Please dont get into programming, the career sucks and the pay is lousy for the years and years of effort to master your craft. If you like ceilings of 150k or so, then perhaps it's for you.

Did this jackass not read that I am a teacher? Does anyone below superintendent make more than 150K?

Or was this more nerdery sarcasm?

Oh, and it's been established that money isn't a reason to enter the field. Right?

Ignore him. He's probably a disgruntled programmer.

Seems like a Jackass to me.

Another good resource is MIT OpenCourseWare. I know of a guy who basically "went to school" using it. He dedicated 5 years of his life to going through those courses, and now he makes in the half a million dollar per year range doing consulting and teaching courses to other developers. He's pretty much a genius, though.

Xcode!

I had a conversation with a friend who's a Rubyist, the language I was thinking of starting with. He advised to look at Javascript as well due to demand.

I could look at something like SQL, but if I've never coded, it seems something like Ruby is a better place to start. More to think about.

I think you should also think about where you want to work and what you want to do. Then look at those kind of companies and industries and see what you want to do.

I will say, while they might not ask for it, I think you definitely want to have some familiarity with SQL and database type programming.


That said, you probably should be prepared for a salary decrease from teaching. You are going up against people with degrees and experience. You definitely need to learn and then create some programs. Definitely have a website about you where you show off some of your code.

[This message has been edited by MSCAg (edited 5/19/2014 10:33a).]

One way to give yourself credibility would be to jump into open source projects on GitHub. That would serve as a way for people to see what you can do and you would learn a ton by doing it.

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Please dont get into programming, the career sucks and the pay is lousy for the years and years of effort to master your craft. If you like ceilings of 150k or so, then perhaps it's for you.

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If you work at a sucky place, it's going to suck no matter what you do. I love programming and couldn't be happier with my job. And if you think the ceiling is 150k, you are fooling yourself.

MSC,

I appreciate the sentiment, but are there programmers making less than 40K? If that's the case, I'll have to wait until I get good enough to make more than that.

If one is able to land a development job with no experience and/or no academic background for programming, I would expect that job to pay less than 40k. Straight out of college (granted it was 7 years ago), I was making 43k.

Fair enough. I certainly don't want to have unrealistic expectations. Maybe I can use summers to do interships or contract work or something to ramp up.

Rodney,

Maybe you can leverage your teaching knowledge with technology:

http://usnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2012/10/02/14184513-georgia-teacher-rakes-in-1-million-by-selling-lesson-plans-to-teachers?lite

According to A&M's Career Center, A&M Computer Science (B.S.C.S.) graduates in the fall of 2013 had a median starting salary of $65K. Damn good pay for a 22 year old.

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MSC,

I appreciate the sentiment, but are there programmers making less than 40K? If that's the case, I'll have to wait until I get good enough to make more than that.

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My guess is a lot of those 40K+ jobs are going to be had by guys with a degree in the field. You may have to be willing to take a crap pay job to either get some experience or let a company check you out for relatively cheap risk.

If money is your only concern, there is money in education. Not as a teacher, but principal and central admins can pull good money.

The above poster probably hit it right, you should learn and then look in to education companies (Pearson, some other). Maybe be a good bridge.

I think having a degree in the subject is of less value than some of you guys are thinking. Especially since the OP does have a degree from A&M and isn't just a HS grad or something.

If you show a strong mastery of the subject matter, you can get a job and it won't be paying less than new grads simply because of their degree, IMO. Now, it may take a while to get that mastery, but if you go into an interview and know what you're talking about, places will hire you. In this case, it would probably also be beneficial to show what you've done in the past (which is why I mentioned GitHub above).

Lots of very good programmers do not have a computer science (or similar degree). But these very good programmers have lots of experience.

I would not hesitate to hire a SKILLED programmer without a degree.

There's also a lot of programmers with a CS degree that are horrible.

Your goals are going to dictate how you should approach this. (I'm assuming you're most interested in web or mobile app development because... well why wouldn't you be? Desktop apps are usually a lot more complicated than web/mobile)

Lots of people want to learn how to code as a hobby. For this, there are plenty of resources on the web to help you achieve your goal. I thought rubylearning.com is a fairly good intro that will probably give you enough of a foundation to jump to some rails tutorial. Lots of posters have mentioned other resources.

Beyond them are the people who dream of entrepreneurship and want to learn enough code to build their web business, but don't want to be a professional developer that's capable of handling lots of different tasks. For these people, I'd also recommend the web, but with the caveat that your idea isn't time sensitive. Business is very cutthroat and there's something to be said for being the first person to market with a product. If that's you, then when the school year ends in the next week or two, you should probably find a web development bootcamp over the summer break. Here's a link that covers a lot of them:

The Ultimate Guide to Coding Bootcamps: The Exhaustive List

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coding bootcamps are designed to train students for a full-time job as an entry-level developer by providing an intensive immersive learning program in an 8 to 12 week period (sometimes longer). The goal of these camps are to train you with the skills that employers are demanding without wasting any time. The price tag on these programs are high, ranging from $5-36K! However, a good bootcamp will land you a job with a $60K starting salary (or more), so the ROI makes the investment worthwhile

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Also, while they're pricey, some of them are very flexible about payment. Look at this one:

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Payment Plan: $13,000 upfront, or $15,000 payment plan, or 18% of first-job salary over a 6-month plan after being hired as a developer.

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A bunch of others give substantial refunds/discounts if you commit to finding your first job through their search/placement programs.

So the costs aren't necessarily prohibitive (minus the lost earnings while you attend). But anyway, after finishing that, you could go back to teaching and start building your business in the background (you know, because everyone knows that teachers work like 5hrs/day ) and if it's lucrative enough, jump to full-time at some point in the future.

Then you have the professional developers. I'm not sure there's another white collar profession out there that accepts self-taught people the way coding does. That said, paper can make the transition A LOT easier, so I'd again go the bootcamp route. That's just the easiest and fastest way to land that first job.

[This message has been edited by Deputy Travis Junior (edited 5/20/2014 1:36a).]

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I took four years of English in high school so learning how to teach it at the high school level should be quick and easy.

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I guess I missed it: where did the OP say learning to code would be quick and easy?

Have you seriously never heard of a career change?

91, we've already been through the sarcasm wars and moved on. Your point is taken.

You could always look into the Microsoft stuff (C#, .Net, Asp.net MVC). They have pretty robust free web tools and frankly, they are the leaders in the business world.

Since the advice keeps coming in, I should share my current plans.

I'm going to use this summer (teacher, remember) to dive in.

I've decided to go the Ruby route (with Rails to follow.) I have a good friend who is a Rubyist so I'll be working with him as well as several solid resources I've found. HTML/CSS/Javascript will follow in time.

If I end the summer having learned a bunch and not burned out, then I'll continue on and take it from there. Maybe next summer, I'll be looking to make a change.

I personally don't like the Ruby language. I do use it (without Rails) for a simple testing web site I built. I've just kinda stuck with it to force myself to expand a little (the site is running on a raspberry pi, so there are limitations).

I guess what I'm getting at is if you feel a little burned out, give something else a try. You are likely to get burned out at some point. I've had those feelings in the past myself and I really enjoy it.

I made the decision balancing employability with accessibility (for a beginner) along with available resources. I debated going with JS first, but went with Ruby, knowing I'll have to come back to it eventually.

Right now, I just need to learn a language, and more importantly, how to think like a programmer.

Wish me luck.

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Right now, I just need to learn a language, and more importantly, how to think like a programmer.

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I couldn't agree more. Sounds to me like you're already off to a great start. Good luck!

I write js mostly, and +1 to what a few people have said. Debugging, and fixing code is just as important as being able to write source code.

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To be a great programmer, you need to be very good at math. Given that you're an English teacher...well...

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Totally false. Good coding is more like writing poetry than doing calculus. I know a lot of humanities folks who are great coders.

So, I'm a self-taught coder, my degree was in architecture. I made the career change two years ago and do pretty well now. I think Ruby is a great place to start, Javascript is a good second language. I can tell you more about how I made the switch and give you some more detailed pointers if you're interested. PM me if you like and we can chat about it.

Efficient coding is more like doing diff eq than a limerick.

The exactitude of the process reminds me of copy editing when I was a journalist. Making sure grammar, spelling, punctuation, and all conventions are followed is a must for good writing. In code, it's a deal breaker. No missing commas, or extra ones for that matter.

It doesn't translate well the other way around:

A programmer’s wife sends him to the grocery store with the instructions, “get a loaf of bread, and if they have eggs, get a dozen.” He comes home with a dozen loaf of bread and tells her, “they had eggs.”