Learning to code at 56
medium.freecodecamp.com
medium.freecodecamp.com
For most, they're beaten, defeated. They decide this is all there is, and they're going to ride out their remaining years doing as little as possible other than wallowing in regret and yelling at kids to get off their damn lawn. It's sad and terrible. I can hardly bear to be around a lot of people who were so vital when they were young.
The others, though... they see the clock on the wall. They know that, at best, life is more than half over for them already. They have a limited amount of time. They're the ones ticking things off their bucket list. They understand their priorities. Now, you may not understand just how important it is to them to start a new business, or grow the perfect tomato, or travel through China, but they get it in a deep way, much deeper than most 20-somethings can imagine.
You really, really want to work with people like this if you can. They're brilliant.
a lot of people are saddled with obligations they never actually wanted. :(
peter pan syndrome means you never actually did anything with your life (positive or negative), not that you've been beaten down by it. how can you be beaten down by nothing?
Take a man who is somewhat wealthy in India and place him into San Francisco while conserving the living conditions - he will feel poor and inferior.
Or one of those guys who feel betrayed by the US government and hence voted for Trump - their living standard is most likely superior to that of a (very happy) king in ancient Egypt.
Today's 50 y/o men are influenced by what media communicates - and that is essentially a message conveying a hedonistic and materialistic lifestyle.
Those guys feel bad b/c they don't look as ripped as some Hollywood actor, their spouse not as hot as some chick on a magazine, they can't buy that car b/c their children are expensive etc.
Mature men and women consume less - and our society is built on consumption.
It gives you quite a broad view! At times it feels like standing on a mountain and seeing a vast landscape that you've crossed to get here -- and the mountain path ahead that leads to new heights.
There's also the joy of playing to type for the kids. So many times, they look at you as if you were some weird creature from a zoo. It's quite funny because you can get away with a lot. Hell, they don't know.
I have no doubt that skills and abilities decrease with age, but quite frankly, if you started out way ahead of the norm, by the time you hit your 50s and 60s you're still going to be on par or ahead of most of the population anyway.
So when a dear friend that's in their 20s or 30s asks me how I'm doing, I have quite a bit of fun describing some sort of horrible body issues -- until they realize I'm pulling their leg. And when I hit my 60s and 70s, if I last that long, you can be sure I'll be screwing with people who might think I have dementia. Screw 'em.
More fun times ahead.
Anyway, getting older tends to beat the alternatives.
I wonder if this will just be true for your generation. Because of computers and the programming industry only really taking off when you were already a few years into your career.
I can imagine that someone who started their career with programming early and just continues with it might just keep widening the gap between them and newcomers. Which might only change if there is another shakeup in our lifetimes.
My boss from my previous job is in his mid forties and extremely good technically. Intimidatingly so. I imagine I can become the same if I keep going at it the way I do now. I'm 31.
Being a good programmer has very little to do with following current trends in tools. Tools can be learned, especially if they don't require a fundamental shift in thinking.
I've lived through a project of watching lifer COBOL programmers involved in transitioning their systems to Java. Some simply couldn't learn Java at all, it was such an alien way of thinking. Some of them quit or retired, some became analysts for the project, because they understood the business that was encoded in those bazillion lines of twenty year old COBOL. Now I'm starting to see a generation of early Java legacy apps rewritten in Node or whatever. What goes around...
Whew. Still with me?
But besides the philosophical divide, people are sorted by circumstantial conditions, depending on what good/bad luck they've had, decisions they've made, and economic situations they've experienced. Life might force people to choose between supporting their family and pursuing their dreams, or their dreams might depend on capital or social resources that they have no idea how to acquire, or they might be saddled with some burdensome health condition.
It's not simply a matter of having failed to make a necessary psychological adjustment to take charge of one's own life. There are lots of people out there that are fully aware of their situation and poorly positioned to do anything about it.
Am 36 and on this road; can confirm.
At 40+ I acutely realize how little time is left and how little one can accomplish.
Every day I am reminded on how quickly time passes and hevel (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecclesiastes) of it all.
Again, I enjoy the little things: the random coffee shop with my SO, my kids' smile, the view from the bridge when I am biking and so on.
But starting anything with longer term implications seems so useless.
Silly example: let's say I decided to learn to sing. I am truly tone-deaf and hilariously bad at singing. Maybe after years of constant practice I could approach some sort of basic proficiency but it would achieved at a cost of forsaking so many other experiences.
We have so little time that I have trouble making longer plans.
None of us have 10,000 years that Bill Murray had in Groundhog Day.
And about the particular example of learning to sing, about 2 years of deliberate practice with a good teacher will get you where you want to be, so, not that big of a commitment in the grand scheme of things, I'd say.
- destroy the housing market... check - ruin higher education... check - destroy democracy ... check - bankrupt social security and medicare... in progress, but basically a foregone conclusion - destroy all jobs for the current generation ... check
I guess what I'm trying to say is, very complex systems can have emergent complex (even chaotic) behaviours not originally anticipated. Outputs no longer bear a recognisable relation to inputs. Or even simpler, never ascribe to malice[1] what is often the result of ignorance/incompetence.
[1] Though clearly, there are some malicious actors who are now exploiting the chaos and introducing perturbations to their own short advantage.
Especially our seasoned "best-agers"!! =)
This is kinda like objecting that Google blog posts are really ads for Google.
"News is something someone doesn't want you to learn about. All else is propaganda."
I qualified my comment by adding this . :)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rGAyQAkXajg
So, there was no objection.
I do think we have to be realistic about the issue that many people who learned and performed complex intellectual skills in their 20s/30s no longer perform this kind of ability to pivot in their 50s/60s; to learn a new craft that depends on learning a lot of new information/skills.
Of course this doesn't mean that all people in their 50s/60s are like this. Like this post illustrates.
I have a much wider framework of accumulated knowledge than I did 20 years ago, and leveraging that, I can see how wider parts of systems interrelate with a clarity that I never came close to touching in my youth.
Perhaps this too will fade in another 20 years, but so far I'm actually enjoying having a middle-aged mind. I can accomplish so much more than I could before.
One advantage of being older is I tend to have a more seasoned perspective of what's important and whats not important in the long run.
So for me, reliability, scalability, and ease of use are more important than whether a language supports tail recursion and dynamic typing.
The difference between you and a 20 year old might be measurable, but negligible, when it comes to pure learning. IE you're both learning a task, subject, skill neither of you has knowledge or experience about.
Clearly experience and knowledge has great value, and coupled with any normal sort of learning ability is a solid combination that is superior to increased learning alone.
After all small children can learn amazingly fast compared to adults. But without knowledge and experience to see how to use what they learn or how to combine it to get new ideas they're at a disadvantage.
I mean as a software developer at 35 I know a lot more than I did at 20. I was able to learn pretty quick back then, starting from scratch. I can learn pretty quick now. But with the advantage of knowledge and experience, I'm really only learning a couple of new things at a time to add to an already immense store of knowledge, so yeah it's easy. One new thing and I can see right where it fits into my existing knowledge. It's kind of a different ballgame now compared to when I was 20 when I was still getting a handle on the basics.
— Well, I can’t just call you “man”.
(Sorry.)
I have learned what I can learn and how to learn. In college I could retain a lot for a little time period. Today my short term memory for syntax is not so good. In the book dyslexic advantage[1] they state that dyslexic's short term memory is not as good as the general population but our conceptual memory / ability to visualize is heightened. I am dyslexic and find this to be true. So I learn concepts and thank google every day for syntax.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Dyslexic-Advantage-Unlocking-Hidden-P...
Also Baeocystin I like your HN handle.
Edit: Typo Added link to dyslexic advantage
I think the 'learning how to learn' skill is possibly the most important one a person can possess, but by its very nature, it isn't something that comes without long practice. I know I can think of how I approached study in my late teens/early 20's with a shiver at my poor choices.
I do IT work for small business owners. One of the things that I've noticed over the years is that the number of successful small businesses that are run by dyslexics is much higher than you would expect from the %/population numbers. And it is clear to me that it is their ability to conceptualize what the business needs, visualize how to move forward, and (perhaps most importantly) comfort in delegating tasks that plays a large role in their success.
Which works well for me, too. I may not be dyslexic, but I quite enjoy their work style.
Edit: typo
But you could be wrong. Can you really accurately track how well you learn on a day to day basis over a lifetime? Doubtful. Even if you could really only learn 85% as well as you did when you were 20 it would be a measurable difference objectively. But subjectively that decline would be so minimal from one day to the next you would have a hard time noticing the decline. And since you still feel sharp at 43, and you felt sharp at 20, well nothing has changed, even though it clearly has.
Also some people just lie to themselves about how capable they (still) are. If you've ever dealt with an aging relative who was losing their vision but resistant to giving up driving. Or in the beginning stages of dementia but was in denial about it. Human beings will generally do anything to avoid admitting declining abilities of any sort. Or they will temper an admission with a but of some sort. It's just part of the experience.
You bring up a point about experience. Knowledge and experience have value too, obviously. After all young children can learn faster than adults period, but they don't know anything yet, and that's a disadvantage. And being able to learn a little bit better isn't so attractive that you'd be willing to give up all your accumulated experience. I wouldn't either.
But I am sure I can share that experience with a 20 something with no knowledge about software development and they'll pick it up much faster than my 60 something mother with no knowledge and software development. And that's where the learning bit comes in. And learning one more thing in a subject you're already an expert in, isn't really a tall order. Starting from scratch, like most children or young adults have to do is a greater feat and put on the same playing field, in a subject where you really have no experience or expertise, you might find the competition a little stiffer than you remember it being than when you were a kid. Still at 43 you're still young, but at 53? 63? 73? At some point there will probably be some obvious differences in your abilities that just become more stark as you age, even if you fare amazingly well against your peers in the same age group.
Research that seems to support that people who spend a lot of energy on learning and thinking and doing mentally demanding activities do better cognitively in their old age. I hope it's true, and specifically I hope it's true in my case.
If age hasn't proven to be an impediment for learning yet I just wouldn't worry about it. And even if things get tougher to learn as you get older it's not boolean, you can still learn things if you put the effort in, if you still want to learn it. Being less capable != incapable. This isn't a scenario where any position other than #1 is tied with last place, or first place loser, or any other sort of trope you want.
I can honestly say that I have an easier time learning anything now than when I was in my 20's. Any subject, whether it's new to me or not.
The only deficit I've noticed is that an unexpected distraction affects me more, and it takes me a little longer to get back in to the groove. Whether this is because of my brain, or simply because the things that distract me (I heard a thump, did my Dad fall down? Do I need to call an ambulance?) are more serious than what distracted me in college, I cannot say. Probably both.
The only thing I will say in my defense is that I was a caregiver while my Mother descended through the hell that is Alzheimer's; I am intimately familiar with failure modes of the brain.
I also had my Dad move in with me after my Mom passed. He is mentally competent, but very stubborn about his hearing and other deficits.
This causes a tremendous amount of frustration on my part, and I have promised myself to never lie to myself about my changing abilities, no matter what.
Can I do so? Hopefully. Clearly I can't guarantee such a thing, but I'm used to having to work around health issues. I'm asthmatic, and have pretty severe IBS, which is an awful thing I wish on no one. If I am grateful for one aspect of it, it has taught me to respect my physical abilities and limits, no matter what they are, or what I wish them to be.
A useful skill, I think.
New tech is frequently old concepts applied in a new way. Once you recognize those core concepts and can find older analogies, you're way ahead. In the end it's a net gain.
I find it pretty easy to learn things, just not when I'm interrupted by the kids. There's no reason why at 36 I can't listen to lectures about philosophy or read a bit about some new tech. What's hard is getting focused time to do a proper project, because my time outside of work hours is taken up by parenting.
There are many reasons to challenge the assumption that it's difficult for older people to learn to code:
* It's may not be valid to extrapolate from more general neuroplasticity findings to programming
* It may be that changes in neuroplasticity affect the effectiveness of different modalities of learning, so that it's not so much that it's harder for older people to learn coding, but that they might need to use different strategies to learn --- for instance, 20 year olds might be able to get away with rote memorization as a crutch, and older adults might need to use more authentic learning strategies
* It's also possible that for large numbers of adults, learning to code is easier, because their brains have been trained through work they've done throughout their careers
* It's also the case that there isn't one "programming", but rather a whole constellation of different skills, some of which reward an orientation towards organization and careful planning, some of which reward tenacity, some of which reward creative and intuitive thinking, some of which reward numeracy, and so on
We should be very careful about generalizing, because one thing we do know is that human brains have incredibly powerful cognitive biases that are working constantly to fill in the blanks in our knowledge --- particularly about our models of the behavior and capabilities of other humans --- and much of what it fills in is accurate only up to the point where it allows us to effectively collect berries and hunt gazelles and stuff.
For whatever it's worth: I'm 40, not 50, but the tempo at which I've been learning new things is accelerating, not decelerating: I work in more languages now, I work in more problem domains (for instance, I never used to do any front-end work), and in particular my math --- which has always been awful --- has been improving by leaps and bounds. Maybe things will suddenly suck for me when I turn 50, but the current trends are not worrying me.
With coding, a single good programming book for about 30$ can get you a long way...
I would choose python, ruby(or crystal), c++, c#, etc.. and stay away from the browser, unless you have a very good reason to write for that.
I know it is a bet, I'm betting in React and if in two years it is old news, I will have to move on. But until then, I am employable.
I am very early in my learning path (started from scracth last November), but I have a very clear impression that it is easier to learn Javascript than any of the languages you mentioned.
Would you care to elaborate more your point? It would help me a lot.
thanks!
If you use one of those other languages with the web, people are going to want you to use Javascript anyhow. So you have to learn both, unless you only do very, very basic things.
If you use one of those languages without doing web-stuff... Ugh. Maybe some phone apps line Swift or Java might be do-able, but I dunno about productivity for a long time.
On the other hand, it's not that hard to get good enough with Javascript to build some nice usable websites and get paid. IMO it's by far the shortest path to a programming career, and that will help get good enough to learn other languages and spread out while earning income.
In my wife's case, a large tech company hired her as a junior developer, and she's been doing great. In an industry where it is fairly common for employees to leave after two or three years (if not sooner), I don't think any employer is overly concerned that they'll only get a handful of years out of an employee. They'll most likely get less than that out of a 20-year-old.
It helps me with the eye strain. Also I am starting to find myself returning to good ole paperback books for reading. Try printing out some code bases when ever you start getting more advanced you can actually learn a lot from studying code.
I'm generally OK with spec swapping, but I'm tempted to replace my primary glasses with bifocal/trifocal/progressives which in theory should end the swapping. I'm just not so sure I'd like tilting my head in order to change focus. :-/
IIRC, computer glasses have a yellowish-amber tint to them, and possibly some coatings.
Like you, I got single vision glasses for computer use, but they don't have the tinting/coatings that computer glasses do.
I run a pair of 4K 27" monitors at 100% scaling (people who see my setup think I'm crazy), but I had my optometrist get me set up for a reading distance of 21" to 27" -- the closest and furthest points of my monitors -- for my glasses. My single vision prescription includes distance + adjustment for presbyopia, so it's great.
You measure your working distance at your desk, take the number with you to the optometrist, and they'll dial-in a prescription that works best for that distance.
Anti-glare coating helps too.
Seems smart and social enough to get a good job in development.
And on top of that he is quite good at writing. Maybe that's something - in combination with programming skills - he could focus on, career-wise...
Most of those fields seem pretty advanced (can't speak for DSP or trading, but realtime and embedded software both seem fairly intimidating to me). Do you feel that someone totally green to software would be able to ramp up in the time advertised by the average bootcamp (2-3 months)?
Some of your other examples, like lawyers and dentists, however do seem artificial. There is no legal option to hire someone without credentials (at least in the jurisdictions I am close to), even when the buyer understands the risks and poses no external risk to others.
I don't know about this heavy machinery thing. As a farmer, all I need to drive my 30,000 lbs. (when dry) combine down the road is a standard automobile license, and nothing at all once I'm off the public roads. Nobody thinks twice about that. Even more curiously, I do not need any credentials to produce food that people willingly stick into their mouth! You'd think that would be orders of magnitude more worrisome than many of the other careers you pointed out – especially given the difficulty of tracing food origins as a consumer – yet nobody bats an eye.
Computer credentials are also a for-profit business model, rather than an organized body that ensures a certain degree of competency is met. For example, being a board certified physician requires a lot more than simply passing a bubble test, which is what a lot of credentials in the computer industry consist of.
I think credentialing does demonstrate a certain degree of competency, but it also does create an artificial scarcity, since many, many, many people out there have the same skills, or better, but just don't feel the need to obtain credentials.
(C.N.E. = Certified Novell Engineer, but who would know that nowadays, or care?)
1. Credentials Legally Required: Lawyers, Doctors, etc.
Credentials and accredited schooling are required in these disciplines because they involve specialized knowledge AND because misuse or malpractice can seriously hurt people. Even then, there's plenty of cartel-like behavior going on. For example, the U.S. system of accrediting lawyers (three years of graduate school plus bar exam) is almost certainly overkill.
2. Specialized Technical Skills: Welders, Trades
Welding, fabricating, etc. require specialized skills and knowledge. These skills are taught in trade schools and through apprenticeships, not four-year colleges. The credentials are usually not LEGALLY required to work in the area - you can hire a welder who doesn't have one - but in practice, you want to hire people with the credentials because they probably know what they're doing.
3. Non-Technical Skills: Teachers, Social Workers
Teachers, child services workers, etc. Here I think the argument for credentials is the weakest. Why do we NEED accredited teachers? For centuries we've had teachers who never had one, and even now, many private schools don't require credentials. In fact, some of the best teachers I had in school never had teaching degrees - they had degrees and experience in the relevant field (say, chemistry) and came to teach. In fact, in some of these fields, the credentials are attempts to form bars to entry, thus protecting the existing members of the profession - just why do we need school + certificates for hair dressers?
So where does software engineering fall? I think the second category is where it belongs, and bootcamps are attempts to create the kind of technical training / apprenticeship that exists in the trades. That doesn't mean official CS degrees are worthless - far from it - but it also means that we don't need any bars to entry for people who decided to learn coding in another way.
Because there's a need, and that need is vital.
For example, a dentist can take a six-week course on breast augmentations, and then perform boob jobs on the side. There are many "cosmetic surgeons" out there who are dentists, ENTs, and general practitioners, who have no formal training in plastic surgery. That's why it is important to look for a board certified plastic surgeon, rather than a board certified dentist who does plastic surgery.
Collaboration in engineering is hard enough without having to deal with someone that forces a git push, is comically overconfident in their solutions, or exhibits any number of traits I've found to be common from people coming from the "learn a trade in a hurry" programs.
I'm not sure that's true, other than the obvious issue of supply vs. demand, where wages are concerned. As for quality, I've worked with college-trained programmers who wrote awful code, and I've worked with self-taught programmers who wrote amazing code. Some of the best programmers I've ever worked with were self-taught.
I never attended a bootcamp, but I have mentored for Rails Girls, Girl Develop It, and a bootcamp or two. In my experience, bootcamps are good places to learn how to write certain types of code. They don't help much in the way of theory, algorithms, or other low-level details, but for teaching people how to write typical business applications, they are a pretty good place to start, I think.
I also think bootcamps are good at weeding out those with no aptitude or desire for programming. My wife attended a bootcamp, and there were two types of people who attended with her. Those who took the task seriously, studied the materials, read the books, and practiced, practiced, practiced, and those who thought that paying the $5,000 to $10,000 was all the effort they had to apply, and that someone else would magically load their minds with the requisite information, once they had achieved that monetary apex. The first types got jobs. The latter types did not.
In my experience, a lot of it came down to how people approached the program. It was either:
"I have n weeks to learn as much as I can in order to catch up and be competitive with people with formal education and more experience"
or
"In n weeks I will have the skills needed to get a job in this field"
Most of the complaining about the program came from the 2nd group. People in the 1st group got better jobs, faster.
I wonder what my older relatives and acquaintances would've want to learn, or work with, without the chains of economical reality.
He's never learned to type, imagine coding with hunt-and-peck. Characters like ()[]. he had no idea where to find. He didn't have much understanding of file systems; so things like saving and renaming were tricky.
Anyway, he was pretty thrilled with getting a "hello world" example and one that asks your name and prints out a greeting.
I envy your father. It will be fun watching him have "a-ha" moments as the pieces start to fit together.
https://softwareengineeringdaily.com/2015/10/28/free-code-ca...
The image on the article is this one:
https://i2.wp.com/tobecomeateacher.org/wp-content/uploads/20...
"Stock photo" by Jake Barford: https://unsplash.com/@jakebarford
The photo of Mr. Vaughn, (from his "profile"):
https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/fit/c/100/100/1*Lu4bKAqf2Sxm...
as the image referencing a testimonial "Jordan Blum, EIC, The Bookends Review" whose looks are also slightly different:
http://thebookendsreview.com/about-us/
As a rule of thumb, when it looks too good to be true, it isn't. ;)
Good find though. This is really fishy.
The author clearly uses a photo of what is ostensibly themselves as their profile pic. Nothing in the article indicates "this is me."
More important: there is little if anything to be gained by this deception. The article includes self promotion, including "Connect with me on twitter" in the author byline. But this is IMO a par for the course quid-pro-quo in nearly every blog article ever written.
"I’m learning to code at 56. Here’s an epic beat-down of my critical inner self."
and just after the title you put an image of a good looking fiftyish guy looking at the reader straight in the eyes, and right after it you repeat:
"I’m 56 years old and learning to code.".
Maybe it is not "intended" or done in any way in "bad faith", still it does seem like saying, "here I am, at 56, look at me".
Maybe ;):
But it can't be astroturfing, which has a specific meaning about misrepresenting the source of the support.
The stock image is shady, but that's more of a Medium-style-blogpost thing (edit: see below) -- people routinely add stock images in obviously-not-fair-use ways, without permission; the negotiation article used a ton of stills from Mad Men (presumably before they got a nasty letter and took them down).
[1] This one: https://medium.freecodecamp.com/how-not-to-bomb-your-offer-n...
Edit: Didn't check that url -- n/m, you're right, it's something FCC seems to do a lot, not a Medium-thing.
This makes things easier, not more difficult.
If you don't get upvoted quickly, you'll get missed. Several weeks ago, 3 of 4 stories that i submitted within two days were completely passed over, only to be resubmitted by other people, which ended up on the front page. One story was even #1 for several hours.
Here it often seems quite random what does get picked up.