You replied to my post where I said that employers weren't likely to take on an older person with zero experience.
You said that was nonsense, and then gave your friend's mum as an example. You literally don't know how much experience she had when she got her first job.
He doesn't need to though, I mean just scroll back up the thread and see the reply from Burnsey who has seen hundreds of applications.
You have been overly pessimistic, claiming it took you "weeks" (plural) to get to "hello world" when that's literally something that can be done within minutes of setting up your environment and reading the first pages of a programming book.
Just look at MOOCs or bootcamps etc.. these things last only a few months - in the case of bootcamps they might be full-time over just 6, 8 or 12 weeks perhaps and people will come away with multiple projects to show for themselves. People from bootcamps can and do get hired as developers (I'm not saying they're guaranteed a job but it does happen)*.
MOOCs are part-time, few hours a week endeavours but no reason why someone can't do multiple or do them at a quicker pace than intended if they fancy spending chunks of their weekend on it instead of say just one evening a week (very possible over the summer say if you've just graduated uni with a STEM degree of you're working a random Joe job).
Lots of people need to pick up programming on the side - plenty of engineers, mathematicians, statisticians, physicists etc.. might have had very few formal lessons/tutorials in programming at university but end up working in jobs where programming takes up a large portion of their time, you just have to take the plunge and learn on the job in some cases - they're not necessarily employed as "developers" per se either - though plenty do indeed go into developer roles (it's not all CS graduates).
*also think about how long an actual CS or Software Engineering undergrad actually spends programming - their course isn't all programming, they'll have various modules covering discreet maths, databases, computer architecture, software specification, networks etc.. if you break it down and they have say one or two modules in the first year, one or two in the second year to learn how to program (and those won't necessarily be the same language - they might learn Java** or Python but also say a functional programming language**) etc.. then that might only be 2-3 hours a week over the course of 2 or 3 10 week modules. The rest of their timetable is full of all the other stuff they need to cover. Maybe some third year modules require them to apply their programming skills and maybe they spend a fair bit of time coding as part of their dissertation but it's not hard to see that it is quite feasible for a bootcamp, running full time, to cover in a couple of months almost the same amount of programming as someone with a CS degree might have, at least as far as the general skills are concerned.
** for example say they have 1 * 10 week intro to Java or Python in the 1st year + in the second year they have 1 * 10 week module going over more advanced Java or Python + 1 * 10 week module introducing functional Programming in say Haskell. They've not actually had loads of programming tuition when you think about it, it wouldn't take you long to cover as much of the basics of Java or Python as they've had.
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