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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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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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