Leepic

Hello, a bit of an intro: I'm 33 years old from Europe and worked in IT departments for at least 5 years but I was always interested into programming, therefore I decided to take a dive into it and I'm planning to produce palpable results in the months to come.

What I do want to know, however, is what would a company expect from someone like me, who doesn't have a formal CS education (yet?) and less than a year of prior programming experience (with Visual Basic). I certainly have a plan in mind that I already execute around the things I want to learn, beginning with refreshing CS fundamentals and creating web applications using Python/Django and so on but my question is about the less "technical" stuff because I can certainly just open a job board and see what are the technical requirements for a job opening I'm interested.

What I want to know is if would my motivation, determination and ability to learn and display results through a portfolio of homemade projects will be enough to convince an employer to give me an interview and an offer? And if not, is there something I can do about it?

Hello.

I'm 32 years old and I've been suffering from depression for the last few years and that coupled with lack of friends and bad career choices made an explosive cocktail so I apologize for wanting to keep this post decoupled from my main profile.

During what I would call "last depression year" I found myself devouring book after book after book. Philosophy, science, psychology books. As a result, I redefined myself, although I wish I shouldn't have to go through this transformation in this "violent" way. I've reached the point of looking at my previous self and wonder who the beep is this guy. I'm not going to dive into further details.

I'm now more confident that I love mathematics and programming. More than ever. But I'm afraid to admit it. I'm afraid because deep inside me there's a voice telling me that I loved before and there's no consistent correlation between my feelings and what I can achieve. After all, my love for programming doesn't mean a lot if there's an industry that will judge me with "rules of thumb" such as "age", "race" or even better, "sex".

Or maybe they might prefer to judge me for my "depression era". Because, switching careers after my thirties isn't hard enough (sarcasm), I'll also have to explain why am I unemployed for the last 2-3 years. And I suppose saying "I was too busy contemplating suicide and had to choose between bus or train" won't do any good.

So, the ultimate question is, is it realistic to take the chance of pursuing my newfound desires?