[captaincaveman]

Criminal record only a problem for the subset of businesses that care/check about that sort of thing, which is less than what others are saying (25 years experience in UK).

Over 60 and a junior programmer isn't easy, your salary expectations are possibly higher and your willingness to grind through problems is also probably lower, I know both of those would be the case for me, and mean no offence. So yes to be honest it will be a bit harder for you, however, its a job seekers market at present and with perseverance I don't doubt you'll find a job, and without that same grit you'd unlikely to last as professional engineer today anyways.

Most companies don't do all that leetcode stuff in UK, interviewing is still a pain though.

[gnu8]

> willingness to grind through problems is also probably lower

Maybe I misunderstand what you’re saying here but I don’t think this is fair. An older worker should know to put the problem down at 5 PM and walk away from it, but that doesn’t mean they’re unwilling to work on a problem they haven’t solved before.

At least, I hope some day when I’m an elderly ex convict that I will still be able and willing to solve new problems.

[captaincaveman]

In my experience (not 60 but I don't see it getting better), is when learning some arbitrary tech you have to bump your head on a lot of tedious things, there is so much to learn it takes a lot of effort to get to that eureka point. With age I am less inclined to dedicate hours to this, the outcome doesn't feel worth the effort anymore, the knowledge soon becomes redundant as the new shiny comes along. Perhaps this due to experience rather than age to be fair.

Also as a junior engineer, its not that the problem your trying to crack is likely to be some business problem, most likely some stupid bug in your code.