I do agree that I wouldn't advise someone to start a career with programming if they were 30's and 40's. But yet again everything is doable.
But for a 15y/o learning some programming stuff... for him programming can be a career. Don't forget we have so many new stuff coming out everyday that older programmers if they exist and they haven't become project managers wouldn't really go into.
Also when you mentioned Wordpress because he has knowledge of HTML and CSS... well he had* prolly. Atm I would say that CSS is a very complicated and delicate thing that pays well to people that own that field. With mobile and tablets you need to know how to write responsive code. CSS has move from when it was just static text.
To the Original poster: I can't really think of anyone around my circle which includes most of the UK's leading Tech Companies and a lot in San Fran, that would go off and hire a 30-40 years old person that has some experience in programming but he is not actually a programmer. They can start as junior developers but again the salary will be low and the competition to get in that field... plus people that are hiring for junior developers would like to see a youngster that can learn and become a senior after few years, I don't think they will go with someone older than 25 unless they are looking for a frontend developer passing it as a junior developer role.
My advise to them is maybe to start off their own little thing maybe a webproject or a mobile app and try to find investors?
On one of the comments you replied that one of the guys is from Vienna(Austria) I thought that Austria has a very good economy atm. I get why the other guy from Spain has trouble but Switzerland and Austria are on top of EU atm.