Transcription
Hello friends, my name is Andrey Churino, you are on the channel IT Voploti. In this short video, I will reasonably, finally, and 100% accurately answer the question: Is it possible to enter IT after 40 years old? I myself recently turned 40, and in this regard, I started thinking: What would I do if I weren't a programmer now? Would I be working as a salesperson, a marketer, or even in construction, as I used to? How would I act now to enter IT at my age? Now I will tell you everything, and you will have no more questions. I will talk about forty-year-olds now, but if you are younger, it is even more suitable for you. So, is it possible to enter IT at 40? If we consider this question in the context of mental and physical abilities, then it is 100% real, and here's why: there are no physiological reasons that would prevent a more or less healthy forty-year-old person from learning an IT profession. This is not something out of the ordinary, it is not something very complex or physically demanding, it is a perfectly ordinary job that almost anyone can learn. It doesn't take 10 years to start earning. It's usually sometimes tedious, sometimes interesting work, like a million other professions. Second, if you are approximately my age, then most likely you still feel the strength to learn something new. It's only when you're 20 that you think that when you reach forty, you'll be too old to learn something new, that forty-year-olds are practically old people, what kind of programming learning, they just need to not die from a heart attack. In reality, it's not like that. When you actually reach this age, you understand that you still have everything ahead of you, that you can still move mountains, that you can learn almost any new profession. Therefore, if we are talking about programming, it is absolutely possible to start learning it at 40. Therefore, the answer to the question: Can you physically master IT? Absolutely, you can. You still have time and strength to learn this specialty and build a good career in it. And I want to dwell on the career in more detail. Many of my peers are afraid that they are old-timers who will come into a young, new team, that they won't be able to find common ground with anyone, that they will be looked at askance, that they will be a black sheep, or that they won't be hired at all because of their age. In reality, this is partly true, partly it is true, but this can be worked with, this can be fought, and further in this video, I will tell you what to do about it to overcome it. Probably the most difficult thing for people over 40 is to pass the HR selection. Often in IT companies, there is suspicion towards older people who have just learned a profession and are taking their first steps and have little experience. And often, HR managers, HR specialists, managers have a question: What will he do in my team? Why is he needed? Why should I hire him if there are dozens of our peers, younger guys who have just graduated from university, with basically the same knowledge? Why should I hire this old-timer? Yes, this exists, but it is quite possible to bypass it, and how to do it, I will tell you in the next part of my video in a few minutes. For now, let's consider the next aspect. First, we need to keep in mind that there are very, very many developers over fifty. If a person is now, for example, 50, then at the dawn of the IT industry in the mid-2000s, he was around, probably 20-25 years old. It was then that many of today's programmers started, and where could they go? They are still working in IT. They are still alive. Imagine, they are quite young, quite strong, they can still work and earn well from it. Therefore, in any team, probably in any company, you can find many, many such specialists who are 40-50 years old. Most likely, where you go to work, there will be people who will be your peers, who will be older than you. So, I repeat, remember this: there are very, very many of your peers working in IT. You are not such a black sheep. Most likely, you will meet your peers at the workplace where you will gain your first experience. Second, what else is important to remember is that today many IT specialists, especially after the COVID times, are offered the option of online work, i.e., full remote work. You may not appear in the office at all. You may not see your colleagues in person at all. You will communicate with them at most in chats and occasionally meet at some online meetings. You understand, in such a case, it practically doesn't matter how old someone is. When communicating with a person in a chat on work issues, you will never understand how old they are, and your colleagues will not understand how old you are. The age factor in this case is reduced to almost zero. In reality, what difference does it make how old your interlocutor is if you communicate with him in a chat on work issues? It's the same with you, no one will simply know your age. Therefore, initially, I recommend people who are already over 40 to focus on remote work, at least for starters, so as not to experience this inconvenience and this fear of a young team. Why do you need this? Work calmly remotely, it will be absolutely irrelevant how old you are, no one will understand how old you are, this question will not come up at all during your work. Recently, by the way, I was just talking about this with my neighbor, he is also a programmer, he is about 10 years older than me, and he decided to change his job. He posted his resume on a well-known service, and he was simply flooded with offers, he just didn't have time to go to these interviews, you understand. He initially indicated an online work format, and as a result, he received several offers, including at VK, including at other well-known organizations. He eventually chose one of the attractive offers with a very good salary, works completely online, the age issue does not come up at all, there is absolutely just never with a very good salary. Therefore, if you build your career, at least choose your first jobs in a remote format, then I think your age will not come up anywhere at all, and no one in the team will even pay attention to it. Another fairly common problem for people who are far from 20 years old is excessive self-esteem and unwillingness to get along with anyone, to communicate with anyone, especially to obey people who are much younger than them. Perhaps they can be understood, because it is difficult to recognize the authority of a person who is younger than your son. But friends, if you want to build a career in IT, then perhaps you need to put your self-esteem aside a bit and perceive your colleagues exclusively as specialists. Remember not their age, but their roles in the organization. You don't like it when people pay attention to your age, so don't pay attention to the age of your colleagues. Let your manager be much younger. Understand that you will not meet with him personally, you perform your function, he performs his function, that's all. Don't think about teaching your managers, don't think about teaching your colleagues, just work, especially at the initial stage, do your job qualitatively, learn new things, and everything will definitely work out for you. But please, don't show off. As you can see, friends, it is 100% real to enter IT at not the youngest age. There are simply no objective external reasons why you couldn't do it in the coming months. The reasons why people don't do it are purely internal, meaning it's only up to you. Let's consider them and what to do about them to get into IT 100% accurately at your age. Probably the main reason that prevents old people like me from getting into IT is a catastrophic lack of time. I have, for example, two children, one of whom needs to be driven to and from school, driven to and from clubs. The second is still very young, I need to sit with him periodically. I have a dog that I should walk at least sometimes. Permanent repairs that need to be done, shops, gyms, and so on and so forth. In such conditions, it is extremely difficult to force yourself to study something after work, to allocate at least one or two hours for it every day. When you are 19, you have a lot of time, you have parents who will prepare food for you and buy you clothes, you don't have to go to work, you basically don't need to do anything, you can calmly, with burning eyes, if you are passionate about something, sit and do it for hours on end. When you are 40, alas, you often have neither the time nor the energy after work to sit and spend a few more hours studying something new. How to deal with this? I have personally become convinced from my own experience that there is only one way to overcome this: it is education in certain, I emphasize, not just any, but certain online schools. Because if you decide to enter IT at an age when you have a lot of other things to do, you absolutely need to have not only a carrot but also a stick. A stick that will force you after work, after training, after children, after anything else, to sit down and spend at least a couple of hours studying a project that you were assigned, to sit and complete certain tasks from your curriculum. Because if you study it yourself, you will quit in 2-3 days, I guarantee you 100%. This has been tested by me and many, many others. Yes, many of us have heard that online schools are not needed because everything they give can be found independently on the internet. But friends, the curriculum of a secondary school can be easily found on the internet, right? But why do we all send our children to secondary school? The curriculum of any university can be found on the internet, right? But why have almost all of us studied, all of us are going to send our children to university or have already sent them to university? Why? Because all this can be found on the internet. Yes, because in educational institutions, programs, knowledge that is generally available for free, are structured in the right way, everything that a specialist in a particular field needs to know is selected there, a motivation system is created there that will not let you do nothing, there are experienced teachers who will convey the educational material so that you definitely understand everything, who will teach us so that we study with burning eyes and do not go to study as if to hard labor. So all these stories about how the entire curriculum of an online school can be found on the internet are complete nonsense, especially when it comes to older people. Friends, well, what will we find on the internet? Well, seriously, imagine how, having only 1-2 free hours a day, you will independently search for information on the internet in the right structure, in the right sequence, and still force yourself to study all this? How every day, you must study every day, it's really possible? No, 100% not possible, it's nonsense, you will never become an IT specialist this way. To get into IT, you need to first get into the right IT school. To get into IT, you need to first get into the right IT school, one where professionals who themselves work in this field and know this market from the inside perfectly will teach you. I would recommend avoiding popular online factories that teach absolutely any profession. If you open the list of their courses, you will find everything there, absolutely everything from fortune-telling on cards to interior design creation. This is complete nonsense in my opinion. It's better to look for a school that is created by programmers for programmers. If you want to enter IT, then look for a school that specializes specifically in programming, because their entire infrastructure, all management, all teachers know exactly what to do to train good IT specialists. They have all gone through this path. Agree, the most high-quality service is provided by someone who specializes in something, who does not scatter across different fields, but concentrates specifically on one area. It is precisely such schools that I would recommend looking for to study programming. There are quite a few of them now. I don't know, maybe the fingers of one hand are enough to count them all. I personally have not set a goal to find them all. I know one such school well, I've known it for a long time, I noticed them a long time ago when they were probably just starting many years ago, but they still pop up periodically, and these are really guys, programmers who created this online school for programmers. They are gods in this, they are really focused on training programmers. I will leave a link in the description of this video if anyone is interested. Go and see. Perhaps there are others like this, I don't know, I haven't set a goal to find them all. You can search if you're interested, but these guys definitely have everything done in such a way as to produce good developers. Yes, they are naturally all paid, as in any similar good online schools, no one, none of them will teach for free, because it is a rather complex and costly process. But at least they have installments that absolutely any adult can afford, to pay a few pennies every month, and absolutely precisely, this training, this payment for training that you will leave there, will absolutely pay off in the first couple of months of work in a new place. The advantages of online schools that specialize exclusively in programming are also very big advantages: they often cooperate with large IT companies where students can intern during their studies and where they can get a job after their studies if they master the program well and show themselves well. These IT companies are already on standby, they immediately take yesterday's graduates of these online schools. Therefore, the issue of employment in such schools is usually resolved very easily. This is by the way about what I said at the beginning of the video: that it is difficult for older people to pass the HR department filter, they often cannot even reach the technical interview because they are buried at the initial stage. There are many questions for them: You are 40 years old, man, where have you been before? What have you been doing before? Why are you only starting to come into IT now without experience? Why are you needed at all if we have a lot of young guys with the same lack of experience? Why shouldn't we take them? So, regarding this, in good schools that specialize in programming, in the school to which I provided the link under this video, there are employment programs. First, they cooperate with well-known IT companies, and during your work, you will accumulate a real portfolio with real projects on GitHub. And after graduating from this school, it is quite possible that if you show yourself well, one of their partner companies will invite you for an internship. At least, the one to which I provided the link under this video has such programs. Go to the link, read it, everything is described there. So, the issue of employment, of first employment at a venerable, I wanted to say, age, like mine, i.e., 40+, is quite real. You just need to approach the choice of a partner with whom you will study programming correctly. What else is important, friends, is to initially make sure that programming suits you. Yes, I repeat, almost everyone can master programming, there is nothing super complicated about it. But if you don't like it, it will turn out that you have exchanged a bad thing for another bad thing, exchanged one unloved job for another unloved job, and you will not be able to develop in programming, achieve any heights, good salaries, any good positions if you don't like it, if you feel sick from your work every time. Therefore, initially, think about whether you really like it, whether it is really close to you. It wouldn't be bad if you weren't a nerd to the bone. It wouldn't be bad if you liked solving some logical puzzles and riddles in school or even now, because programming is almost entirely work consisting of solving some complex or not very complex logical puzzles and riddles. Remember how you did in school with mathematics. It wouldn't be bad if you, if you studied mathematics at least a little, at least at an average level in school and passed it, so that you are not a complete ignoramus in mathematics at all. In regular programming, not in any super complex tasks, you don't need a lot of mathematics, but the school curriculum will definitely be needed. Most likely, it won't be any logarithms, tangents, cotangents, but it will be elementary actions, and they will be constantly needed in programming. Therefore, remember your relationship with mathematics in school. It would be better if you were at least a little, at least a little bit, but friends with it. And finally, what is also important is that you need to choose an IT profession that you will like, because there are many subdivisions, many programming languages, each of which is responsible for something. As a rule, each of which is used in a specific area. As a rule, think about what personally attracts you more. Maybe it's creating interfaces and user interaction, i.e., when you have a ready-made design that comes from a designer, and you bring it to life, you make it so that the user can click buttons, so that he can move sliders, so that he can fill in fields and send them somewhere, so that the picture drawn by the designer comes to life and becomes a ready-made application, website, or program. This external interface is also created by programmers, but programmers of a specific area. This is called front-end development. If this attracts you in some way, if something resonates with you when I describe it, then most likely you would be interested in studying front-end. There is a huge demand for front-end now, they are needed absolutely everywhere, in creating websites, in creating applications, in creating various interfaces in programs, and so on and so forth. If you choose front-end for starters, you will have one big advantage: front-end implies a deep enough study of the JavaScript language. So, JavaScript today can work not only in the user interface, it can also work on the server in the form of node.js. That is, knowing JavaScript, you can quite easily transition, if necessary, if you wish, to server-side programming, where you can create logical structures, logical programs without encountering or interacting with the front-end at all. That is, knowing JavaScript, you will be a sufficiently versatile specialist. If you are more attracted not by the user interface, but by creating some logical programs, solving some logical tasks, machine learning, artificial intelligence, creating some admin panels, all this internal programming, then Python is 100% for you. Take Python and you won't go wrong. Python is just huge. I myself love this language very much. Knowing it, you can engage in data analytics, artificial intelligence, machine learning, neural networks, create various admin panels for websites, create Telegram bots. By the way, Telegram bots are most often made in Python. Create CRM systems. Yes, practically anything. Look at what languages online schools offer. You can follow the link under this video, there I have left a link to training programs for various languages. Choose what you like, start changing your life today. It's real, it's quite within your power, the main thing is to start as quickly as possible. Don't waste time. Well, and finally, friends, I want to repeat the thought that has run through this entire video like a red thread: programming is not difficult, programming is within the reach of almost any person, programming is just a job like almost any other, there is nothing extraordinary about it. It doesn't matter how old you are, 30, 40, 50. You can absolutely start doing it, and in six months, a year, you can write programs quite decently in the language you choose. Yes, probably at 40 it will be a bit difficult to learn to create operating systems from scratch or invent new technologies in the field of artificial intelligence, but to work as a programmer and perform ordinary programmer tasks is 100% within your power, because there is nothing super complicated about it. Just start, friends, start today. Don't postpone. The hour has come, friends. Perhaps this video is a sign from above for you that you need to start right now. In six months, you won't recognize your life, I guarantee you this. Just start, and everything will definitely work out for you. Well, and I have to say goodbye to you, friends. I promised that the video would be short. Good luck to you in your new field. Start, start, start. Well, and don't forget to subscribe to my channel and give me a like. It would be very helpful. Bye.