I would say the answer depends on Where in Europe your friends are seeking employment. The job market - and the job requirements - are significantly different between Rural Romania, Berlin or an oil field in Norway.
They are 30+. General advice there is to stay away from competing with the 20+ crowd. Compete where age is on your side, which means go into business where you have 10 years experience over the young ones. If you were a carpenter and want to be a programmer, build solutions for the construction industry. If you were a car mechanic, build solutions for the car salesman. You get the idea.
For starters, your friends can choose between getting an education , or trying their luck at "skill". If they want to work for big corporations, education is mandatory. If they want to work for small companies, education isn't going to be as important, but reputation is key. Be sure to never leave a job unfinished, and always ensure your customer is happy. Your happy customers are your salespeople.
If one of your friends are already fluent in HTML/CSS, it's natural to go into the custom wordpress theme coding, etc. This is not really an IT job anymore, but a part of the advertising industry. Pays poorly, and will continue downwards.
Your DSP friend is in better luck. This is a hard, difficult-to-learn skill. Especially if he also understands the advanced math behind it. Good DSP jobs are found in larger industries, so if he doesn't have a math degree, that would be advised. Having a Master's degree and being good at DSP programming will secure a very good future with few competitors.
As for "programming", that's not really one job but a wide field of jobs. Marketing style jobs are plenty and small, and available for both web and mobile. They pay poorly though. Corporate 10000+ hour projects or salaried positions are out there, but almost always require a M Sc.
There are always going to be plenty of 100 hour projects at smaller companies, but it's poor job security.
"Programming" in general is also under very heavy fire from outsourcing to lowest bidder, so I would not advise anyone to start it as a career.
> Be sure to never leave a job unfinished, and always ensure your customer is happy.
Can't agree more about that. Also great advice about the DSP friend. What makes me optimist is that they are based in Vienna / Barcelona, so big cities with some IT scene inside.
A 6 months study time is totally reasonable for them... so basically no "education" (but one is graduated in a different field), but self-education is totally possible to achieve. I guess that in order to buy a reputation they'll need to start with a job that looks serious but maybe without a stellar salary, and evolve from that. Thanks.
I kinda agree but at the same time I disagree with you. You make a fair point on saying few stuff.
I do agree that I wouldn't advise someone to start a career with programming if they were 30's and 40's. But yet again everything is doable.
But for a 15y/o learning some programming stuff... for him programming can be a career. Don't forget we have so many new stuff coming out everyday that older programmers if they exist and they haven't become project managers wouldn't really go into.
Also when you mentioned Wordpress because he has knowledge of HTML and CSS... well he had* prolly. Atm I would say that CSS is a very complicated and delicate thing that pays well to people that own that field. With mobile and tablets you need to know how to write responsive code. CSS has move from when it was just static text.
To the Original poster: I can't really think of anyone around my circle which includes most of the UK's leading Tech Companies and a lot in San Fran, that would go off and hire a 30-40 years old person that has some experience in programming but he is not actually a programmer.
They can start as junior developers but again the salary will be low and the competition to get in that field... plus people that are hiring for junior developers would like to see a youngster that can learn and become a senior after few years, I don't think they will go with someone older than 25 unless they are looking for a frontend developer passing it as a junior developer role.
My advise to them is maybe to start off their own little thing maybe a webproject or a mobile app and try to find investors?
On one of the comments you replied that one of the guys is from Vienna(Austria) I thought that Austria has a very good economy atm. I get why the other guy from Spain has trouble but Switzerland and Austria are on top of EU atm.
The relative strengths is ability to change vs stability.
Generally here, the development skills vary more between individuhals than between age groups.
Straight out of university, young developers tends to have done smaller projects (1-4 team members, 100 man hours each) and have excellent technical knowledge about latest toolkits. They will be able to solve very difficult technical issues and have an agile mind.
They do not have experience from issues arising in larger projects (10-100 developers) due to legacy code, support agreements, management issues, project methodology, and they haven't even tought of corporate culture and office politics yet (sometimes for the better). The love for "my new stuff is better than the old code" can lead to design decisions which causes untested technologies to be used in the wrong places.
Young developers often have no kids and sometimes no spouse, which makes them work long hours,and be very flexible in crunch times.
Older developers tends to have spouses and kids and responsibilities. This sometimes is a problem, but it can also force them to release the code as soon as possible, instead of doing a third or fifth round of optimisations and improvements. Older developers have seen the office politics and shenanigans several times and try to avoid them or even handle them. The older developer may sometimes be lazy and stick with older tools instead of new technologies, which can make products look and feel like they were designed last decade. But in large corporations, it's better with a released working code that looks old but is stable, than code which isn't stable.
Money-wise it's a toss-up. The extra experience from older programmers comes at a premium cost, which most of the time makes me assign junior programmers for the bulk of the work and senior ones for architecture etc.
They are 30+. General advice there is to stay away from competing with the 20+ crowd. Compete where age is on your side, which means go into business where you have 10 years experience over the young ones. If you were a carpenter and want to be a programmer, build solutions for the construction industry. If you were a car mechanic, build solutions for the car salesman. You get the idea.
For starters, your friends can choose between getting an education , or trying their luck at "skill". If they want to work for big corporations, education is mandatory. If they want to work for small companies, education isn't going to be as important, but reputation is key. Be sure to never leave a job unfinished, and always ensure your customer is happy. Your happy customers are your salespeople.
If one of your friends are already fluent in HTML/CSS, it's natural to go into the custom wordpress theme coding, etc. This is not really an IT job anymore, but a part of the advertising industry. Pays poorly, and will continue downwards.
Your DSP friend is in better luck. This is a hard, difficult-to-learn skill. Especially if he also understands the advanced math behind it. Good DSP jobs are found in larger industries, so if he doesn't have a math degree, that would be advised. Having a Master's degree and being good at DSP programming will secure a very good future with few competitors.
As for "programming", that's not really one job but a wide field of jobs. Marketing style jobs are plenty and small, and available for both web and mobile. They pay poorly though. Corporate 10000+ hour projects or salaried positions are out there, but almost always require a M Sc. There are always going to be plenty of 100 hour projects at smaller companies, but it's poor job security.
"Programming" in general is also under very heavy fire from outsourcing to lowest bidder, so I would not advise anyone to start it as a career.
YMMV.