A friend and customer (I freelance doing programming and system admin) already in his early 50s, with a career history in law and business, asked me to mentor h

A friend and customer (I freelance doing programming and system admin) already in his early 50s, with a career history in law and business, asked me to mentor him so he could learn programming and contribute to his own project. 18 months on he adds value to the project and is programming above beginner/junior level. With another year of practice he might have the skills to make a career in programming, though that isn’t his goal. We started with relational databases and SQL, since that’s core to the application we’re working on. He originally asked to get involved to run ad hoc reports. Then we moved on to web development, front- and back-end. He struggled trying to piece together all of the parts that go into making web sites, but I focused on fundamentals so eventually it would all make sense. I think this worked for my friend because he was able to jump in to a working system that is still under heavy development, for a business domain he understood, and the rest of the team agreed to help him learn. That was pretty much how I got started in programming 40 years ago. It seems that very few companies are willing to train and develop junior programmers, preferring the tech interview performance and the illusion of hiring the top 5%. It wasn’t always like this. If you can find a project you can jump in to with patient programmers who will help you learn that’s a great path, but such opportunities seem few and far between.