is it really bad to getting into programming job at age 30

[Ramanujan]

if i enter programming field at age 30 , how bad is it ?

[flowboy]

I'm a programmer for a company in the Netherlands, not Canada which is where you want to go.

But anyways, where I work it's like this:

• Your age doesn't matter, your skill matters. We hire people in their 50s if they know what they're doing.
• You can get a job without a college degree, but you need to prove your skill.
  Ways to do that are:
  • Previous working experience. If you don't have that, then have these others:
  • Having created interesting projects (have a GitHub portfolio that you can show and talk about)
    • These projects should be somewhat relevant to what this companies are doing, hopefully in the same lang/tech stack too
    • One of their engineers will probably look at your code and they should think it's decent
  • Proficient knowledge of the language (can answer advanced test questions)
  • Passing practical tests in programming assignments as part of your application
  • Getting online certifications. Microsoft and Oracle offer those for example.
• Your communication with humans is just as important. I can tell from your posts that you need to work on your English a bit more. Someone who doesn't speak English or Dutch really, really well wouldn't get hired where I work, I think. The better you can speak and write, the better your chances of getting hired.

So I would advise choosing which programming language you like best (one that is widely used today, for example C#, Java, PHP, C++), and start learning it really well and building your portfolio, and getting an English language tutor as well, for example here: https://www.italki.com/.

Any sector you go into will be using complementary technologies and languages as well, so depending on what that is, you might also want to pick up JS, Python, Spring, React, or others... What those tend to be, you can see in the job listings.

https://stackoverflow.com/jobs/companies

Having done one or two courses is not enough. You need to practice a lot, because when your manager tells you "Build this" you need to know what to do.

But it doesn't hurt to start applying to jobs early, and just see how far you get in the application process. What their criteria and demands are.

You can already apply from where you are, many companies hire remote even outside the West, and some might even help you with the VISA (acquaintance of mine got in that way from Russia)

Edited December 5, 2023 by flowboy

[Yimpa]

Only as bad as you make it out to be… start with your mindset (and work from there) 

 

Edited December 5, 2023 by Yimpa

[Ramanujan]

@flowboy

16 hours ago, flowboy said:

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Wow thanks a lot for your effort

[Ramanujan]

16 hours ago, flowboy said:

.

 (acquaintance of mine got in that way from Russia)

U mean , someone from russia was able to migrate to netherland ?.

[flowboy]

yes, she had a bit less choices of company, because not all of them wanted to do the VISA thing, but she found one. Had to move to Amsterdam for it.

[Ramanujan]

@flowboy @flowboy is she insanely skilled ?

How much skilled is she ?

 

[flowboy]

@Ramanujan  I've seen her code when she got the job, it wasn't anything impressive, but she worked at it. I imagine she's good now.

I think they took a liking to her because she's an ambitious hard worker and did extra things like create a hobby website for teaching programming, and Toastmasters.

Edited December 6, 2023 by flowboy

[Bobby_2021]

Short answer is no. And that's not because of your age. IT is mind numbingly hard to break into these days. I would want my younger cousins or kids to get into tech. The gold rush is over. The best time to get into tech was till 2021.

I recently saw a post on LinkedIn hiring for an unpaid internship and they had the audacity to list the requirements for a mid-senior dev. The hiring is broken beyond repair. 

You need to know absolutely everything and more to be hired and even that won't be enough. You need someone established in the industry to get a job. If you are starting out, 2 years will be necessary to be job ready at the least. So go into it only if you are willing to fight this uphill battle. 

[Leo Gura]

No one cares as long as you got skills and can offer value and accomplish excellent results.

In the business world what people care about is the results you can provide.

Edited January 3 by Leo Gura

[Bobby_2021]

13 hours ago, Leo Gura said:

No one cares as long as you got skills and can offer value and accomplish excellent results.

In the business world what people care about is the results you can provide.

1) You need to be given a platform to develop your skills. How can you improve your skills if you are not given a job to do and improve at it. This is the chicken and egg problem.

Employers want experience and skills. You can develop skills in a professional environment only anyway. No one who broke into the industry was a know it all and to expect it from freshers or new grads is lunacy. Someone needs to bet on you to deliver results.

2) There are tons of skilled and experienced people in the market anyway. They are even applying to entry level positions as well. How is someone with a bunch of personal projects supposed to compete with experience folks.  

With the advent of AI anyone can cook up a nice, cute project and there are templates available for many projects. They are not going to cut it anymore. They are a nice add on.

3) Connections >>> Skills.

Given that you are not a complete dumbfuck, you can pick up everything at a job and learn it as you go. You can build skill at work rather than having to do it all alone and make yourself attractive to employers. They care about professional work only.

Experience >> Connections >> Real(professional) Contributions >> Personal projects. to help in getting a job.

I am not saying it all doom and gloom. But that it is going to be an uphill battle. You need to grind extra hard than 5-10 years ago for lesser wages and a higher cost of living. You need to put in everything you have and more and you might have to see some dumb idiot get a job because his father is the friend of the CEO of the company.

[Bobby_2021]

Most people you take advice from broke into the industry pre-2021. Post 2021 market is a world apart.

[Con heo dien]

I'd say the market for developers is currently very good. In Western Europe alone there are literaly tens of thousands of IT-related employment vacancies that cannot be filled. 

The future is unsure though. AI currently assists developers with all the boring coding stuff, which is nice. It's likely though, that AI will make big steps in the fields of advanced coding, design, analysis etc. Which will result in growing amounts of (laid off) developers competing for a decreasing amount of jobs. There will still be jobs and there will be massive new opportunities, but it's questionable if that is the case for a beginning programmer.

[Bobby_2021]

 

30 minutes ago, Con heo dien said:

I'd say the market for developers is currently very good. In Western Europe alone there are literally tens of thousands of IT-related employment vacancies that cannot be filled. 

The future is unsure though. AI currently assists developers with all the boring coding stuff, which is nice. It's likely though, that AI will make big steps in the fields of advanced coding, design, analysis etc. Which will result in growing amounts of (laid off) developers competing for a decreasing number of jobs. There will still be jobs and there will be massive new opportunities, but it's questionable if that is the case for a beginning programmer.

Absolutely. AI will the amplify the output of the current developers that the difference from them and the newbies who do not have a base only widens. It is not worth it to get into Tech from now on.

I have been applying to tons of jobs with no hits lately that I had to learn cloud on top of the SWE experience I have. Can you link some details of the IT companies or job portals? The market here is wrecked. 

[Con heo dien]

1 hour ago, Bobby_2021 said:

I have been applying to tons of jobs with no hits lately that I had to learn cloud on top of the SWE experience I have. Can you link some details of the IT companies or job portals? The market here is wrecked. 

Actually I based my comment on newspaper articles and IT monitors. I am not looking for an IT job myself. I am not sure if I can help you, but I will send you a PM.

[Leo Gura]

8 hours ago, Bobby_2021 said:

1) You need to be given a platform to develop your skills. How can you improve your skills if you are not given a job to do and improve at it. This is the chicken and egg problem.

You can easily train up coding skills without work, by working on your own little projects. Those little projects then go into your protofolio and demostrate your skills to employers. This is the best way to get hired.

Edited January 4 by Leo Gura

[BlueOak]

Programming is a yearly thing. Its more about how current you are with whatever languages you are using. If you take a break of a couple of years, you'll know what I mean.

Sites like this are more important than age. 

https://www.codewars.com/

https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/the-10-most-popular-coding-challenge-websites-of-2016-fb8a5672d22f/

By that I mean ability and practice. I was a good coder once upon a time, people came to me to get them through their software engineering course.
I was nothing compared to some of these guys on these sites. You'll learn to see really elegant solutions that are worth real money in savings of time, memory, processing power etc to any company that employs you.

Make it a hobby to visit whichever you prefer once a week. Even while learning.

[Bobby_2021]

2 hours ago, Leo Gura said:

You can easily train up coding skills without work, by working on your own little projects. Those little projects then go into your protofolio and demostrate your skills to employers. This is the best way to get hired.

It's 2024. You give the screenshot of this website to any AI tool and it will spit out the code for you. And you can go a long way with barely knowing how things work to build small projects. Which is why they don't care too much about small projects and it is seen as a basic skill. Why would you struggle all day to code something that you can get using a prompt anyway. 

You can't use these to outsource your thinking in professional environments, because if something breaks, and it will, you have to clean up the mess. It is not much of an issue with small projects.

You need near professional experience. I have started to contribute to open source software. This is as close to professional experience as you could be. Contribute to a real code base that is actually used by millions of people. Now that is of some value especially since it gives you exposure to people in the industry who can see your work.

3 hours ago, Con heo dien said:

Actually I based my comment on newspaper articles and IT monitors. I am not looking for an IT job myself. I am not sure if I can help you, but I will send you a PM.

Sure. Thanks man. Appreciate it a lot.

Edited January 4 by Bobby_2021

[Leo Gura]

4 hours ago, Bobby_2021 said:

It's 2024. You give the screenshot of this website to any AI tool and it will spit out the code for you.

An AI tool cannot do the job of a serious programmer. Enough with the AI hype train.

Portfolios and projects will always matter.

Edited January 4 by Leo Gura

[Girzo]

4 hours ago, Bobby_2021 said:

It's 2024. You give the screenshot of this website to any AI tool and it will spit out the code for you.

AI spitting a web forum code, haha, a good joke.

There's a reason why most forums look similar, and often archaic as fuck. There's little web forum solutions because of how complex type of website it is.

AI right now has problems with solving problems at the complexity of high school algebra, and you would want it to write to write code and plan out all supplemental stuff for a system as complex as a web forum.