Attention Coders: Potential career changer looking for advice

5,482 Views | 92 Replies | Last: 8 yr ago by AGSPORTSFAN07
TexasRebel
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HECUBUS
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AG
If you are in Austin, ACC has some certification bootcamp options. They do fill quickly, as in 24 hours from registration opening.
Sparkle Pony
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Rodney, has this thread crushed your spirits yet, or given you fresh resolve?
Rodney Dean
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AG
Neither. I'm going to give it a shot, knowing how long and hard the road will be. If it's something I should do, I'll stick with it. I appreciate all of the feedback.

Three cheers for the Nerdery!
HECUBUS
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AG
When I was at Motorola, they would bring local teachers in for program management in the summer. Surprise, EE and CS folks are a lot like kids in grade school (and the Nerdery).

At Motorola, a teaching background was highly respected in high tech.
rbcs_2
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AG
I think that's more of an indictment on the type of people Motorola employs than anything else.
Sentinel
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AG
Having a teaching background and programming experience is wonderful. If you proceed with programming as a career, you could always retire and then go back to teaching STEM to kids in school.
HECUBUS
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AG
An interesting read on the coding bootcamps.

http://m.us.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052702304422704579574083423949544?mobile=y&mg=reno64-wsj&url=http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304422704579574083423949544.html
MathNewman06
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AG
http://codecombat.com/
"learn to code Javascript by playing a game"
JDCAG (NOT Colin)
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AG
quote:
When I was at Motorola, they would bring local teachers in for program management in the summer. Surprise, EE and CS folks are a lot like kids in grade school (and the Nerdery).

At Motorola, a teaching background was highly respected in high tech.


I would take offense to this if I didn't yearn so badly for naps every afternoon.
Shawdaddy
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AG
I will offer up some encouragement for you!

I made a career change about four years ago. My primary job is related to finance, but the small company I work for does all of its own programming in house. (My boss and I do all of it). He is a very talented,self taught programmer who has been doing it for 25 years, really since very early on, and has been helping me to learn it. While programming in my down time I have become fairly adept with C#, and MySQL.

My additional advice to you that would be to REALLY make good money, it is all about using programming skills in an area where you have a particular expertise. Even the best programmer is limited to what they can write by their knowledge of the subject matter. i.e. to write a financial accounting system, you have to have an expert knowledge of how it all works.

All that being said, go for it. It is intimidating starting out, but you learn it a little at a time. And by far the best way to learn it is to program until you run into something you can't figure out, then research how to do it. It is time consuming, but very effective.

Good Luck!
Shawdaddy
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AG
Sorry, DP.

[This message has been edited by Shawdaddy (edited 5/22/2014 12:14p).]
Pro Ag
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AG
Where do you live? That will help people tell you what type of free groups are around that would be helpful.

I'm not a developer but work in software development and can tell you your attitude will factor in. Also, if you want to be really good you will have to consistently refine your skills and learn. I wanted to go the dev route out of college (engineering degree), but I'm glad I didn't because I don't want to work/tinker in my free time.

Good luck!
rbcs_2
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AG
quote:
I wanted to go the dev route out of college (engineering degree), but I'm glad I didn't because I don't want to work/tinker in my free time.


Not really. The programmers that do this kind of stuff are the ones that love programming so much that it's also their hobby. On rare occasions I will tinker with some programming related project outside of work.
Aggie Q
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AG
Rodney - I saw this post a while back and have been meaning to respond to it for a while, you’ll hopefully understand by the end of this why it’s taken me some time to get back to you! In short, I’ve just recently gone down a very similar path (from being a teacher to developing software); actually I’m right at the cusp of that transition which will be finalized when school ends here in a couple of weeks.

Fair warning - this is long!

Quick background: I graduated AERO from A&M back in ‘07 but decided to go into teaching (lot of factors going into that decision) and have been teaching ever since. Through the years I’ve taught high school physics, geometry, astronomy, calculus, and engineering - the latter two being my current placements. These last couple of years I’ve been feeling that “creative itch” - a need to be building new things and solving new problems on a routine basis, something that teaching just wasn’t fulfilling for me.

In 2012 Udacity offered it’s first round of free courses and my brother turned me on to them. I decided to take their inaugural “web development (python)” course in April of that year during my conference periods/weeknights/weekends. By the end of April some of my Calculus students had discovered I was learning how to build websites so they asked if I could make a Prom voting website. Thinking it would be good practice I said “yes” - that was easily one of the most stressful projects I’ve worked on!

Creating a prom voting website for high school girls taught me the most important lesson I’ve learned today: if you want to get better at coding (or anything) just do it - build stuff, build lots of stuff. Definitely build stuff with hard deadlines and a lot of pressure. You will screw stuff up. But you will learn and get better.

That summer I didn’t take many days off - I spent almost every day (even Saturdays/Sundays) building some apps for my Calculus class. I definitely had to learn how to balance family time and work time (my wife is also a teacher, so filling “our” summer up with coding was definitely a strain, and taught me the importance of making a time budget and sticking to it).

For the 2012-2013 school year I spent most of my afternoons working a few hours after school on my projects. I probably built 20+ webapps for my classroom/school during that first year. All of my apps were education related (with a couple exceptions) and most of them directly helped me in my primary job - teaching. That was a good choice in hindsight - even if I never got a programming job at least I was making my life as a teacher easier.

In the spring of 2013 (1 year after starting) I developed the idea for a large scale webapp I called “lessonwell” here’s a post on it from back then and I spent almost the entire summer of that year developing that app. This was a good experience that taught me a lot about bug fixing, interacting with customers, and some really niche stuff that I hadn’t encountered before.

For the 2013-2014 school year I really doubled down on lessonwell and taught myself the principles of test-driven-development and restful api’s. I also made a conscious effort to populate my github account with all my projects and contribute to stack overflow. In January of this year I decided to “go for it” and started working hard looking for a job.

My first step was to figure out what job I was looking for; that actually took me about two months, and this was the most confusing step. What do I want to do? That’s a tough question to answer.

In the end this is what I came up with: Python / Web Development / Education related / Remote (work from home).

Once I had that figured out I started looking for jobs that “mostly” matched those descriptions (some obvious exceptions were Stripe and FogCreek). I didn’t apply to these jobs for another two months, instead I just read the job descriptions and taught myself the skills that I was lacking. Then, in March of this year I started applying to jobs that matched my search. A lot of the places I sent emails to never called back, some people called back and scheduled interviews the next day. Some interviews were very challenging and left me feeling like I wasn’t prepared (FogCreek’s interview was very challenging but was a good experience - I didn’t get an offer there). In the end I took an offer from a small software company in New York that is working on a SIS (student information service) platform.

I’ve been working the last month part time for this company and will come on full time in June (working remotely from my home!)

tl;dr: Long story short - it’s definitely possible, but it’s been a long road (2 years) and I’ve worked my butt off to get here (60 hour weeks minimum even through my “free” summers). You should expect that at least.

My recommendations:

1) Find and take a good introduction course - Udacity’s course is all in Python, and if you want to do Rails I’m sure you can find a ton of other options out there as well - but I learned a TON in that Udacity course and Python has been very fun to work on.

2) Build as many apps as you can - try and build stuff that will help you out with what you are already doing. Also build random stuff that is fun

3) Github - you’ll want to understand how it works and put all of your code there

4) Get familiar with StackOverflow and contribute as you are able
5) Talk to people and go to meetups.

6) Take a look at weworkremotely.com and read up on job descriptions - learn those things.


I'd be happy to answer any questions you have about this - qdonnellan at g mail

Once you've built some stuff that's live, let me know, I've got some contacts in the Austin area who could probably help you from there!


[This message has been edited by Aggie Q (edited 5/22/2014 3:46p).]
Rodney Dean
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AG
Can we move Aggie Q's post to the top? Excellent!

I'll definitely be in touch.
khkman22
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AG
Rodney Dean, just curious how this turned out for you.
Rodney Dean
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AG
Just made an update post. Let me know what you think.
reb,
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quote:
Something else to think about is the industry you want to code for. Web development is a crowded field, but at least what you learn is applicable across a lot of different industries. If you want less competition for jobs (and therefore a better chance at a decent paycheck sooner), then learn something that is specialized for a particular industry. For example, the demand for developers with SQL, HL7 and some clinical experience is huge right now because of the frantic push to get everyone on electronic health records as fast as possible.
Glad to see this. Rodney, if I may hijack your thread a bit for a tangent I hope you won't mind. Wall of text is incoming.

I worked for a couple of years in the tech field, which was an industry I got into simply out of my love for tech, internet, and the web. I found a small company hiring that made a SaaS web app and not having a formal tech education, and being self-taught nerd with a natural aptitude for teaching and patience, what I did was pre-sales engineering, client training and on-boarding, and technical support on the customer-facing side. On the back-end, I did beta-testing, quality checking, and worked with the product roadmap as part of the software development lifecycle to prioritize features (through customer feedback and industry direction) for development, testing, and staged roll-out. I also handled the CRM and web/email marketing. It was great experience.

I found myself laid off along with a good chunk of the company, though, because the company didn't really grow or make money during my time there and despite all that I was doing, I was still really replaceable. And that goes back, I believe, to my lack of a formal tech education.

In almost every job listing for things that seemed like it would be a good fit for me, I would see those three letters over and over: SQL. I knew I could do a bootcamp or something but for credibility's sake, I decided to go back to school and I'm working on a Masters in Information Systems with a focus on database development and administration. I'm really loving it because I always wanted to learn to program, and am hungry for more. This is my first semester so I just got through VB.net but next up is C# and SQL.

I got a ton of satisfaction out of pouring energy into my semester project. I wanted the application to do so many things that I left the course material behind months ago. The professor took a look at it last week and said that it was completely unnecessary (in a good way) because it was an intro course and I was doing things that weren't taught till the advanced courses. Like...I didn't want to store the login passwords in a stupid text file and use StreamReader() like other groups in the past had done, I wanted it to hit up an access database so that took me down the rabbit hole of oledb voodoo and some sql. I was stitching together a lot of things I found through googling, stackoverflow, and dreamincode.net. But I know thats all rookie stuff. Maybe it was overly ambitious...my code is a damn mess...but it compiles.

It was a group project, so I figured this was a great chance to use github. I taught myself the basics of Git but I couldn't get enough buy-in from my group to where they would actually use it. That is unfortunate because I know that in the workflow of any real development job, doing social coding with repos will be a part of the 9 to 5.

From what I'm hearing, companies are wanting more than just code monkeys these days, they want them to have business sense. That is great if true, because I have an M.B.A. (which has thus far been totally worthless for me) that they can use to check a box, and a love of business in its own right. Especially the business of tech. I just need to get in a room with someone and they are going to be able to tell that every day for the past 7 years, I've listened to tech news podcasts and consume as much information as I can just as a hobby. I can talk anyones ear off about the emergence of the cloud and mobile, who the players are, what they do and what their strategy is, and how the trends coming are things like IoT, wearable/implanted biometrics, and a reinvigorated focus on InfoSec. I understand and can discuss all of it in the relevant context, be it financial/economic, legal/regulatory, scientific/technical, marketing/PR, cultural/social, etc.

I have no issues with being a DBA or the like out of a misguided sense of professional pride. My goal is to not find myself in the same situation I was in, which was working in a company that wasn't growing, doing work that could be done by anyone off the street that has a basic level of sales, business, and technical IQ. I feel like I'm on the right path, here. I think. I hope. When I spin things the way I have in this post, and see SQL mentioned as a desired skill, I feel better about the risk I'm taking going into debt. I want a damn job. I want to be able to buy a house with a backyard for my son one day. I'm hoping that by the fall or by the spring, I'll have enough under my belt from a developer/DBA standpoint to get a foot in the door somewhere making coffee. I have my eye on the medical center here in Houston as a target rich environment.
Ryan34
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AG
You'd probably be a fit in my line of work.
reb,
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quote:
You'd probably be a fit in my line of work.
does it come with a hot wife like you have?
AggieEE
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AG
I think an English major would make a great programmer. You need to understand structure...which an English major should.
Rodney Dean
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I think you might be right. The writing process is one of revision, which is huge. Figuring out audience and structure is big, too.

I'm hoping the ability to write will come in handy as a soft skill, too, being able to attract attention via blog posts, write internal communication, or even documentation for the software itself.

I guess a good way to say it is, people would like their developers to be good writers, so if one has that skill, then it's a matter of learning the technical skills. The hard part.
AGSPORTSFAN07
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quote:
I know of a job opening right now that pays ~$150K if you can write assembler language programs on a z/OS operating system with deep knowledge of IMS database internals.
 
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