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Comment by chdir | Hacker News Reader

> learning to code when he was 63

> switching careers extended his neural plasticity considerably

I find this very interesting & uplifting. Would you be comfortable sharing more on what motivated him to switch careers at that age and your general observations throughout the process. I'm perhaps your age but I've experienced switching careers significantly is like hitting F5 in your life, or like a complete system re-install. Everything feels fresh & new. You feel energized to learn a lot of new concepts. However, it's usually very difficult to convince someone who's 60+ to learn to code. Usually people are intimidated by programming if they've only interacted with a browser for most of their lives.

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Well I started in computers when I was 15. My dad was very worried and upset when I quit my first job flipping hamburgers at Wendy's and started programming full time.

Over the years he grew tired of his job, he went into management and that was just worse. He said he missed the problem solving of the day to day mechanic job. My mom had went back to school at 40 to get a degree in art and was having a lot of fun with computer graphics and over the years my Dad would tease her about paying the bills.

One particularly hard day my Dad handed his keys to his boss and walked out of the shop, never to look back. He ran into a project to help his church with their headquarters website and he said "It can't be any harder than working on a 318". And off they went, from that one to the next, now my mom makes eReader magazines and my dad sits and bashes away at sites and debugs problems.

One time he tried to tell me how smart I was and I laughed, I told him I've watched him tear a car down to the studs and find one broken part and put it back together from memory. Never looking at a manual, reading diagrams or even pausing to guess where one of a thousand parts went. He's brilliant, he taught me to break problems down to single variables, test and iterate. Clearly he's way smarter than I am, I'm just trying to mimic him. :-)

>is like hitting F5 in your life

It starts your career in debug mode ?

F5 = refresh (browser)

"Switching careers" also implies that he found a job as a programmer. I imagine it's really difficult to convince someone to employ someone who is 60+ and just learned to code.

It depends, I've known of people to "break in" by offering to work the first week or two free, then negotiate. Generally you aren't going to work for a fortune 500 company as your first real job... but there's plenty of businesses that need someone to get work done, and can't afford market rates...

Beyond that, the self-starter is often a safer bet than a fresh college grad.

There's a lot of prejudice along this axis and it's mostly acceptable in SV. Fortunately it's not universal!

He is self-employed, all he had to do was hire himself. :-)

I've spent the bulk of my life self-employed and he realized it wasn't as scary as it looks from the outside.

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