Advice for Older Entry-Level Programers?

jmorse asks: "My uncle recently shut down his manufacturing business and is considering entering the job market as an entry level programmer. He's done a lot of ad-hoc programming in several languages to fulfill his business' needs, but has never held a job as a programmer or software engineer. I know it's a tough time to be looking for a programming job, especially when there are so many unemployed younger people who would gladly put in long hours. What advice do slashdotters have for an older guy just getting started?"

Comments

Re:leverage experience

[kitts]

I totally agree with this. Firstly, consider for a moment the possibility that you won't get a fulltime job as a straight-up programmer. Yeah, life sucks, you get over it. Unless you're lucky enough to get into a firm somewhere, you'd have to spend half your time trying to set up contracts anyway.

Meanwhile, if you can take some courses in Visual Basic and database programming, you could probably get yourself another job in the industry, only this time as an office administrator or something. This might not sound great, but keep in mind your education options -- either you go back to university to get a degree, or go to professional college where this is the sort of job they're training students for anyway.

Meanwhile, with the experience you have, you already know how to deal with people, follow procedures, give different options for different trouble scenarios, maybe even manage a person or two... This is your trump card.

And while office automation might not sound like much when it comes to programming, there's plenty of ways to use it as a learning tool for sexier programming skills. When you get given a database to design, go overkill and do a data dictionary with DFDs, ERDs, etc. If you need an office-wide system coordinating reports, try to code it with modular design so that bits and pieces can be interchanged. Maybe even do up a bunch of UML diagrams for it, or figure out how to deploy it with a simple Install wizard. Want to use Excel's charting tools but your data is all stored in a text? Visual Basic's Excel library can help you automate that. Need tracking software? Win2K comes with IIS, which will have an ASP engine. Store it all on a central server and feed it off as web pages (can make pretty things without too much effort). Need to change platforms completely? Brush up on your protocols like XML or CORBA...

Sky's the limit. You only have to be creative and make sure you're not biting off more than you can chew on your projects. Not until you have seniority again, at least.

Re:All depends how you paint it.

[StandardDeviant]

I have a good friend (we run the site in my sig together) who was in much the same situation. He ran a series of bookstores, and he'd end up writing the inventory and accounting packages, that sort of thing. (He's in his late 40s and I'm in my early 20s, so age wise our friendship may seem a little odd, but once two men have fought qmail and slashcode together it's a bond hard to break ;-) ) Anyway, his first tech job for a year or so was working as a coder-analyst for a book-centric dotcom. Worked out great for him, becuase not only could he provide significant value from the getgo with his domain knowledge, he could learn from the pure coders. Now he's working in an even more code-heavy position, so the transition is definitely possible. I think he's like 45 - 47 or so, and he's never had formal CS training, so the transition is definitely doable if you play from your strengths. Best of luck to your uncle! (If he does want to go straight coder, formal education in CS or sw.eng. is worth the investment, even if it's a couple-three part-time semesters at a community college.)