Is it possible to be hired as a Junior Developer if you are 36 years old?

Yeah, just keep trying and don’t give up. Life is about dealing with failures. If despite 100 failures you will try 101 time, something else can happen cause you learned 100 times. ( unless you didn’t learned from failures cause you’re complete idiot )

Junior and senior in this case Should not have anything with age to do :)

You got 29 years left until retirement, that’s a long ass time so you should be fine 🙂

Im friends with someone who got his CS degree at 40 and had no industry experience when he graduated. He went on to have an extremely successful career after that

That's a great question.

I assume you are concerned with ageism? Rest of the answers are encouraging and I agree with them :), but still think that agesim is present in some meausre, unfortunately. :(

@ed-dev-edu
Ageism is a real problem in the web world.
Outside of it, the dev shortage actually is real...

I just got hired as a junior (though my title will just be Software Developer) at 31, so I'm going with Yes.

I'd hire any age of they know their shit

@Crost this answer wins

@Crost You would, but significant portion/majority of HR managers (or other personnel that have say in hiring) don't share your opinion, unfortunately.

Yes. Wouldn't be that odd. Plenty of companies have younger devs teaching olders - that will also happen if an experienced dev wants to transition into a new field.

However you will face some prejudice from recruiters.

The idea of someone with a long career outside software will make some people think "Are they serious about programming?". As opposed to someone who picked programming as their first choice.

(Even though that might be untrue. Many people might have picked programming as a second or third choice )

Some also stupidly imagine that an older person might not be happy in a junior "grunt" position. Not as passionate and might be aiming for a manager position.

One advantage these days is many companies are interested in deverification and that includes age and career background.

So when a recruiter says "This candidate comes from a long career outside of software" while that used to be a negative - it might be flipped today. "Good, they might bring a different perspective."

Actually, I had a colleague that switched from being a senior dba to a junior node dev in his early 40s. So. Yes it is possible.

people changing careers is getting more and more common, so go for it :)