Is it too late to start your career as a programmer at the age of 30 ?
- by Matt
Assuming one graduated college at 30 years old and has 5 years of experience (no real job experience, just contributing to open source and doing personal projects) with various tools and programming languages, how would he or she be looked upon by hiring managers ? Will it be harder to find a job considering that (I got this information looking at various websites, user profiles on SO and here, etc.) the average person gets hired in this field at around 20 years old.
I know that it's never too late to do what you're passionate about and the like but sometimes it is too late to start a career. Is this the case? Managers are always looking for fresh people and I often read job descriptions specifically asking for young people.
I don't need answers of encouragement, I know the community here is great and I wouldn't get offended by even the most cold answers.
Please don't close this as being too localized, I'm not referring to any specific country or region, talk about the region you're in. I would also appreciate if you justified your answer.