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What about seems glamorous? I hate programming. I love the idea of pay and working at a cool hip tech company with interesting things in the office that I’ll never get to use cause I’m busy sitting at the desk programming.
My engineer friends at big tech tell me it’s pretty boring stuff most of the time. You’re dealing with huge previously built tech stacks, doing a lot of maintenance work. Minor changes are very hard to make. One of them declined his offer to work at Google search cause it was too boring.
Instead, he went to an early stage startup, then started his own business because even the startup was slow.
Coding is fine, but you'll have to recognize that it's a tough industry, and that you have a late start in comparison. Far more than other industries, coding is in part propelled by people who have been coding since they were kids (unlike, say, accounting, which no one in their right mind starts working on as a passion project in their teens), so the competition will be steeper.
I'm honestly not close enough to the industry to be able to give you a good estimate here. However, if you're not coming out of a undergraduate program in CS, I expect employees would want to see a portfolio of some kind, which would take some time to develop.
Or, you could go to a coding bootcamp. Be careful though, because those often have inflated outcome statistics. But it'll provide a good in. The tradeoff is that boot camps only teach the lower level assemblyline esque skills due to the timeline, so you'll be missing out on the higher level cs principles.
Depends on your financial health, life situation, and income needs more than anything.
In general, I'd say it is never too late if you set your mind to it!
With no programming background it makes things harder, but with drive and motivation you can do it :). Sounds like you are early on in your overall career as well, so it is probably an easier time to make the switch as well.
I would suggest doing some self study over the next few months and creating some things (even if it is a shell blackjack game or something) to test the waters if you will actually be happy as a sde.
Good luck op!
Appreciate the response. Wouldn’t say I’m financially stable, as I’ve only been working about a year. That being said, I do have enough money built up to last me around 8-12 months. I assume you wouldn’t recommend quitting my current job (nor do I want to) but, at the same time, how am I gonna find time to learn?
Nothing is glamorous when you do it for a while. I think coding is a useful skill to learn in general. Self-study, see how you feel in a few months. If it gets your intellectual juices going, think about going bigger :)
I taught myself to program ON a job...it was like, 10 of work during the day and 8 hours of work at night, kind of all bleeding together, since it was ... literally learning on the job.
That was an intense situation ... I’d imagine like 2 hours a day would be enough to get started/get a feel for what programming is like (at least at a super basic level) — Not sure what your end goal is but perhaps check out codeacademy’s JavaScript track or even freecodecamp, to start learning the basics...you first start learning these super basic functions/concepts and then how to put them together, eventually learning why / when / how you should be writing them...at least that was kind of my experience - it’s a bit of a grind especially at first, but the foundational concepts like loops and variables are really important to grasp as you start progressing.
Lots of ways to get there, always helps when you have an opportunity to apply it, safely—and even more if you can find a mentor / buddy to start working through or discussing these concepts with.
You should probably try it first. Do a (feasible) project from start to finish and see if you find it enjoyable. Honestly, the glamor is overhyped and I wouldn’t focus on that as my motivator to switch
It depends on what idea you come up with. You can’t go wrong with python since it’s easy to learn. But this depends on what kind of software you want to write. (Lookup C and Xcode)
For a bare bones app, I would say it takes 1-3 weekends of hard work. But if you have no background, I would add a month of relatively focused study on top of that so you can learn the fundamentals
“Coding” is a pretty broad term. There are millions of computer programming languages now. And, everything is different from each other.
Just to let you know I have engineering in electronics, and started coding from microprocessor level (not even computer programming). So, I can say it’s very interesting subject to learn. But it may not be as helpful to switch jobs because there are computer programmers who are doing it since day1 of their college.
And, industry became so outsourced that we can hire a programmer from Asia for like $20 and get the work done overnight vs spending $100 for US programmer to get work done in next couple of hours.
So I suggest, just learn it for fun initially. If you think you are really killing it, then you can think about career change later..
So I made the transition you are talking about, studied SCM/Finance/Mktg in college, got a job in tech consulting as a developer.
Here’s what you need to do:
1. Research, figure out what segment of the industry interests you. Coding is a fairly pointless skill, building up knowledge of how to complete a specific task is how you’ll make the transition. I recommend looking for adjacent areas, Forecasting, Fintech, etc. are what I looked into based on my background. Pick one and skill up based on it.
2. Learn, When you pick your industry/area of knowledge, start learning. Every one will recommend some boot camps, but you will have a hard time getting hired based off boot camps alone. Once you’ve built some basic tools, start showcasing them to your team. Make it clear you have these skills, and want to bring them to clients. This will allow you to make the transition to a technical role. Alternatively you can network your ass off and try to get your foot in the door at a mid sized company or a lower tier tech consulting company. Either way the key will be a portfolio.
3. Catch Up, you are starting at a disadvantage. You don’t have 4 years of knowledge on the basics of coding, working on github, etc. My friends and background gave me a leg up in this area, however there’s still things I stumble on a year in that a CS major would already know.
4. Differentiate. Your 4 years studying SCM weren’t wasted. You have valuable domain knowledge. Depending on how you transition, that knowledge can make interacting with clients easier, help you build better solutions, etc. At the very least, the skills of a BA make understanding and filtering requirements much easier. Use these to differentiate yourself from your peers.
5. Profit.
There is nothing glamorous about coding, but it's definitely not too late for you to switch gears and do it. Take an online course or two first though, to make sure you don't hate it.
That’s super helpful, really appreciate the response