Develop Yourself
To change careers and land your first job as a Software Engineer, you need more than just great software development skills - you need to develop yourself.
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Develop Yourself
#244 - From Zero to Software Engineer After 30: My Journey and What You Need to Know
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Ever feel like you missed your chance to break into tech? That 30 marks some invisible deadline for career reinvention? I've been there—and I'm here to tell you it's absolutely false.
My journey from addiction to software engineering began in my thirties, while juggling two kids and a full-time job.
The truth about learning to code after 30 isn't sugar-coated: you're playing a different game than the 22-year-olds who've been coding since middle school. You'll have responsibilities they don't—families, mortgages and perhaps aging parents. But you also bring powerful advantages they lack: real-world experience, emotional intelligence, and discipline that comes from weathering life's storms.
Where most career-changers fail isn't in their ability to learn, but in time management. You don't need eight hours daily—you need two focused hours and a reason strong enough to keep showing up.
Don't let news cycles about AI or layoffs dictate your future. The tech industry desperately needs more adults in the room with diverse perspectives and life experiences. Whether you choose Parsity.io or another path, take that calculated risk on yourself.
Because what's harder: the temporary challenge of learning something new, or staying stuck in a life you don't want?
Shameless Plugs
🧠 (NEW) Parsity's The Inner Circle Program - a highly customized roadmap to take you from 0 to hired. For career changers who want to pivot into software.
💼 Zubin's LinkedIn (ex-lawyer, former Google, Brian-look-a-like)
👂🏻Easier Said Than Done Podcast
Already a developer? Check out 👉 Not Another Course
Serious about joining Parsity? Schedule a call with me ☎️
Welcome to the Develop Yourself podcast, where we teach you everything you need to land your first job as a software developer by learning to develop yourself, your skills, your network and more. I'm Brian, your host. When you're learning to code after 30, it's very different, and there's some things that no one really ever talks about that I'd like to talk about in this episode. Out that I'd like to talk about in this episode, my coding story started with an intervention. If you can believe it, if you've listened to this show long enough, you probably know a little bit about my salacious past. I'm not going to get all into the really gory details of it, but for a long period of time I was doing coke, meth, drinking alcohol, selling drugs, doing bad stuff. Imagine a rap video. That's kind of like what my life was like. Now I'm a big old nerd. I learned to code around 30, after having two kids and full-time job. I had, at this point, transitioned my life into having at least, you know, somewhat of a normal life. I was still addicted to all sorts of terrible things, but I basically abandoned my street life and was working a dead-end type of job you could say. Maybe it wasn't so dead-end, it was okay, it had a union and stuff. Anyway, it was a job and it required a long commute, had kids and then, being sober, I'm like, okay, now what? What am I gonna do with this little monkey in my mind that is constantly chattering away? I needed the dopamine. I needed the rush. I tried candy eating a bunch of sweets. It the dopamine, I needed the rush. I tried candy eating a bunch of sweets. I got real fat. And then I tried running, which was really, really helpful, and then I thought I have a lot of time on my hands, jesus.
Speaker 1:I was driving Lyft on the side because we were broke. I have kids, I wanted more money and I was meeting people software engineers in the Bay Area and I thought, man, if I could just go back, I would be one of them. They seemed really smart, they dressed pretty casual, they seemed to like what they did and they were really enthusiastic about it. I drove a lot of people in Lyft and Uber and these were the people that always seemed the most enthusiastic about their jobs and I was like, man, I wish I would do that. I got to tell my kids they should probably look into that and I thought, man, I'm not that old am I? I mean, 30 can't be the end of my life, can it? Right, because I'm going to be working another 35 years. That scared me a lot.
Speaker 1:So then I started dabbling in code. In fact, one of my jobs at the school where I was working was to update the website, and one day I had to learn some HTML and CSS to update something. One problem I didn't know anything about that, so I called the school webmaster. She came in, she peeled back the curtain on some of this HTML and CSS stuff and I was one blown away. Two I was like flabbergasted that I didn't know this stuff.
Speaker 1:I'm like I have to know how this works. I'm on the internet all the time and I had zero clue this is how it works that all this code was behind it. To me it was like a magic black box. It was like no clue, never thought about it. Kind of embarrassing, honestly, to think about that, like I didn't even know basic stuff and I'm not that old. I mean, I come from a generation of people that learned how to code through MySpace. I didn't do any of that. I was too busy getting high and chasing money in the streets to care about that kind of nerd stuff, right? So at this point I'm like, okay, I need to learn some of this stuff. I'm meeting these software engineers. This looks actually really interesting.
Speaker 1:So I went on Codecademy. I got hooked. I got addicted to coding and I'm still kind of addicted to it in many ways. That's another story for another day. I don't know if it's a healthy addiction. I do know that it's a lot different than when you're in your 20s, right, because you have all these responsibilities and obligations that you're trying to maintain your health, your sanity, your marriage, your kids, you know aging and just feeling like you should have things figured out. But you don't, right, and you can apply this to when you're 40 or 50 or whenever.
Speaker 1:30 seems to be a bit of a magical age when people start really reflecting on their life. And to me, 30 is really young now that I look back on it, because I'm like, geez, you're barely just starting adult life. I sound like an old guy now, don't I? Here's the thing, whether you're 30 or 40 or whatever my partner Zubin, the guy that I run Parsity with he was 37 when he learned to code and he got into Google at 37. So I hope that gives you some sort of indication, some sort of hope, optimism that like, no, you're not too old. In fact, when I meet people that are 30 and they think am I too old, I kind of laugh a little bit because I'm like, dude, you're going to be working for like 30 more years at this rate. You know who knows where we're going to end up in the future.
Speaker 1:But the idea that you're going to retire at like 50 is a fantasy. Let's say you could retire at 50. That's still 20 years. Think 20 years. In the past you were 10 years old, right? So you have quite a long time to not only figure this whole thing out but to become really, really, really good in this profession. If you do so, choose to go that way. So no, you're not too old, you're just playing a different game.
Speaker 1:People always say it's never too late. I don't believe that either. I think if you're 60, I think if you're in your mid-50s, it's probably getting kind of late to learn this stuff. Totally can do it. I mean, I've met people that did start coding in their 50s. They're a very small club of people, but you can do it. So maybe I'm wrong, maybe there is no limit, but I would say that, like entering into a program like Parsity at 60 or 55, I'm not going to sugarcoat it your likelihood of succeeding and getting a job and finding one is much lower than somebody who's 30 or 40 trying to switch careers. At 55, it's a bit difficult to completely switch careers. Remember, this is a game of career changing. Learning to code is not the easy part, but it's really not the game that you're playing. You're playing a different game, which is career change.
Speaker 1:Your coworkers are gonna be younger. Most are gonna be fresh out of college. They grew up in tech. Most of them they know the lingo, they know the memes, they know kind of the vibe right, and you might feel a little out of place, but here's the thing being older actually gives you a bit of an edge in many ways. You've been through some stuff right Like. You've held jobs before. Most likely You've dealt with real stress. You've made mistakes. You've learned from them. You might not feel super technical, but you probably have more discipline and emotional intelligence than a lot of people entering into tech.
Speaker 1:The key is not to let insecurity win. Don't constantly look around and try to compare yourself to others like, oh my God, this 25-year-old kid knows more than I do. They've probably been coding since they were 12. This is often a story you'll hear in tech. You meet people oh, my father was a software engineer. My mother was a software engineer. I grew up with computers. I've been coding since 10. It's my hobby, it's my profession, it's my life. So if you're trying to compete with them and thinking that you went to a bootcamp for two years or you studied for a year and a half and you think you're gonna be at that level, you're not. You can absolutely catch up in many ways, and in some ways you just might not. That's the reality of somebody that spent that much time ahead of you getting really, really good at this craft. It doesn't mean there's not room for you or that you can't do it well. It just means you're going to put in more effort than they likely will, and when they're taking their foot off the gas as they're progressing in their career, that's when you're going to need to put your foot on the gas.
Speaker 1:This next piece is where most people fail. I've seen this happen too many times. That's why, at Parsity, we spend so much time on time management. You've heard me talk about it before. It's true If you don't have time management, you've lost. There's zero way you're gonna make it, unless you're unemployed for lots and lots of time and you just have tons of time at your disposal. And even then you probably won't make it anyway because you lack direction. But, more importantly, you need to have focus. So if you don't have time management, it will break you.
Speaker 1:So when I hear people say I don't have time to learn, what they really mean if I'm being a little mean here is that I'm not ready to give up stuff that I want to do. I didn't have time either. I had two kids, job, commute. I was kind of piecing my life back together. Don't cry for me, you know, because I was the person that put all that stress on me and my family. I don't want any pity or sorrow. Those were all my decisions.
Speaker 1:I messed up my own life and then I had to piece it back together again and some people look at it like a triumphant story. I honestly look at it as an embarrassing thing moment of my life because it wasn't like somebody put a gun to my head and told me to do all these awful things that I did. I did them of my own volition, but, that being said, I still had a big mess to clean up. My brain was addled, you could say, after years. In fact, I even had a heart issue that sent me to the hospital a few years back because of my excessive use of drugs, so I was not in a great position.
Speaker 1:What I'm saying is, though, that we all have issues we're dealing with, like a failing marriage, an aging parent, just work, stress. That alone can be something that's really difficult to deal with. I get it, but you're gonna have to make this work anyway. There'll never be a correct time. There'll never be a moment where you're like now I'm ready, because even in that moment, six months down the line, something will happen. Life is gonna come at you, and if you're not prepared, you're going to fail.
Speaker 1:So here's how you can win the game. You have to sneak in moments and be consistent. Study on your lunch breaks in your car, get Medium. Medium is like a blog subscription that you can have and you can just read articles from people, but, more importantly, you're gonna have to have your hands on your keyboard. If you're serious, you don't need eight hours a day. You need two focused hours a day or so in a reason that's strong enough to keep you showing up.
Speaker 1:If you don't find some sort of intrinsic joy in coding, I don't think you're going to be able to set a schedule that's rigorous and actually keeps you motivated. And if you're not getting wins, if you're not building something, that you're seeing the output and the results of what you're doing, I think you can also feel like you're just on this hamster wheel or like it's never really gonna happen. So journal and write down what you're doing. Prove to yourself that you're making progress. This is really important so you keep yourself motivated.
Speaker 1:One of the reasons why at Parsity we have people record videos on a weekly basis is that they can actually see their own progress. We can see their progress and they can see their progress. They go from talking about variable declaration to things like TypeScript and features in Nextjs and React or how they're deploying a full stack web application. These are much more interesting things to talk about, but they start at a really basic level and now they can see their progress because when you're in it and you're doing it every day, it can really feel like you're not really making progress. You have to have the schedule and you have to also record some proof that you are in fact making gains. And remember you're not just learning how to code, you're basically learning how to learn when you're like 30 or 40 or whatever. Think about the last time you were in school. It's probably a long time ago, right? So you're not just learning JavaScript or Python or whatever right, you're relearning how to learn.
Speaker 1:This part is actually harder than you think. You went to school and you kind of fooled yourself into thinking, oh, I know how to learn. Yeah, you know how to sit in front of a teacher and look at them and then write down and regurgitate what they've said. But coding is not like that at all. You might watch a tutorial and think I'm making progress. I've, like dutifully watched somebody write some elegant code and now I've retained some information, but honestly, that does nothing for you at all. This is why they call it tutorial hell, because it feels like you're making progress, even though you're making zero progress by just watching somebody type. And then maybe, maybe you type what they've typed and you think that that's progress Because you were taught in school.
Speaker 1:That's kind of the way you get ahead, right, like you do the work, you put in the hard work and then you'll get the reward, which is a grade, but in this case it's a job, and they don't care how many tutorials you've watched, right? So the only thing you can do, the only thing you should really be doing, in my opinion sitting down and coding. Nothing else works. You can watch the tutorials as long as most of your time is spent with the hands on the keyboard. The only way you get good at this is by doing Type stuff, break things, fix them, get stuck, get unstuck and understand that mistakes are not like detours, like oh no, I've made a mistake and now I've ruined things. You kind of want to chase mistakes. That's how you learn. That's part of your curriculum, you could say when you're learning how to code.
Speaker 1:Now I've talked about this idea of career change and why that's so different and kind of a powerful idea. It's really like a reinvention, which kind of made sense, why I coupled it so tightly to my sobriety, because I'm like I felt like they were both this reinvention of who I was. When I told people I was going to learn how to code and become a software engineer crickets, no one thought that was a thing that was going to happen or make sense Like people tried to be polite and nice, but they're kind of like. I just saw their face like, wait, what? What are you talking about, dude? You? Do you even own a computer? At the time, I didn't even own a computer At the time. I didn't even own a computer, so I had to buy one. Learn all this stuff.
Speaker 1:And after people knew my past and thought, geez, you're that guy you used to see hanging out at the liquor store down here. You're the guy who used to call up at 2 am on a Tuesday to come deliver me all sorts of terrible stuff. Now you're what? Yeah, right, you, hey, good luck, right. I went from literally hanging out with criminals in the streets to hanging out with nerds in San Francisco, and this takes time, energy, energy and patience.
Speaker 1:Since then, I've coached probably over at least over 100 career changers, the ones who switched to tech out of desperation, meaning they hated their job so much, they hated their life so much. They're just looking for something like a life raft to cling on to save me, save me, right? They honestly don't make it. Most of them just don't make it. It's not enough to be desperate, right, you have to consistently show up.
Speaker 1:You have to understand that this is a long game. If you understand that, if you have the right expectations, you're much more likely to win Much more likely, because I can't guarantee your success. Nobody can, and if they say they can, they're lying to you. Don't fall for that. I know it's tempting to go to one of those programs where they say we're going to make you a software developer and if you don't get hired, we'll pay you. That's not how this works. This is a gamble. Be real with yourself, be honest. This is a gamble, this is a grind, and this is a shot at a better future. If you're willing to earn that shot, it's totally doable.
Speaker 1:People have done much more difficult things than change careers. Understand that right. This is not some crazy game like winning the lottery or getting like a six pack if you're a 600 pound man which is also a doable thing this is changing your career. Let's not over blow it right. It's not like super easy, but it's not the hardest thing in the world. But make sure you understand that this is a risk and you are taking a risk. The nice thing is, though, when you're gambling on yourself by teaching yourself a hard skill. I don't consider that a big risk whether or not you get hired, because either you'll have somebody pay you for the knowledge you've acquired or you can use that in other ways to then make yourself money or just to learn how to learn. Because if you've taught yourself how to code or if you've learned the art of coding which is a difficult skill to acquire you can learn all sorts of things difficult skill to acquire you can learn all sorts of things.
Speaker 1:Coding was like a gateway drug for me, right. It started off with coding and then it started into running, exercise, reading, writing, being online, becoming a bit of a mini influencer marketing sales businesses. It really opened the door to all sorts of things outside of just my hands on a keyboard typing and writing code for somebody else. It led me to learn hey, maybe I can do all these other things that I never thought really possible. I was really overweight when I started to learn how to code. I've lost like 50 pounds since then. I became a better public speaker. I used to be deathly afraid of speaking in public and then since then I've just kind of learned that whatever I thought was not me or part of my identity was actually pretty much self-imposed. I'm like well, if I learned this hard skill and I got into this industry and I'm learning how to do this stuff and I'm hanging with these nerds that are way smarter than me and I'm somehow keeping up, what else can I do? So it really was this gateway drug for me, and I see that for a lot of people I'm not unique in that aspect at all. I've seen people completely change their lives. There's a few people I've met that have gone from like prison into software development and then they've gone like the influencer route, which is like making content and I don't like to say influencer in this derogatory way or anything. I mean this is an actual thing you can do. Now. You can be an influencer, and influence is an important thing. Learning how to articulate yourself, talk about technically complex things. These are really good skills to have, whether in tech or really in any industry you can think of.
Speaker 1:So look at coding as not like the end-all be-all. Look at it as potentially the end game, but also look at it as maybe just the stepping stone to something that you don't quite know yet or not in your favor. I'm just keeping it real with you but they never are for people doing something hard. That's the deal. This is the barrier to entry. This is the price for admission to play the game. The odds are not going to be 100% in your favor.
Speaker 1:Learning to code is hard and, yes, learning to code after 30 is even more difficult. But you know what's even worse than that? Staying stuck in a life you just don't want. So you can kind of choose which hard you want. You can either have the hard of a life that you don't particularly like, that you're used to, or you can have the hard of taking a chance on yourself, losing time, hours and money to potentially not get the outcome you really really want.
Speaker 1:Now, this is the weird thing. I can't guarantee anything, but I've yet to see somebody that actually learned the skills, was good at what they did, but I've yet to see somebody that actually learned the skills, was good at what they did and, over a long enough time horizon, didn't find themselves in a job. Remember, this is not like winning the lottery here. This is finding a job. Okay, so let's just keep it real on that too. There's a lot of really terrible coders out there from really awful boot camps. You're not competing with them. They're not even on the map. So don't think that the competition is so fierce that you can't get a job. You're really overestimating everybody a lot and likely underestimating yourself. But if you're interested and you're thinking about learning to code, just do it right. Forget AI. Forget all the news headlines.
Speaker 1:You and I don't know the future. We don't know what's going to happen, but you shouldn't let news cycles dictate your future. Don't know what's going to happen, but you shouldn't let news cycles dictate your future. I really hope that's one big takeaway you have, because I suspect that another five years from now, we're going to need more and more software developers, and I think that we have a generation we're scaring off, including people that are my age, that should be getting into this profession. We need more adults in the room. No shade to the 22-year-old kids with the hoodies on that are getting into this profession too. I know there's a lot of you out there that are super ambitious and smart. They're going to be hiring a lot of older people like me and people in Parsity, but I'm saying we need people like you that are listening to this show, that are older, that have experience, that have wisdom to be in this game right.
Speaker 1:I really do think that's important, whether or not you choose to go to Parsity, whatever, if you're doing Odin Project or you're doing your own thing, hey, major props to you. Parsity's small. We couldn't take you all, even if we wanted to. But whatever path you choose to go, just choose a path. Understand the pros, the cons and the risk that you're taking and make an informed decision. Always hope that's helpful. See you around. That'll do it for today's episode of the Develop Yourself podcast. If you're serious about switching careers and becoming a software developer and building complex software and want to work directly with me and my team, go to parsityio. And if you want more information, feel free to schedule a chat by just clicking the link in the show notes. See you next week.
