Start a Coding Career at 50?

hey everybody welcome to the video so let's just jump into it hi stefan my name is johnny johnny be good i don't want to give his real name just in case people want to keep anonymous my name is johnny and i am curious about taking your course but i have a couple questions i am over 50 years old is it too late to start a new career as a web developer or becoming a coder i would want to do mainly freelance i have some basic computer skills but to be honest i have no college degree and i have been into computers for a long time and feel like it might be a good career i would be basically starting from scratch if you think it is not too late what course our languages would you start out first with thanks for your time um so if you want to go freelance the number one choice for freelance is of course the web stack so that means html5 css3 a touch of javascript and php now php is a choice for freelancing because so many small businesses rely on php for their websites and there's a lot of content management systems out there cmss as the nerds would call them like wordpress and drupal and joomla which are built with php so it's a really good choice of a programming language to accompany the web stack there are other choices out there like javascript for back-end and python as well but again within the context of freelancing that is the way to go now if you're in your 40s and 50s and you want to get into this new as i've said in many videos people watch my videos know this the key the key or the way to go is probably freelance with some exceptions exceptions are number one perhaps you are moving from career a into the programming world maybe you're a nurse or maybe uh you're a bookkeeper maybe your accountant maybe you're an experienced restaurant manager in that situation you may be able to to apply your knowledge from your current career or your soon-to-be previous career and combine that with nerd coding power and together you're gonna have some pretty formidable skills so for example perhaps you could become a consultant for a chain of restaurants who want to learn who want to implement technology in their restaurants whether it be mobile apps whether it be advanced website for order taking what have you etc so your domain knowledge in the industry you happen to have been working in could be used and combined with coding knowledge to get a job as an i.t professional as a software developer maybe as even somebody who's in charge of implementing for a smaller company you're gonna have to learn but you know you can learn as you get paid because there is a lack of skilled developers in the world today that is uh for sure on the other hand if you want to do freelance then being somebody in your 50s freelancing and even older 60s and older is entirely possible actually and it actually is a very good situation to be in because there are a lot of baby boomers who who are starting businesses who have small businesses and they may not want to implement their wordpress site they may not want to implement their shopping cart solution et cetera so this is where you can come in as a freelance a freelancer writing code for people so yeah it is extremely viable it's a different career track when if you were 18 or 19 years old at that age or 25 or 30 years old at that age you may go work for a startup gained some experience there but at 50 i don't think the startup world for the most part would be for you that being said i have a friend of mine one of my former mentees and studio web student he has a startup and he has you know and his startup is pretty successful for for startups and you know google's one of the companies invested with him and uh i think one of their hires one of her managers was a guy in his late 50s they brought him in for his skill in terms of managing staff and employees and so forth so there is that opportunity as well although that guy is not strictly a coder as i've said on many occasions even if your job or your career aspirations is not to actually write code on a daily basis having a good understanding of the fundamentals of software development coding in general understanding the lay of the land is just going to make you a far more valuable individual in the uh out there in the world that is for sure so i highly recommend it so if you want to get into it you can get into it i have students who've done my studio web courses and they've gotten jobs beating out people with comp sci degrees within just a month or two of training yeah anyway so i'm seamus lisa self-promoted i know i have to do it a little bit every now and then i don't do it enough check out my courses i have a structured curriculum and a set of courses designed to teach people what i would want them to know if they were going to work for me uh this is the web stack so html5 css3 javascript python php sql databases etc once you got that the world is your oyster so uh there you go i hope that's useful bye-bye

Channel: Stefan Mischook

Views: 82,260

Rating: 4.9330997 out of 5

Keywords: developervlogs, developermentoring

Id: 8glu5IPbXHg

Length: 6min 8sec (368 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 23 2020