Oh and age by itself has nothing to do with it. There are old people who could pick it up because they have the right fundamentals. Sure there are some challenges that come with age, but let’s not sweep all old people into the category of “cannot enter a programming career.”
I’m not saying that’s what you were doing. I think you were talking about age as a further factor compounding the difficulty on top of already lacking basic related skills.
I am a senior full stack developer and typically in the top 10% of the developers in my org wherever I've gone past 5 years.
I do 0 algebra or geometry. I call APIs, I put stuff in databases. I store state.
I really don't think it's "math"y at all. I transform data, I use libraries. I can't think of any algebraic examples of anything I've done in the past 5 years, let alone geometry.
That's not something to be happy about, that's something to be terrified of. If nothing the average coder does requires any particular specialized skills beyond gluing together libraries built by experts, what do you think will happen when, like the coal miners, some technological or societal change comes along that reduces the need for average coders?
Demand for coders isn't infinite.
I mainly taught a handful of college educated people who studied things like earth sciences, arts, and ocean science, but struggle to understand a for loop or a function call.
And now I understand how it can be un-fun to struggle, especially if you don't intrinsically enjoy writing scripts and mucking around the terminal.
I think it's more likely that the basic math (algebra, geometry, etc) is missing when you look at men who started working in the mines before they finish high school. Without the math foundation, it's not "hard work", but a weak foundation which just causes frustration.
That, and a 58 year old guy learning to code will soon have to compete against a 20-something with far more education + computer + social media experience, especially since coding can be done overseas.