Same probably goes for younger people as well, though. The difference being that most people pick the career paths they stay on in their 20's. I've seen many drop out of computer science curriculums and gone to become a carpenter or whatever. Promoting the possibility for change later in life is a wonderful thing and societies should encourage and make that possible. Nobody should feel trapped in their past, but obviously they still need to put in the work.

Edit: Not to mention the amount of people who apply to universities and never get accepted. There's plenty of room for failure and pessimism if someone wants to take that angle, and someone is always left out of something, no matter how hard they work. That's also why society should enable an equal springboard for everyone. I want the best and brightest to become the doctors and scientists of the future. Not the ones who had the most leisure time in their hands to be able to study and get accepted to programs.

I think it doesn't really matter. Programming is not a physical impossibility for a vast majority of people. Like I could train for years and never be able to bench press 400lb because of genetic limitation but learning to program doesn't have that limitation. Learning to program like most skills just takes time, effort and dedication. I think if you fail at it either you weren't as interested as you thought or you may have been trying to learn a language that just didn't vibe with you.

Programming also seems like the only profession people just assume they can pick up in a year. No one wakes up and says I'm going to quit my job and become a doctor, or a professor, or lawyer in 3 months to a year. If they are making that type of career switch they go in with the expectation that they will have a lot to learn and it is going to take more than a year of concerted effort. Not everyone is going to become a software engineer at google or apple but there are plenty of well paying programming jobs.

Sorry for the long post I just get frustrated when people want to look at others failures as a gage for their own capabilities. Believe in yourself and put in the work, the results will come.

“He who who says he can and he who says he can't are both usually right” – Confucius

I see your point, but I think you may have missed mine. Let's say there are ten successful older programmers interviewed. Seven of them went to coding basecamps, two of them went back to school, and one of them was entirely self-taught. I, as someone who wants to be a developer concludes that going to a coding boot camp is the best way to become a developer later in life.

The problem is that there might be 1000 people who attended boot camps and went on to work in McDonalds for every one who got a developer job — 0.1 percent became developers. But maybe only ten of the self-taught people work in McDonalds for every one who got a programming job. It would be smarter to self-learn in that situation.

But, if all you ever see are the successes, you have no way to decide which is the best course of action.

I don't think that's true at all. I suspect many people don't have the obsessiveness, attention-to-detail, memory, and perseverance that a programmer needs to fix a hard bug. And not many people would enjoy a job that requires sitting motionless in front of a computer for long hours. (I love it, though!)

> Elixir

Interesting pick for a first language.

It's not my first exactly. I'm pretty handy with Python, and I've played around with various other languages. I chose Elixir because the functional paradigm gels better with how I think than OO languages. Elixir, with Phoenix, alongside React and React Native seem like a good fit for what I want to do: build sustainable small-scale web apps. Pinboard is a motivating factor for the sort of business I'd like to build.

I too have learned Elixir and am interested in these sort of small scale Internet businesses. If you want to chat about ideas and do a regular office hours style meeting that would be cool. My theory is that just doing the office hours each week will focus minds and help us to clarify the most important things we should be working on.