical tree.

Data science (ingress, cleaning and then algorithm development), cloud based platforms with Web & Mobile applications are still very highly sought after. There's also cybersecurity but everyone wants 100 years of cyber security experience, £10K of certifications and a cast iron insured guarantee that they will never have a data breach. Ok that last is a little OTT but people want someone that's demonstrated it already.

There does seem to be a distinct lack of willingness to invest in people, to build them up in fear they will simply be poached and offered more cash elsewhere. So the emphasis on your own development rests with you.

 

[LuckyBenski]

Following to sub and read later... I'm 34 and was a late starter. Went from electronic engineering degree at 30 to testing TVs, then testing apps, then reviewing code, before blagging my way sideways into a Dev role. Honestly feel I'm lacking grounding and if I change firms I'd like to become a junior software developer to fill in those gaps.

 

[Hades]

You'll find that the job market in the last couple of years really demands you demonstrate programming capability. Todo this you're doing things like hackajob or hackathons, contributing to open source projects and integrating with programmers/senior staff on social media. It's about getting the relationship to unlock the roles before the horde (for smaller companies) and to have a social media advert for the large orgs where the recruiters/interviewer can review. Especially as people will want to know you can code given you don't have any in the last few years.

You sound like me - almost 50 and was programming BASIC in the 1970s, Assembler in the 80s and then did a software engineering degree before going all the way through the technical tree.

Data science (ingress, cleaning and then algorithm development), cloud based platforms with Web & Mobile applications are still very highly sought after. There's also cybersecurity but everyone wants 100 years of cyber security experience, £10K of certifications and a cast iron insured guarantee that they will never have a data breach. Ok that last is a little OTT but people want someone that's demonstrated it already.

There does seem to be a distinct lack of willingness to invest in people, to build them up in fear they will simply be poached and offered more cash elsewhere. So the emphasis on your own development rests with you.

Yep, very similar. 53 now. BASIC in 1981, 6502 Assember a couple of years later. In between those I was writing out the values for machine code instructions and poking them into memory from BASIC (because I couldn't afford an Assembler on my pocket money).

It's a tricky decision because the relatively easy path is to get another job similar to my current one. The harder path is to return back to what I enjoy.

Since my original post above I've been told I won't find out whether I am redundant until "sometime in August". It's disgraceful they are keeping everyone's lives on hold. But at least it takes me past another work anniversary so it's another years employment in the redundancy calculation if it does happen.

 

[NickK]

Following to sub and read later... I'm 34 and was a late starter. Went from electronic engineering degree at 30 to testing TVs, then testing apps, then reviewing code, before blagging my way sideways into a Dev role. Honestly feel I'm lacking grounding and if I change firms I'd like to become a junior software developer to fill in those gaps.

I did a thick sandwich degree in software engineering rather than computer science. I almost did Maths instead. The degree specialisation I took was parallel and distributed computation. We had mandatory formal methods (turning requirements into maths and then proving the maths before converting into ADA), proving realtime state systems in parallel wouldn't lock up (tau), and meta-methodologies (studying methodologies - at the time Yourdon, Ward Mellow, SSADM etc).

Nowdays the engineering stacks for companies tends to be architecturally similar to remove costs and the packages used, therefore, are relatively similar. There's more emphasis on knowing the tools to make something and then people are happy for engineers to learn patterns from the interwebs to implement things. So I wouldn't worry too much on knowing realtime, provable concurrency as people will simplify the data atomicity into a pessimistic lock because they know no better (and systems are so complex it becomes unmanageable to have distributed transactions plus that knowledge across engineers of the org).

So it comes down to experimenting in your own time - the coding/hackathons then allow you to demonstrate the coding and techniques you have learnt.

Data science is an odd one. Yes there's lots of analysis but I would say the majority of data scientists either (a) spend their time cleaning ingested data (also patronisingly known as data input* by data scientists), or, (b) randomly try different ideas to return data "insights" by playing with anonymised production data sets. Very few create a seem to understand the data before they bash away.. And AI/ML? Well that's coding up something that simply finds the data by pattern recognition.. so if you're a data scientist then learning AI/ML now is 100% a must. The issue is playing with the AI/ML tools looks impressive but in reality does not deliver anything unless you have the formal training.
* it seems data scientists seem to think they're on the cutting edge of research and the Nobel prize (for misplaced intellectual arrogance). Having worked in a pure R&D commercial outfit I understand where that mentality comes from and how far down the list the majority of data sciences actually sit.

On the job training has (for most industries) a significant bonus in terms of relating to the industry vs academia. In my old Logica days (12 years) we'd get a lot of technical training open to us which made it simple to pickup new skills and the experience in the market area also helped understand the general approaches that would work. I picked soft skills because I found learning and analysing the tools easy unless it was esoteric or proprietary.

TL;DR - experience will trump academia however you need to experiment and challenge yourself to new ideas. So enter some hackathons even if it means failing the first few times you will learn a lot from others.

 

[LuckyBenski]

TL;DR - experience will trump academia however you need to experiment and challenge yourself to new ideas. So enter some hackathons even if it means failing the first few times you will learn a lot from others.

Cheers, this is the conclusion I've been coming to I think - I changed roles after covid turned up. This means I've hardly been exposed to my colleagues in person, haven't been able to look over shoulders, ask for help in real-time etc. Just not learned as much as I hoped by osmosis.

I'd also like to do some work on games dev, not necessarily for work but for passion. So have considered doing some game jams or joining up with others on projects.

 

[NickK]

Cheers, this is the conclusion I've been coming to I think - I changed roles after covid turned up. This means I've hardly been exposed to my colleagues in person, haven't been able to look over shoulders, ask for help in real-time etc. Just not learned as much as I hoped by osmosis.

I'd also like to do some work on games dev, not necessarily for work but for passion. So have considered doing some game jams or joining up with others on projects.

Ok on the "do what you're passionate about" - don't. What you should be is passionate about is doing the job itself.

If you do a horrid job in an area you're passionate about - the passion will fade as you become disillusioned with the job.

If you love the job with a passion then the work required is fun. If you happened to be in the area you find enjoyable too then you have a win-win, with any bump or blip of negativity in the area impacting you less than doing the job itself.

I hope that makes sense.

For me I love hustling and networking, the area is less important and I don't always get to hustle. It's hard job and rewarding but it seems to push the happy buttons. Sitting coding does less for me other than accomplishing something that has never been done before. Cracked some thing - superb, now get it to market and into profit - stupidity hard work but f-awesome. See it in the engineers "we did that" - really f-awesome.

 

[OspreyO]

Cheers, this is the conclusion I've been coming to I think - I changed roles after covid turned up. This means I've hardly been exposed to my colleagues in person, haven't been able to look over shoulders, ask for help in real-time etc. Just not learned as much as I hoped by osmosis.

I'd also like to do some work on games dev, not necessarily for work but for passion. So have considered doing some game jams or joining up with others on projects.

I don't think you will learn much unless you get someone with experience to take an interest in mentoring you.

 

[OspreyO]

Most companies will ignore anyone who hasn't been programming in recent years.
Most companies will ignore anyone over 40 for a hands on programming role.
Plenty of demand for Python so you might get away with it.
My advice would be to look for a hands off role somewhere that uses Python.

Couldn't agree more. Where I am don't train people up into roles anymore. We hire them already experienced straight into the role.
The only progression is you leave to get a better job somewhere else. We can't replace those people because we pay too little and over spec the roles. Also there's no progression. (see Line 1 above).
We started up the office lotto the other day, then realised half the players have left.

Python isn't that useful on it own. You generally need a bunch of other stuff with it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sO1ctUNQ1k8&ab_channel=Devslopes

 

[NickK]

Couldn't agree more. Where I am don't train people up into roles anymore. We hire them already experienced straight into the role.
The only progression is you leave to get a better job somewhere else. We can't replace those people because we pay too little and over spec the roles. Also there's no progression. (see Line 1 above).
We started up the office lotto the other day, then realised half the players have left.

Python isn't that useful on it own. You generally need a bunch of other stuff with it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sO1ctUNQ1k8&ab_channel=Devslopes

This is why companies are screaming they can't get the skills they need. Too scared that training people results in loosing investment due to churn, yet scream about the candidate selection being crap (yes I've seen on linkedin recruiters bitching like this - an instant red flag) because they can't steal a trained individual from other companies.
If you're expecting people to fund their own training and to drive forward then expect (a) demand for additional salaries and (b) higher churn.

As you may have gathered from my tone - this is a bugbear.

 

[OspreyO]

If I wanted back into development I'd have to build a portfolio of projects in the current languages and frameworks. Basically 1-2 yrs of study. Then get a junior role. Or try go free lance or contracting which would be so much stress and long hours. I'm not sure that's something anyone wants to do unless they absolutely love it. If they loved it they would been doing it already.

You'd also have to practice for coding interview and the practical tests they give you. You can't wing it.