“One of the big obstacles in a job interview when you’re older is that people think you’re inflexible and you can’t learn new things,” said Ms. Beigle-Bryant, who was laid off from her job as an administrative assistant at Microsoft in 2011.

The code lessons she took a few years ago, also through Codecademy, “gave me an edge,” she said. “I developed a confidence that I didn’t have before.”

The operators of many of the nation’s nearly 100 coding boot camps say the vast majority of students enrolled in immersive training programs, which usually last 12 to 15 weeks and cost about $12,000 to $15,000, find employment upon completion. (The most popular program? According to Course Report, a website that monitors this industry, it’s a JavaScript-focused “full stack,” which teaches all stages of software development.)

Older people have been part of these success stories, too, yet they are often hesitant even to get started.

“I think so many people are discouraged because they think they’re too old,” said Letta M. Raven, a tech support specialist for a payroll software company and a frequent speaker at women’s tech conferences. She has observed this reluctance among some conferencegoers and even had it herself.

“I was considered old in this industry,” said Ms. Raven, who is 42 and held many jobs, including pastry chef and artist, before settling into her current career. She was long interested in software development, but it wasn’t until two years ago that she enrolled at PDX Code Guild, a boot camp, and took courses in programming languages like Python, Ruby and JavaScript.

Ms. Beigle-Bryant also remembers being pointed away from anything technical and more toward the fine arts when she was younger. Programming “was something I’ve wanted to do since high school,” she said, “but I was always discouraged from taking computer classes.” She did manage to take one, in Basic programming, in 1973.