I know someone who was in their 40s. Never had a software development job in their life, but worked in tech in a side-verticle.
When he lost his job, he looked up popular programming languages and picked one up and built a small app for a resume. Then he studied interview questions around that tech stack, not just the answers, but took the time to learn "why" each answer was what it was.
He ended up getting hired as a senior developer. The crazy thing is, he kept up that work ethic and constantly studied everything. He would drill me with questions spending his evenings researching how to solve his JIRA tickets for the next day. And although his code was likely not super great - it was accepted as production ready AND he got promoted to engineering manager within a year and has continued to grow in software development.
The interesting point about modern software development is:
If you are focused on the more hyped stacks (Typescript, Node, GoLang, Rust, Serverless, NoSQL, Mobile development, etc...), you will find that they are changing rapidly. So much so that EVERYONE has to constantly learn. As long as you are dedicated to learning, it is possible to quickly rank up.
Soft skills and management skills are in desperate need in software development. If you can lead people or you can communicate with a client in a professional way - there are great opportunities. I'm sorry to say that I've personally interviewed so many engineers over the years who clearly don't link appearance, hygene and affect with success. When you can bridge tech with sales and management, you'll get your VP and CTO's attention way faster.
We keep building the same thing over and over. Literally. I can go into why I think that, but the point is that almost every "new" hyped library in any stack has already been invented in some similar way elsewhere. Take Redux and immutable data. This pattern was not some Facebook invention. Immuatble data structures were invented in the 70s I think and immuatble state has existed in other language stacks. It's just all those 20-something developers in Facebook had never run across it - nor did they bother to do a lot of research on what might have existed (it seems anyway)
ML and Data Science is a really new field. This is another area to drop into easier. Quite honestly, it is a lot of data denormalizing more than anything from my limited experience. Like 90% getting tons of data in the DBs in the right format, then 10% writing some ML scripts for something like TenserFlow. Maybe even more like 95%/5%. Because of this, real world experience can help in creating useful data structures.
AND although I firmly believe that the software development space is easy to get into, there are many areas you need years of experience. You probably won't be a great UI/UX designer to start. You won't be building any game engines or low level chip firmware for sure. Any area that needs really high-performant code (which is suprisily not often) won't be a good fit.
Finally, none of this works if you are not willing to learn on the job. By that, I mean, everything you didn't understand that day or week you learn by the next day or week. You don't need to be an expert, but you should know the why of the problem and how to find/implement a solution.
This is probably sloppy. I don't have time to do a lot of edits. I'll end with, don't move into software development because you think it might be easy or "good money". Bad developers, uncommited developers, fail like any professional does in any industry. Try it out and if you like it, then dive in. Within a few years on the job you'll be considered the expert (as long as you keep learning)
People do whatever makes you happy because at the end of the day it doesn’t matter. No one is gonna be on there death bed wishing they understood compilers better
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I know someone who was in their 40s. Never had a software development job in their life, but worked in tech in a side-verticle.
When he lost his job, he looked up popular programming languages and picked one up and built a small app for a resume. Then he studied interview questions around that tech stack, not just the answers, but took the time to learn "why" each answer was what it was.
He ended up getting hired as a senior developer. The crazy thing is, he kept up that work ethic and constantly studied everything. He would drill me with questions spending his evenings researching how to solve his JIRA tickets for the next day. And although his code was likely not super great - it was accepted as production ready AND he got promoted to engineering manager within a year and has continued to grow in software development.
The interesting point about modern software development is:
If you are focused on the more hyped stacks (Typescript, Node, GoLang, Rust, Serverless, NoSQL, Mobile development, etc...), you will find that they are changing rapidly. So much so that EVERYONE has to constantly learn. As long as you are dedicated to learning, it is possible to quickly rank up.
Soft skills and management skills are in desperate need in software development. If you can lead people or you can communicate with a client in a professional way - there are great opportunities. I'm sorry to say that I've personally interviewed so many engineers over the years who clearly don't link appearance, hygene and affect with success. When you can bridge tech with sales and management, you'll get your VP and CTO's attention way faster.
We keep building the same thing over and over. Literally. I can go into why I think that, but the point is that almost every "new" hyped library in any stack has already been invented in some similar way elsewhere. Take Redux and immutable data. This pattern was not some Facebook invention. Immuatble data structures were invented in the 70s I think and immuatble state has existed in other language stacks. It's just all those 20-something developers in Facebook had never run across it - nor did they bother to do a lot of research on what might have existed (it seems anyway)
ML and Data Science is a really new field. This is another area to drop into easier. Quite honestly, it is a lot of data denormalizing more than anything from my limited experience. Like 90% getting tons of data in the DBs in the right format, then 10% writing some ML scripts for something like TenserFlow. Maybe even more like 95%/5%. Because of this, real world experience can help in creating useful data structures.
AND although I firmly believe that the software development space is easy to get into, there are many areas you need years of experience. You probably won't be a great UI/UX designer to start. You won't be building any game engines or low level chip firmware for sure. Any area that needs really high-performant code (which is suprisily not often) won't be a good fit.
Finally, none of this works if you are not willing to learn on the job. By that, I mean, everything you didn't understand that day or week you learn by the next day or week. You don't need to be an expert, but you should know the why of the problem and how to find/implement a solution.
This is probably sloppy. I don't have time to do a lot of edits. I'll end with, don't move into software development because you think it might be easy or "good money". Bad developers, uncommited developers, fail like any professional does in any industry. Try it out and if you like it, then dive in. Within a few years on the job you'll be considered the expert (as long as you keep learning)
People do whatever makes you happy because at the end of the day it doesn’t matter. No one is gonna be on there death bed wishing they understood compilers better