It's definitely possible, here's a real-world example. A highly valued employee in a (relatively) small, software development house had a very varied background. He had been dabbling in tech, but really came from all sorts of manual labor jobs. It wasn't until he was 40-45 that he got a bit more serious about IT. Learned a bit of HTML, a bit of Flash, a bit of graphical design (this particular guy had always enjoyed drawing) etc.
He got hired to his first IT job when he was about 45 if I recall correctly, and I was at his 10 year anniversary some years ago.
This particular guy is not a star developer or star graphical designer, but he is sufficiently skilled as to build the websites, make design for their more complicated web apps, taking charge of the e-marketing production, internal support etc etc.
He is extremely valuable to the business due to his variety of skills, but I'm sure he could also have become very accomplished in one discipline, if his interests had been more focused.
Really, it's possible. The great thing about software development is you can learn pretty much all of it on your own.
It does however require a real interest and determination, because self-study is tough and it takes a lot of hours of both study and practice to become valuable to an employer.
He got hired to his first IT job when he was about 45 if I recall correctly, and I was at his 10 year anniversary some years ago.
This particular guy is not a star developer or star graphical designer, but he is sufficiently skilled as to build the websites, make design for their more complicated web apps, taking charge of the e-marketing production, internal support etc etc.
He is extremely valuable to the business due to his variety of skills, but I'm sure he could also have become very accomplished in one discipline, if his interests had been more focused.
Really, it's possible. The great thing about software development is you can learn pretty much all of it on your own.
It does however require a real interest and determination, because self-study is tough and it takes a lot of hours of both study and practice to become valuable to an employer.