A friend of mine was changing his profession to programming and he was around the same age as you (though he was in HR previously, so he was retraining from scr

A friend of mine was changing his profession to programming and he was around the same age as you (though he was in HR previously, so he was retraining from scratch with part time studies). It's perfectly OK to be junior at 40. Then, you say you are/were an administrator. I say that this is a very, very convenient position to do programming. (1) You have tasks that warrant writing a program; (2) you will be part of your own audience, so you know when your program is good enough and what the heck should it actually do; (3) you're nominally not a programmer, so nobody will expect you to adjust your toolbox to the company's vision. Language choice will be your decision, so if you deem Erlang to be much better for something, you write Erlang, not C# or Java just because the rest of the company uses that. I am such a sysadmin myself (was? my title now is "programmer/Linux system engineer"), so I speak from experience. Most of my day is spent on writing code for managing systems, not on administration itself, though I do some of that, too. And there's a lot of tools that would be helluva useful for sysadmins (or for me, at least), but they are not written yet and I don't expect regular programmers to write them.