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Sorry if we scared you away from the accounting thread, Empress. Anyway, I’m an accountant with no immediate plans to not be an accountant, but I’ve developed an interest in learning how to program, starting completely from scratch. This week I am completing Khan Academy’s computer science principles course. After that I’m planning on selecting courses from the “Open Source Society University” path on github. My long term goal with this is to either continue working as an accountant with a freelancing side gig in software/data analysis, or to eventually find a role that requires both software and government regulatory knowledge. I suppose a third option is that I actually gain enough experience to become a competent full time programmer for things unrelated to finance, but that’s not the goal unless it happens naturally. As things are, I have no need or plan to make any money from this for several years. I just want to dedicate time to learning and creating progressively better personal projects until the day that I feel comfortable doing work for someone else or building a tool worth monetizing — maybe 2 or 3 years from now if I am very consistent? I recognize that this all sounds naive. Feel free to knock some direction into me.
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Feb 19, 2021 18:52
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Mush Mushi posted:Sorry if we scared you away from the accounting thread, Empress. Thanks for the previous replies, everyone! I’m following up on my own post because in my search for self-learning resources I found Oregon State University’s online post-bacc degree in computer science. It’s expensive, but can also be worked part time over my 2 to 3 year timeline. It’s probably overkill unless I decide that I’m looking for a real career change, but... Having an actual degree or even showing that I’m enrolled in a program backed by an educational institution increases the odds of success in the scenario that I decide to make a serious effort at a software development role, even if related to my current field. I.e., Becoming a developer that makes tax/accounting software rather than an accountant that works with developers, or an accountant turned data analyst...if that makes sense. Would a degree earned part time even look good compared to self-study? If a degree is becoming a requirement, I could do it. Obviously I still need to think about this a lot before committing to anything.
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Mar 9, 2021 03:16
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ultrafilter posted:Do you already have a degree? Yes. BS and MS in accounting. Right now I am self-teaching basic CS concepts and Python with a goal of Doing Something in the future. Ideally I’d like to be involved in software development for a finance or tax product, but as a developer and not an accountant. I’m currently a subject matter expert in a niche area of tax, so my conservative employer that bills me out by the hour won’t be overly enthusiastic about me suddenly wanting to be data man. At this stage I’m just looking to optimize what I can do outside of work. If I find a role that allows me to play around with automation more then that’s fine, but that still doesn’t mean I’d qualify on paper for a dev job.
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Mar 9, 2021 04:14
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Lockback posted:There is benefit to getting a comp sci degree, but it's rarely the best use of time and money for someone who already has a degree and experience. For what you want to do a combo of self study and maybe a boot camp would be the best route. Some people can even do self-study to the extent they have a glowing portfolio, but if you do that your portfolio's gotta be real good. Thanks again. I’m bouncing all over the place with ideas about how to merge my current skills with something new. Once I decide to do something I tend to go all in, for better or worse. That said, I think I need to chill a bit and focus on my original self learning plan and give myself time to discover what I ultimately want to get out of this journey.
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Mar 9, 2021 18:06
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feedmegin posted:What's a good website for a complete beginner to programming to learn Python from, these days? I say 'these days' because I presume learning Python 2.7 would be a pretty silly idea at this point. I can write Python myself so I could help out with any tricky bits. My wife's been asking about learning it. I enjoyed watching the content at py4e.com for an initial intro and am following it up with Automate the Boring Stuff. The first six chapters of Automate the Boring Stuff cover almost everything in py4e. For me it was good to go over the absolute fundamentals in those two formats and then get into the actual application examples of ATBS.
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Apr 30, 2021 17:49
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Would having a software development certificate from a community college add any value to the resume of a self learner? By some accounts my local CC has a decent computer science program and courses can be taken online. They issue certificates for software development in various languages that require 5-6 courses. I’m having trouble abandoning the idea of formalizing education through the community college, but I’m certain that I could learn what I want to know faster on my own. Seems like if I ever find myself competing for an actual development job, then I’m competing against CS degree holders and the certificate won’t matter. If I’m competing for an accounting role that is impressed by Python and ~analytics~, then once again the certificate doesn’t matter because I’m relying primarily on my accounting background.
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May 19, 2021 20:57
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I posted in this thread a while ago about self-learning as an accountant. I’ve made some progress through a combination of community college classes and MOOCs (I’m halfway through full stack open which uses MERN/create-react-app). My near term goal is still to build some domain specific web apps that I and hopefully other accountants would actually use, but I’m open to a career change if I continue on this path. I started dabbling in leetcode’s “explore” track, which seems like a lighter version of cracking the coding interview type content. It’s fun in a puzzle solving type of way, and it is improving my general JavaScript syntax, but I feel like beefing up my algorithm skills is going to become a distraction from completing full stack open and actually building something that I can show off. It’s been a struggle to avoid analysis paralysis throughout this process. If I take the community college’s DS&A class in the winter I can graduate with a software development certificate, which I know doesn’t mean much but it would be a nice note on my resume and would satisfy my itch to be better in that area. In terms of bringing my “formal” education to a close, I’m thinking I drop leetcode and risk taking a mediocre DS&A class instead, and in the meantime try to knock out full stack open. Writing this out was helpful. Any other thoughts or course corrections are welcome!
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Nov 17, 2022 18:18
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On the topic of breaking in to the industry as a non-traditional candidate / career switcher, are machine learning skills helpful at all? In my intermediate python CC course our final project was to create a basic neural network without any libraries and confirm it works against the iris dataset and some other basic functions. Not saying this qualifies me for anything professional, but it did demystify some things, e.g. I can read about transformer architecture and generally understand what is happening. I’m staying the course with full stack web development no matter what and have a project that I like in progress. That said, there’s so much AI / ML content out there right now it’s hard to avoid. Part of me wants to take a detour to really learn how to train and deploy something related to my industry. Another part of me feels like this is a trap, and I should keep the momentum going with core development skills.
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Dec 15, 2023 19:38
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