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Is it worthwhile to go back to school to start a computer programming career? I'm currently 35 and work as a billing clerk for a small law firm. It's a stable job, but one with no prospects for advancement. My mom has latched onto the idea that going into IT is going to be the key to financial security, but I am incredibly skeptical. Also, I already did some post-college schooling to get a CPA certificate, and I don't want to go through it again. EDIT: Stuff others have posted BigPaddy posted:This is a good idea and after that if you wanted something more structured with support https://www.udemy.com has a number of courses for different languages and technologies that would be a good start before looking into a Coding Bootcamp to get something to show you abilities rather than a full on degree. Grumpwagon posted:https://www.freecodecamp.org is also a good resource for learning web programming, especially if you're more of a self directed learner (you'll need to use resources outside the course to learn some of the material). They have a beta site with a bunch of updated techs: http://beta.freecodecamp.com/en/map Che Delilas posted:Oh, I forgot to link this in my last post: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6G3kQyqMFpQ. It's basically "Don't wait, for gently caress's sake" but there's some nice insight into the hiring process from an employer's perspective. SirPhoebos fucked around with this message at 21:02 on Sep 6, 2017 |
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Aug 15, 2017 15:17
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This is not an easy question to answer and this will probably turn into a long post but here we go. Currently I run a team of Salesforce and Full Stack developers for a 50 person startup in New Hampshire and recently have hired from Goons straight out of college for the Full Stack team. I have been working in Software Development in Corporate IT jobs and Product Development for over 10 years at this point so have a bit of experience to pass on. Is Software Dev a good career to move into? Yes with a few buts. There is a skills gap in the area and while you hear about people coming over on H1b visas taker jerbs and all that there are way more out there than there are people coming in to fill them. I moved from Britain to take up a position in the Boston area in 2012 not only due to a gap in skills needed in software dev but because I had a lot of customer facing experience and being able to deal with non technical people as a technical person is a useful place to be. So there are jobs, they are generally good jobs and the exceptions I will go over, the wages and benefits tend to be good and there are opportunities for upward mobility to a point if you want to be a pure developer and further up in to management if you wanted to go that way. You also can work in almost any industry since everyone has some investment in technology at this point. The main split with the types of jobs is between Corporate IT and a Development Shop. Corporate IT will have you developing tools for that business, extending and maintaining other software they buy and has more potential to give you exposure to a number of different technologies and products. I started in Corporate IT and learned a lot of skills across a lot of different things which set me up well later to be able to do a lot of work with system integration and high level designing of systems and software products. However in a corp IT job you are very much a cost and are there to provide tools for Sales and Marketing to be able to sell the product. You won't get a lot of respect from the higher ups in the company as they are likely all Sales and Marketing people who are perpetuating the culture of crapping on IT. You generally can work up good relationships with the people using the tools you work on as you will be their savior when everything is broken but Director, VP and Exec level they just wish you would make everything 100% reliable so they didn't have to pay you anymore. These are the kinds of jobs that you hear getting outsourced a lot for short term gains so the execs hit profitability targets and bail before their replacements have to institute a project to rehire a local IT team to unfuck everything. This might sound cynical but I have seen it 3 times already. Other frustrations with corp IT include having to deal with vendors of lovely products that refuse to unshit them and you cannot move to something potentially less poo poo (p.s. all the alternatives are poo poo as well) because your boss signed a 5 year contract with them to get a better rate so their boss would give them a bonus. Having to deal with non technical people asking for impossible things. I was once asked to make a server psychic so it would know that a file was corrupted before it downloaded the file to check it for corruption. They didn't understand that the origin of the data should check the integrity of what it generated then tell us it was time to grab it and yeah that was only Monday of that week. Final frustration would be dealing with corporate politics that you have very little input over yet negatively impacts your life. An example of this would be a CMO forcing through the purchase of a certain tool that we knew wasn't going to do the job we needed it to because he was golf buddies with the CEO of the company that made it and they needed a North American sale to trumped about in the Marketing magazines. Good things about Corporate IT. Companies tend to be bigger and more mature, might have a bonus structure and better benefits due to scaling costs. Since it will be a sales and marketing company primarily they will be events held that you will get invited to, I had a few trips to the Caribbean payed for the company to do sales kick offs in April because they wanted someone in IT to tell them about all the cool things they would be getting to help them sell more and blah blah blah fruit smoothy on the beach with a BBQ for a week whatever. The other type is the Developer working for a Product Engineering department of a company that sells software. Note I said sells rather than makes software because again every company is a sales company. This can be for an established software house like the Oracles and Microsofts of the world or for a smaller startup like who I work for. It varies company to company and there are plenty of stories about lovely things happening to people at Oracle, Salesforce, Microsoft, Amazon, Google etc... etc... but they tend to be more engineering focused companies so you tend to have a little more say in how things work and your input might get a little further up the chain. Most of what I said about corp IT applies apart from having tools shoved into your lap by non technical people, instead it will be the technical people doing it and a lot of the time it is either automation which makes you job easier or some other tool that you might or might not use. In Software Dev for a Software company the major complaints will come from pressure to deliver new features to a timeline so they can be sold to new customers and help keep current ones, timelines are super important and form the main part of THE GREAT GAME!!! The game basically is you over estimating how long everything will take because you know that someone will push back asking for it to be done sooner because they promised it to a customer and didn't ask you first. In my job this is where currently I just laugh at them and leave because I have the authority to dictate those timelines and do all I can to protect the off hours of my staff. However that is because I have been in situations where you are compelled to do long days and weekends and it sucks balls while being indicative of lovely planning. I plan everything out months in advance and organise things into little buckets people can shuffle about to make themselves feel good. Sadly this is not the norm but there we go. BigPaddy's list of Tech Jobs to never take: - Games Developers: Just no, they will work you to near death and when you no longer perform throw you out and get in some more bright eyed youngsters to flog. The crunch is the norm not the exception and very few people make their way up from a code monkey to the hot poo poo designers you see at E3 over promising and underdelivering. - Consultancy Firm: The Cap Geminis of the world where you will be a replaceable cog as soon as a cheaper cog comes along. Throw in that every quarter your performance will be judged and if they feel like they have to put you in the bottom 10% out you go. Finally you have to deal with dumb customers whow ill not communicate properly and blame you for everything. - "Solutions" Companies: Similar to Consultancy firms but smaller and usually hired to do development work that the client didn't plan correctly and oh poo poo it needs to be done now now now. High stress, low payoff and you spend you time fixing other peoples poo poo and being at fault when it doesn't work anyway and misses the deadline. Right I need to go to a meeting where I tell people why my team are busy and to not bother them under penalty of death. I hope the above is helpful and not too negative I just wanted to press the reality of the industry. I am sure someone will be along to tell me I am wrong any minute now.
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Aug 16, 2017 15:28
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Programming is good and fun and generally well paid and employable once you're established, but you may or may not have the knack for it and if you're studying it just to make maximum  rather than because you enjoy it/have that knack then you're probably not going to make a super great programmer. Maybe Google yourself a Python tutorial or something, play around a bit, see if it's something you want to be doing 40 hours a week every week? It's free.Edit: having worked at two consultancies and known several people from the games industry, I agree with all of the above re: don't take these jobs, btw.
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Aug 16, 2017 17:16
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feedmegin posted:Maybe Google yourself a Python tutorial or something, play around a bit, see if it's something you want to be doing 40 hours a week every week? It's free. This is a good idea and after that if you wanted something more structured with support https://www.udemy.com has a number of courses for different languages and technologies that would be a good start before looking into a Coding Bootcamp to get something to show you abilities rather than a full on degree. With udemy when you sign up you will get discounts (like $85 courses will be $10). This is a common occurrence, never pay full price for any udemy courses.
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Aug 16, 2017 18:33
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Thanks for the responses. I'll take a look at that software you mentioned.
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Aug 22, 2017 15:14
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They hit the software programming side of things pretty well, but IT isn't all programming. There's also infrastructure (ops) work, which is keeping the networks / servers / whatever running. That's less programming, although there will likely be some since Microsoft is pushing towards using scripting more often, and Linux has always been about that. There's also support, but abandon hope all ye who decide to spend their lives telling people to restart their computer.
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Aug 25, 2017 03:52
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https://www.freecodecamp.org is also a good resource for learning web programming, especially if you're more of a self directed learner (you'll need to use resources outside the course to learn some of the material). They have a beta site with a bunch of updated techs: http://beta.freecodecamp.com/en/map
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Aug 26, 2017 13:16
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22 Eargesplitten posted:They hit the software programming side of things pretty well, but IT isn't all programming. There's also infrastructure (ops) work, which is keeping the networks / servers / whatever running. That's less programming, although there will likely be some since Microsoft is pushing towards using scripting more often, and Linux has always been about that. If you decide programming is not your thing then as the above says there are other things in a tech job. Networking and getting experience with AWS, Google Cloud, Azure, Heroku etc... is a good thing to look into but more traditional infrastructure isn't going away any time soon. 22 Eargesplitten posted:There's also support, but abandon hope all ye who decide to spend their lives telling people to restart their computer. Don't do this to yourself.
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Aug 29, 2017 12:56
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I'm in a somewhat similar position to the OP. I'm an engineer now and doing well enough at that, but it's not really anything I'm passionate about. I've always loved programming and pick it up very quickly. I got some bad advice when I was choosing my career and decided to specifically avoid programming BECAUSE I liked it. What kind of qualifications would I need to get a job in IT or programming? I'm looking to get in with as little extra school as possible, basically.
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Sep 3, 2017 01:56
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Zyme posted:I'm in a somewhat similar position to the OP. I'm an engineer now and doing well enough at that, but it's not really anything I'm passionate about. I've always loved programming and pick it up very quickly. I got some bad advice when I was choosing my career and decided to specifically avoid programming BECAUSE I liked it. What kind of qualifications would I need to get a job in IT or programming? I'm looking to get in with as little extra school as possible, basically. I can speak to the programming side a bit. This industry doesn't really have a lot of formal qualifications, not unless you plan on going into the deep computer science stuff. There are certs, but they don't really mean anything to most people. So good news, you'll really just have to prove that you can hack it. First thing is you'll probably want to figure out what area you want to focus on. Do you like web development? Moblie? Database? Something else? Do you have a particular language or stack you like to work with? Pick an area and make some poo poo with it. Doesn't have to be fresh or a new idea, just make some things. Keep in mind there are roughly three berjillion choices of languages and technologies to work with. If you don't have a preference or inclination, my advice at this point would probably be to learn Javascript and focus on web dev, it's got a great job market right now and isn't going away any time soon. People in this thread have already mentioned some good learning resources, and threads in the Cavern of Cobol subforum are good places to ask for advice along these lines as well. I like Pluralsight (tip: you can play the videos at a faster speed if you need to, some of these people are ridiculously slow). Your goal here is to make things. Small things. A website that can parse some text and spit out information about it and/or reformat it. An app that plays a vomiting sound if you shake your phone too hard. Don't loving try and make Facebook Zyme Edition or anything like that, you'll paralyze yourself. Take those things and put the code into a public repository that you can link to and show off and talk about. GitHub and Bitbucket are your boys here. This is how you prove to companies that you aren't just a bag of wind who read in Forbes that programmers make good money. Put your GitHub or Bitbucket URL on your resume. This last bit is important. The instant you make a complete thing that works, start applying for jobs. You won't feel like you're ready. That's because you never really feel like you're ready, because every time you learn something, you learn about 5 more things to learn that you didn't even know existed. You'll always have the urge to think, "I'll just learn this ONE more thing and then I'll start applying." Fight that urge; it's a beast that cannot be fed. I still feel like this all the time and I've been doing this for 6 years. If you have something that you can show off, just start applying. This is the toughest time, you'll be competing with the largest applicant pool for jobs that can be done passably by a good portion of that pool. Just keep applying and keep making things that you can show off and talk about. Standard boilerplate about hygiene and not being an antisocial goony goon goes here (yes this matters even for programmers).
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Sep 3, 2017 19:26
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Che Delilas posted:There are certs, but they don't really mean anything to most people. So good news, you'll really just have to prove that you can hack it. Being someone who hires developers I can tell you that I don't give a poo poo about certs since I have done a lot of them and now they only last a couple of years exist only to make money for the vendor. Some look for them and will put them on their job reqs but honestly as long as I don't think you are trying to bullshit me and answer my questions with the answers I want to hear I will give you a go.
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Sep 3, 2017 20:36
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Che Delilas posted:.... Thanks for the suggestions! I've been hacking together websites from my own bastardized HTML/CSS/Javascript for fun for the better part of a decade. I'll have to start thinking about putting together something I could put together to showcase. In the last couple of years I have been playing around with optimizing sites for mobile responsiveness, which seems like it could be relevant.
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Sep 4, 2017 00:52
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Zyme posted:Thanks for the suggestions! I've been hacking together websites from my own bastardized HTML/CSS/Javascript for fun for the better part of a decade. I'll have to start thinking about putting together something I could put together to showcase. In the last couple of years I have been playing around with optimizing sites for mobile responsiveness, which seems like it could be relevant. Honestly if you have anything remotely functional in either of those categories you should just start applying now. This isn't like a presentation to the Board or something, you don't need it to be fully baked or polished. The point is to prove that you can write code that does something you wanted it to do, and talk about it. You'll probably get a bunch of rejections; if you have the opportunity ask them for specific reasons, and if they cite problems with your code, work on fixing those problems or at least researching why they're problems so you can talk about why they're problems and what you'd do differently. But mostly just apply. Now. By the way, the very fact that you code in your spare time, for fun, will be a huge plus for some companies. Oh, I forgot to link this in my last post: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6G3kQyqMFpQ. It's basically "Don't wait, for gently caress's sake" but there's some nice insight into the hiring process from an employer's perspective.
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Sep 4, 2017 02:19
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BigPaddy posted:If you decide programming is not your thing then as the above says there are other things in a tech job. Networking and getting experience with AWS, Google Cloud, Azure, Heroku etc... is a good thing to look into but more traditional infrastructure isn't going away any time soon. If you do this to yourself, do yourself a favor and go into enterprise support. The less you deal with the mouth-breathing public who consider computers a totem of fearful incomprehension the happier you will be long-term.
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Sep 4, 2017 03:16
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Glad someone made a thread for this. I've already changed careers once at 30. Now that I'm 35, I might be looking into something else. I've got some living situation issues (I don't know what country I'll be living in in the next few months, and my existing education is extremely US-centric). What sub-field of programming would I be best suited focusing on if my main career objective is to maximize the possibility of remote or overseas work? Is WebDev still the answer? I'd made it a good deal of the way through the FreeCodeCamp front end section last year before my paid work got really really busy and I stopped. Been thinking of starting again lately.
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Sep 6, 2017 00:15
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How does one get into entry level security type roles? (I.e. Pen testing or forensics) I'm gearing up for a career transition from a completely unrelated field, and to at least put myself in a position gain entry level work I'm doing all that I can to build a web development-based portfolio of projects. However, I'm going back to school for a network security specific program and I'm hoping I can some how tie it all together.
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Sep 6, 2017 20:43
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I just got an offer for a property accountant job, so it appears I won't have to consider making another career change after all. But thanks for all the responses, and I'll keep an eye on this thread in case there is something worth adding to the OP.
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Sep 6, 2017 20:57
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SirPhoebos posted:I just got an offer for a property accountant job, so it appears I won't have to consider making another career change after all. But thanks for all the responses, and I'll keep an eye on this thread in case there is something worth adding to the OP. Congrats!
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Sep 6, 2017 21:00
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I'm currently in the process of reskilling for CompSci and this thread has been useful so far, so keep the tips coming. It was actually getting a Vive wot did it for me, I was so amazed that I signed up for University (I'm in Australia, so higher ed cost is negligible) with the intention of acquiring whatever skills I needed to work with VR/AR in some way (in the industry, or indie dev, or even just as a hobby). While that's still my overarching goal, it turns out I also love coding (only learning Python so far), so I think I almost wouldn't mind working in any development role. I think my next step after Python will be C# and making boatloads of stuff in Unity but if anyone has advice specific to VR, I'll hear it.
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Sep 7, 2017 04:35
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DinosaurWarfare posted:How does one get into entry level security type roles? (I.e. Pen testing or forensics) I got into entry level security (consulting as a pentester) by getting an internship at a consultancy and turning that into a full time offer when I finished school. Security is one of those unusual fields where being good at programming does not necessarily mean you are good at pentesting and being good at pentesting does not necessarily mean you are good at programming (although the smartest coworkers I have are excellent at both). If you have specific questions, feel free to PM me; I don't want to discuss my specific job in a public forum but I'm happy to chat.
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Oct 7, 2017 03:47
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DinosaurWarfare posted:How does one get into entry level security type roles? (I.e. Pen testing or forensics) I'm somewhat in the same boat. I have an Accounting degree, and work in the Accounting department of a (very) large company. However, my boss, all my co-workers, and everyone I know always ask me what I'm doing here instead of IT. Out of the blue, my boss's boss set up a meeting for me to go chat about IT Security with one of the IT managers. I'm definitely open to making a career change, but what I want to know is, are there sections of Security that are considered dead ends? In other words, what do I want to look for in an entry-level position, and what do I want to look OUT for?
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Nov 10, 2017 18:13
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