So, I will start by saying “Yes, you can do it. It’s not too late and programming is fun and fulfilling”.

However! One thing my experience has taught me in seeing people approach and bounce off programming is: programming is a fail-til-you-get-it type of endeavour. Your first several years will be littered with broken code, because there are a thousand little things you have to bump up against before you unlock one more puzzle piece.

So! If you go for it, persevere! You aren’t a bad programmer, or a slow learner, because you can’t get your code to work. Every single one of us ran into the same issue, and we just had to push through, learn to Google, and try again until it sorta-kinda works. You in 10 years will be embarrassed by what you write in your first years

It’s never too late to start programming. To get a job though you need to show you can get things done. Even if you’re going for junior roles, you’ll benefit from being able to include links to some finished projects on your CV. For most basic entry level it is far far far better to have something that was finished, and works, but isn’t perfect rather than nothing at all.

Don’t put too much trust in so called “certificates” from these schools. A company will, again, be more interested to see what you can do than what pieces of paper you’ve earned. Having said that some courses are good (some are not). Only sink money into it if you have scrutinised the reviews and seen good words about them on here or Reddit or other popular program discussion places. Don’t go off their own testimonials.

If you were willing to be relaxed on salary (if the alternative is indeed homelessness) then you ought to be able to get your toe in the door somewhere. After that don’t feel too loyal, do what you need to, but study and build study and build in your own time and keep yourself out there open to job #2.

Have a go on your free time and see if you like it. There is an absolute ton of free learning material online. You don’t need to pay anyone.

Most programming jobs (e.g. making web sites) are easy enough for the average person to do, but I think most people would find programming far too tedious and boring to learn.

It’s like law - there’s nothing particularly difficult about it but most people find it incredibly mind numbing to read legal documents.

So I would have a go in your free time first to make sure it is something you could do.

We just hired a former musician who spent his 20s-30s in a band, and his 40s playing in dive bars.

He took a 2 year bootcamp and he’s currently one of my juniors in his 50s. He told me the salary at the junior level was 2x more than he ever made.

Maybe he’s lucky. But if you’re obsessed with programming, you’ll make it. It’s a tough industry right now. But in two years, who knows? Maybe they’ll be a hiring spree again.

When I was in uni for computer science we had a few older people at the time. I myself went a little older at 21 instead of 18 but there were others, notably one even at 50-ish changing careers from nursing to computer science. I’m pretty sure they’re doing pretty good now. If you finish with knowing your stuff, employers aren’t going to care that much about your age.

Schooling for programming isn’t super necessary. Programming, at it’s core, is not super difficult. It’s effectively learning how to structure fundamental logic in a way to do what you want and then figure how to do that with the programming language you are using. There are various free resources online to get started.

Once you’ve learned some fundamentals, you can start some random practice project and figure out how to expand it to challenge yourself and learn from practice.

A lot of programming is also experience driven. As you code, you learn better approaches, new capabilities within your programming language, best practices, etc. Looking back at code from when I was first starting, I often find multiple potential improvements in the way I did it at the time.

I did a “game design” school when I was younger, but couldn’t get a job as a programmer. Worked for a laboratory for a little over a year, and then went back to school to get a software engineering degree. I was 28 when I went into it, worked with “youngsters” of 18 years and older. It was completely fine.

I’m now 50k in debt, but I’m also making twice as much as I did with my minimally paying job at the laboratory. It’s going to be a boon in the long run, IMO.

Then, luck should be taken into account. Once you are done with your degree, perhaps the market will have recovered a bit, because I’m hearing a lot of negative feedback lately.

edit: If you’re not sure, you can take a peek at this graph of free MIT YouTube courses. Choose something interesting on the right, then figure out where to start on the left to get to your chosen point. Each course can easily take about 100 hours, which sounds a lot, but if you do them you can take that knowledge and more easily extrapolate information in the future.

I’m in my late 30’s and I’m a junior dev, having been in the role for just over a year. If you are persistent you can do it. From my experience it has been a hard and at times frustrating job simply because there is so much I don’t know, but that comes with the reward of the eureka moment, where when something works it is one of the best feelings.

Now in terms of doing a school, if it’s a scheme where you pay for the training and they say they’ll get you a job at the end, please be cautious. I have a few friends that went down this route and they say they were the lucky ones to land jobs, but in their groups everyone else was left out in the cold at the end.

This was just my process but I did the Java MOOC course that taught me enough to get going, I was doing this at the same time as working in IT. It’s completely free. For frontend learning I’ve been using Scrimba which has free content but also a paid for subscription, it has been alright and the way they merge the recordings with the IDE is good and the free content feels more substantial than what you’d get with Codecademy.

I’m still just a noob at all of this, and there is so much I don’t know but I’m happy to try and answer any questions you have.

There will always be a need for talented systems engineers with emphasis on security. Programming in general is a good thing to learn anyways but understanding systems, how they work, and how they communicate is equally as important. There’s a lot of manpower needed for information security right now.

What you guys think how AI influences the progress of programming. In two years the profession will look a lot different than today. I’m a designer and even today I’m pretty much able to make apps for myself practically without coding. This will only get simpler with complex apps. I’m not saying they are coded well, but they work. In two years, in less, probably in a few months there will be swarms of ai agents programming the same thing. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying we won’t need you, the experienced programmers, but how much jobs will there be for new people?

And I know there is a lot of ai hate on lemmy so please spare me with that.

Programming is a great way to make money, even remotely, but it’s very difficult. If you’re interested and up for the challenge, going to school for programming (computer science) will help a lot in the future.

What country are you from?

Why not getting a job with flexible hours or even something in shifts. This will get you paid rather well and if haven’t got a wife or kids for the moment use your spare time to study.

I’ve known a security guard who only worked nights, very well payed. As nights are call he used it to study.

Many possibilities all depends on your willingness and personal situation. You do not always have to throw money against something to succeed.

Like mentioned in previous posts. You really need the obsession to become great and that will take some years. Do kot expect the big $$ in the beginning.

Absolutely! At 29, you’re still young, and learning programming can open up many career opportunities. The tech industry values skills more than age, so a degree (or even strong skills from self-learning) can definitely help you build a stable future. Go for it!