[smt88]

You can, but it would require a lot of hard work at very low pay. My recommendation is to try to use your existing skillset for a tech company, and then try to transition internally. The right company may even provide free/before-tax tech education.

Some points to consider:

1. Your age is a big disadvantage. Ageism is pervasive in tech, especially for entry-level coders. Someone your age who had started at 22 would likely have been in a management role for ~10 years already.

2. It's very, very hard to get a comprehensive understanding of the work that most programmers do: web and/or aging enterprise applications.

Web is an enormous hairball with many layers of history, competing standards, frameworks, philosophies, and target environments.

I've been building web software for ~24 years, since I was literally a child. I started doing it professionally ~18 years ago. When I meet someone from a bootcamp, their understanding is probably 1% of what mine is, which is totally reasonable.

That said, I still regularly bump into aspects of programming and web technology that are completely foreign to me and would definitely be useful for me to understand. For example, I have essentially no experience with the HTML <canvas> element, which is a huge gap!

3. Programming is not something that most people enjoy as a career, even if they absolutely love it as a hobby. It can be tolerable to continually bang your head against the wall trying to figure something out if you care about the outcome. It is much, much less tolerable if the outcome is fixing some mostly-broken, legacy garbage for a client in a boring industry.

Keep in mind that this type of work (maintenance/drudgery) is often the most accessible and secure type of employment for starting programmers. It's definitely possible to get a job at a startup, but at your age, the austerity and gambling involved in startup life is potentially not acceptable.

[bmj]

1. Your age is a big disadvantage. Ageism is pervasive in tech, especially for entry-level coders. Someone your age who had started at 22 would likely have been in a management role for ~10 years already.

Ageism is pervasive in some corners of tech. I'm nearly 50, and in my R&D group, there are few developers under the age of 35. Few of the older developers are managers, either.

I think you are conflating age with experience. If the OP has enough skills for an entry level position, then I would not expect him to have anywhere near the same level of expertise as someone in the industry for nearly 20 years. If the OP wants to get into web development, then they should work to progress their skill set over time (which, by the way, is a reasonable expectation for any number of career paths).

[smt88]

> Ageism is pervasive in some corners of tech. I'm nearly 50, and in my R&D group, there are few developers under the age of 35. Few of the older developers are managers, either.

Of course there are exceptions, but they're rare. Your personal experience has no bearing on industry-wide data[1].

> I think you are conflating age with experience. If the OP has enough skills for an entry level position, then I would not expect him to have anywhere near the same level of expertise as someone in the industry for nearly 20 years.

You're putting words in my mouth. I said nothing about age and experience being the same thing. I'm saying that OP wants an entry-level job at middle age, and that's more difficult for many reasons (ageism being one of them).

> If the OP wants to get into web development, then they should work to progress their skill set over time

People are hired (or not hired) for many reasons, and only one of them is their skill set. I'm sure OP can acquire the necessary skills, but it can be painful and life-consuming, which a lot of people can't tolerate as well at 40 as they can at 22. A lot of people over 35 have mortgages, spouses, children, elderly parents, health conditions, and a variety of other responsibilities that are less common in younger people. Taking a grueling, low-paying job is not necessary feasible in those circumstances.

1. https://www.marketplace.org/shows/marketplace-tech/celebrati...

[bmj]

Your Market Place reference is about "the biggest tech companies." There is work outside of FAANG, and, in my experience, a fair bit of it. As you point out, the work isn't "sexy," but, truth be told, many of us don't do "sexy work" day in and day out.

You are also assuming that every entry level software development position is grueling and low paying. I understand that some companies treat younger employees are disposable (even my own employer, who hires younger/less experienced devs as operations support, which assumes lots of crappy work), but I don't think that's the case in every entry level position.

[WheelsAtLarge]

OP please take this advice under consideration. I see posts in HN over and over that express the idea that there is no ageism in tech because they see x number of techs that are over 50. Well, what they don't take into account is survivor bias. What they see are the exceptions not the large number of techs that had to move to other careers because they could not find a job in tech.

This post makes some very good points.