Over 30? TOO LATE To Become A Developer! ... Or Is It?

if you're trying to become a software engineer these days it's becoming incredibly difficult there's Fierce competition there's AI we have Devon coming to take over all of our jobs and let's face it if you're getting older if you're in your 30s you're basically cooked hi my name is Nick centino and I'm a principal software engineering manager at Microsoft and no I don't actually think that you're cooked if you are someone that's a little bit older than maybe the average person that's trying to graduate from college or university and get into the software engineering space but I wanted to make this video to talk to you about that we're going to jump over to social media in just a moment to check out some responses to this question that I posted on the internet but before I do that just a quick reminder to check out that pin comment from my courses on dome train and to subscribe to my newsletter okay so this all stemmed from a Reddit thread and I was responding to someone who posted this question that was essentially saying something along the lines of I'm almost 30 and want to start programming is it too late and I've seen variations of this kind of thing come up repeatedly on different platforms and I think there's a lot of people wondering this and I think that the honest answer from my perspective is that there's always an opportunity to get into software engineering and it's not just software engineering there's many careers that you can do this especially if it's just going to be a skill and it's not necessarily something that your body is going to have to rely on like if you wanted to become a professional basketball player when you were 60 it's probably going to be a little bit more difficult but for something like software engineering I think that there is still a lot of potential even as you are getting older and I know that a lot of people will disagree with with this but I wanted to share my perspective with you in case you're someone that's thinking about career switching or you're just thinking about getting into software engineering a little bit later than say some of the other people that you're familiar with now to start things off I think one of the most difficult things when we're thinking about this kind of thing is that you have comparison you are going to be comparing yourself to other people that might have started programming when they were born right they came out of the womb and they were holding a keyboard and mouse and they were programming at the terminal and like you're comparing yourself to these people that have been doing this kind of thing for a very long time and you might be surprised but this isn't the way that everyone gets into software development in fact I do have a podcast it's the dev leader podcast I'll put a link to that above here so you can check that out but in my podcast every single guest that I have come on I have them talk about their developer Journey before we get started in the conversation and that's to help show you that everyone comes from a different Walk of Life there are some people yes that started super early they were kids and they got exposed to computers early and they were very interested there are other people that did career switches way later than other people and they've been very successful in software development there's going to be people that have all sorts of different backgrounds and I think that it's a very important reminder for you that not everyone knows that they want to be a software engineer right when they're born the other thing that I want to mention is that if you are doing this kind of comparison you might say well Nick that's kind of stupid because those people that got a super early start they have a way bigger Advantage they had all of this time to skill up and be learning about programming they knew their algorithms and data structures when they were 7 years old it's going to be impossible for me to compete and while that might be true that they have an advantage on some of the technical things they might have gotten started earlier and they've had more practice that doesn't mean that you aren't going to be able to get a job and it doesn't mean that you don't have other skills that can make you Superior in different ways again to shout out the podcast one of the things that I love having my guests talk about is their different backgrounds one of the more recent guests I had on her name is Rita and she was sharing how she was actually an actress and worked in theater for 8 years before becoming a software engineer in that episode we got to see how a lot of her experiences doing improv and other things actually carry over into software engineering and making her very curious and making her eager to tackle challenging problems there are other people that got exposed to working with customers and clients or maybe they have to work with different types of roles and backgrounds at the job that they've been at and that gives them a huge Advantage for having a lot more sof skills and things like that that will help them as they become more senior as a software developer one more thing that I want to share with you is at this point in time in my career I've been an engineering manager for about 12 years and I wrote in this post when I was responding to this question that there are a handful of things that are a generalization that I look for when I'm hiring people you might find it interesting but none of them have anything to do with your age in fact the thing that I'm most interested in is your eagerness to learn things this is going to be hands down one of the most beneficial things that I've seen in soft engineering because we're constantly faced with new difficult challenges that we have to learn about and a close second to that is your ability to problem solve right because you are going to be solving all sorts of different types of problems yes a lot of the time writing code to solve these types of problems is going to be what you're doing but that might mean that you're not even writing code sometimes you might be debugging it you might be having to do all sorts of other things that don't involve any code at all and you're still solving engineering problems the other thing that's rate in my list there is your ability to communicate and collaborate because you are going to be working together with other people these are the three main things that I'm personally looking for when hiring software Engineers yes if you've had a lot of experience building really cool things that's awesome but there are going to be other people that don't quite have that same type of experience but they might have these other skills or traits that are really going to help them be successful software Engineers so far yes this is just my opinion I get that I understand you don't have to believe me if you don't want to but I figured it would be valuable to see some other people that responded to this because it might help you understand that there are people out there that did switch careers a little bit later than the average person might expect and those people have been successful as software developers so let's check out some of the responses this is just a brief Interruption to remind you that I do have courses available on dome train focused on C so whether you're interested in getting started in C looking for a little bit more of an intermediate course focus on object-oriented programming and some async programming or are you just looking to update your refactoring skills and see some examples that we can walk through together you can go ahead and check them out by visiting the links in the description and the comment below thanks and back to the video we'll start things off with Steve Miller here on LinkedIn was saying that he got started when he was 33 years old so yeah by some people's standards that might be significantly later right if you're going into college or university and that's the typical path that you're thinking about you might be like 16 to 19 years old that kind of time frame and maybe you're seeing that someone at 33 that's you know that's almost twice the age but still Steve has been successful at software development I know Chris Flannery here from Tik Tok and Linkedin he's actually a successful content creator I really like Chris's perspective here because the original person was talking about being 30 years old so he's saying you know in 5 years you'll be 35 so would you rather that at that point you still don't know how to program or would you rather be 35 and at least made some progress on it so I think that's a really good way to look at things there's another saying that something along the lines of like the best day to start was yesterday and probably I mean and soon as you were born right but the second best time to start is now or maybe tomorrow but you get the idea eugin here was saying that they tried to start programming when they were 19 but actually had difficulty being able to do it right and they said that when they were 29 they tried again and they got their first job on their 30th birthday so there's someone perfect example of getting into being a software developer at 30 years old Charles here is also agreeing that there are these other learned skills that you can take with you and bring into being a successful software developer so I app appreciated that comment and I've talked with Rob a whole bunch here from LinkedIn and he was saying that at 28 he got started so 30 is definitely not too late Wendy also agrees with that that 30 is a young age depending on your perspective again if you were someone that is younger you might be thinking oh 30 you must be an old person which is going to make me ancient at this point and uh I mean yeah your perspective on this is going to change as you get older as well so uh Muhammad Wasim he doesn't believe me that I'm 30 because I'm not I'm a little bit older than that now but um we scroll down a little bit lower we can see feder Rico I finally started University at 28 after 2 years of self-learning so this is kind of interesting right got started self-learning he would have been 26 at the time so again that's later than most people start University or college and then he went to University after 2 years of self-learning so very interesting but again that's close to that 30-year Mark Alexander Potts here was saying that he remembers classmates being over the age of 30 right so a bunch of them and that's interesting because as he said didn't hurt that many so it's you're doing this comparison thing if you're seeing these other people that are younger and thinking that you're not able to do it just because they're younger than you but at this point I wanted to jump over to Twitter because there were two individuals in particular that I wanted to call out because I really appreciated their responses and I think that they're really powerful and trying to help shape up this age thing we're going to start off with Dan here Dan is code wrinkles on YouTube and I really appreciate Dan he's been very supportive in my content creation Journey Dan actually gave my channel a shout out when I was I think only around 300 subscribers last year and he literally doubled my subscriber count from mentioning me in one video so that was super cool I've always appreciated his responses and engagement on social media because he's very insightful and we always have really constructive conversations but Dan mentions that he started when he was 29 years old now if I open up Dan's profile here let's go check him out Dan is a speaker Dan goes around and he speaks about software development he's a successful content creator he's been a successful software engineer and I think that it's really important to mention people like Dan because you might see him on social media you might say wow like this guy's been successful at doing this and guess what he didn't start when he was 7 years old he didn't he wasn't born knowing oh I'm going to be a programmer Dan got started when he was 29 well let's go back let's go look at one more person there's Karen Payne MVP right I started at 33 and Ed her first full-time job as a software developer at 35 now some people don't know Karen but Karen is also a successful software developer and I wanted to call out this thing right here Microsoft mvp1 11 times of being a Microsoft MVP as a software developer she got started when she was 35 for her first full-time software development job Karen also posts a ton of very informative information online so she's great to read about especially if you're a net developer but again she's another example of someone who's been successful starting later than you might expect but if you're still not convinced and you're thinking Nick sure I get it those are examples of people that have had success with it but they weren't around when there was all this Ai and AI is going to take all of our jobs I mean yeah you might be right we might not have any software development jobs in 5 years I really don't think that's going to be the case and you have the option you could sit and do nothing and never be a software engineer or you can get started right now I think that there are enough barriers of people trying to hold themselves back from trying to be a software developer whether it's that you don't understand certain Concepts you might be thinking that you're too old or you're not good at math so you shouldn't even give it a shot I think that's all just stuff that we're inventing in our heads that hold ourselves back so there are tons of people that I talk with regularly on LinkedIn and other social media platforms all going through this right now where they're trying to get into software engineering whether they are someone coming out of college someone that's coming out of high school trying to go to college or other people career switching later in their life they're all trying to do this and I think that every single one of them that just sticks it through and they keep trying they're going to be very successful in their careers no I don't think that if you're 30 years old and if you're trying to get into software engineering that it's too late for you there are plenty of examples that I just shared with you of people that have done this successfully but I'm sure people would love to hear it if you switched over to software engineering later in life from a different career let's hear it in the comments it would be awesome for other people to hear and see your experiences thanks and I'll see you next time