How to get into tech in your thirties?

Question

A friend of mine runs a 1-man coffee stall. We were chatting last week and he mentioned how he has free time and "would like to get into tech" and asked if I could recommend any "bootcamps".Honestly I wasn't quite sure what to say. He's early enough that he doesn't know what part of "tech" he wants to get into... just "something with coding". That makes it difficult to recommend a course on a specific topic (via edx or others), but a lot of the bootcamps come off to me as scammy (though Lambda school looks interesting) and many of the university programs command high fees for opaque value.So what would you advise a friend in a similar predicament?

benjaminjosephw · Accepted Answer

I think the tech industry is going to be in a very different place by the end of the decade and so the advice we give to newcomers can't simply be the advice we wish we'd heard when we started out. It's hard to know where things will go but my money is on the low-code/no-code movement really picking up steam and starting to blur the lines between builders and developers.
Conventional wisdom says to find some good online resources like codecademy.com or freecodecamp.org (both of which are very good) and get as much experience as you can in your spare time. Code camps can be great for getting your foot in the door with an employer but the quality of teaching can vary massively. This is still good advice for someone who really wants to learn how to code.
If your friend is happy with a looser definition of "getting into tech", I'd suggest a better first step would be to become proficient with tools like Airtable, Webflow and Parabola. These are really useful tools to learn and help build computational thinking while also having an extremely low barrier to entry. I don't think they are the Killer Apps of the low-code movement but, before the Killer App arrives, I think it's a great place to start. There may even be jobs emerging specifically for these kinds of skills (see makerpad.co). Getting into more serious tech is always an option but starting here would give your friend a taste of what's possible with tech skills.

oedmarap · Answer

This is just specifically for your friend's situation; as it seems he has experience in running a business, dealing with customers, and doing it solo.
I would point him in the direction of learning tech skills that compliment him in an entrepreneural sense, versus aiming for an outright switch in his career.
Good examples would be web and frontend design, server administration, e-commerce and payments, etc. Those are the kinds of things he can use to automate his business and even make inroads within his "industry" — with the added benefit of not having an extremely steep learning curve for producing something useful at the end of the day.