Aibu to worry about Coding?

[TheoneandObi]

DS is a Cambridge English grad, working in an ok-ish first grad job. He hates it though. It’s boring, he says, and he doesn’t really see a a future in it for him. He wants to quit and do a course in coding. He’s researched a couple of costly but well regarded courses. But. I’m worried. He did well at maths at school but deliberately swerved away from it at A level. Surely he’ll get eaten fir breakfast? And what jobs would it lead to?
I know I shouldn’t be worrying about a 22 yo. But I don’t want him to make a huge mistake.
He seems to have a bee in his bonnet about having a job which actually makes something

Also, there are so many jobs where coding is useful.

It is very important that he enjoys it though. Coding can be hard work and I personally feel it's one of those things that you have to enjoy.

Can anyone point to a decent free coding course, or suggest a good language to start with? I fancy having a go as a new hobby.

DH is a Senior Developer. He started out as a fine arts grad, walked into his job one day to be met with "HTML For Dummies" and the brief to design a company website.

In the last 10 years, his salary has quadrupled. It is a great field to explore, and good on your DS to be making a plan that focuses on the end result!

I do agree with the other posters though --seeing if he enjoys it is a good first step. There is a level of intensity needed and sometimes that can be very overwhelming; those times, you really need to love it to stick with it.

Do you have to have a degree to enter a coding job? Or could you have a levels then complete appropriate coding course then apply for jobs from there? Thanks

Software has been a stable industry for me, and, at least in my sector, it's growing in demand all the time.

That said, I would NOT waste money on a course.

It's not necessary to learn how, and it's not necessary to get a job. I've never worked at a company that cares about courses or certifications or anything, either. If you can write good code, that's all that matters. If a company does have that requirement, that would tell me they care more about unnecessary rules than quality software and I'd stay away anyway.

He can easily teach himself how to write any language for any purpose with a couple youtube videos, google searching, and some experimentation.

Almost all of the top notch, best, most talented coders I've ever worked with are self taught, with either no uni or completely unrelated studies.

And MOST of the coders I've ever worked with rely heavily on the practically unlimited internet coding resources regularly for work.

And I'm pretty sure I've even had steadily employed colleagues who had never seen a programming language until the day they started their job and just google everything. Those folks are definitely not the best, but they're still getting paid...

Seriously, suggest he look into it on his own, and definitely before you spend ANY money. He can take a bit to feel it out on his own to see if he even actually enjoys it, before wasting a load of money!

stackoverflow.com is a good place to start and a great place to find solutions to specific problems.
If he wants to write apps, the AndroidStudio developer software is free.
If he wants to write apps for iOS or macOS, signing up for an Apple developer account is free.

All the coders that I know are self taught. I don't even think any of them have degrees. There really isn't a need to do a fancy expensive course. He needs to get some books out the library and have a play around.

He also needs to look into the requirements of the sort of jobs he is interested in and see what programming languages are most in demand.

I worked as a developer for several years (have now left to do something completely different). I was self taught and several others in the company were too. I wouldn't worry so much about maths, I scraped a C in maths for gcse. I'd echo what others are saying though that a paid for course isn't necessary if it's something he's worried about if he will like it, going through a free resource might be better, things like freecodecamp, cs50 online and othersnfirst to see if it's the career he will like.

One of the things about coding as a field is that it's incredibly changeable so even if you DID do a degree or course in it, you'd be responsible for keeping up with the latest learning. People who are capable of being self-taught masters of their field are the ones who are successful because they've already got the discipline to learn something through a self-guided medium.

And a handful of DH's employers have wanted a degree as a requirement but they are mostly overseas -- for the most part, a solid portfolio and sometimes a coding test is more than enough to get a job.

DF used to recruit coders for very large projects - he always said the best coders were classics graduates rather than mathos as their grammatical training meant that they coded very logically.

Long-time developer here. I did maths GCSE a year early, A/O maths after that, maths and further maths A-level and a maths degree. Yeah, that's a hell of a lot of maths.

That's not showing off (quite the contrary, being good at maths seems to be socially unacceptable these days), but context - I know a lot about maths, and I've been a dev in various industries for the last...oh...18 years or so.

Here's the thing - in all those years, I've never used any more maths than I learned up to the age of 15 in that GCSE. In fact, there's a lot I did in that year which I've never used in a professional capacity.

Modern development is mainly about four things:

1 - Being able to think about logical relationships between many bits of code and systems.

2 - Being able to quickly and easily visualise complex systems and how they work together.

3 - Learning new languages and structures very quickly.

4 - Being able to work effectively with team members possessing extremely varied levels of social aptitude, while still being assertive enough to push his solution when he's convinced it's the right one.

You'll note that almost none of that is really anything to do with maths.

He'll be fine, as long as he's not a complete doormat.

I'm another long time developer.
Maths is not required for 90% of the code I write, and the other 10% is only because I write some financial applications that have to add up correctly when dealing with percentages and the fact that our smallest currency unit is a penny. The VAT man doesn't like it when the numbers are wrong.
A lot of what I do requires the ability to be think creatively, so that complex concepts can be presented to the end user in a simple manner that makes their life easy and the task non-threatening and intuitive despite them never having done it before.
I definitely get a buzz when software I've created is released and gets a positive reception from users, so I can understand why he wants to make something.

There are some paid for full time short courses (12 weeks or so) that have a very good reputation and a pretty much 100% success rate for employment on completion. It’s a great industry to go into. Salaries are high and demand for the skills is through the roof.

Turns out he’s done some free online bits and bobs so is better informed than I previously thought. He’s thinking of using Makers Academy for the 12 week intensive course. At least it’s cheaper than a Masters I suppose.
Thank you all for your variety of insights and experience. Looking at Makers alumni too they seem to come from a variety of backgrounds, and end up in the most part using their new found skills.

@JocastaJones is there a course you would recommend? I am looking to get into this. Thanks.

Getting into programming is honestly an excellent idea. There's a shortage of programmers. Tell him to learn languages that are widely used, like C# (Microsoft). The money is good. I will say, though, that games development is cutthroat so I wouldn't recommend that.

I code in java for a living (senior software engineer) and Iove it! I am also not good at maths. I have never had any need of maths in all my years of coding and I work in financial services.

Coding is a language so what is more important is the ability to think logically and problem solve

Makers academy is 8k 😮

+1 for Makers Academy. My hubby recruits many of his juniors from here and he is very impressed with the standard of training.

@CallMeCarolDanvers - I've used www.codewars.com/ (learn through challenges) and www.codecademy.com in the past. Also StackOverflow is a great resource for coding snippets to common questions. Language-wise it depends on whether you want to be a front-end developer (GUIs etc.) or back-end. I taught myself Python, bash and a little Ruby, because in my line of work I have mainly focused on back-end scripting. Each company will have its own favourite languages and I found that once I knew the basics of coding it was fairly straight-forward to cross-train.

@RockyRolly - I obtained a degree in Computer Science, but I once worked with a Systems Administrator who had a degree in geology ... and so no, you don't need a degree to be a coder, just lots of enthusiasm and willingness to learn. :)

One interesting fact I learnt recently - it is estimated that these days a person will go through four different career changes in their lifetime. The person who said this had started out in HR and had re-trained as a lawyer.

I used to be a software engineer. I had to stop though as I was losing the will to live it was so boring. It's a good solid well-paid career but most jobs are boring as Hell. You spend far more time fixing up or altering existing code than you do writing new stuff. Creating new stuff is the only interesting bit but you're lucky if you get to do much of that. Pretty much everyone I worked with, in major companies, had relevant qualifications. There were a few that got there without it though and maybe smaller companies are less picky.

Hi. Coding doesn't require maths. It's about problem solving and logical thinking.

Get him to check out academy.uipath.com/learn. Free training that can be done at home in his own time. I work in the industry and can tell you that automation is the fastest growing sector with loads of well paid jobs.

I've been in IT for 30 years and it's a very good and flexible career with loads of options and opportunities.

DH is a senior software developer and works in presales (can’t remember his exact title 😄) so he gets to travel the world. Tech companies are really flexible in our experience, meaning he can work from home whenever he wants pretty much (unless travelling of course) which means he has a brilliant work-life balance and sees our kids loads despite 3 hours communing on days he’s in the office.
Just in case you were worried about that side of things!

Bendy, I think that’s an excellent point. No children in the offing yet. But what you’ve described sounds excellent for work/life x

Some interesting studies in the late 90s, early 2000s found that:-

1. People who went into coding, having trained for it were good at their job
2. People who went into coding, but from an arts background and then trained by their employer, were frequently better.

The concept is that coding is less about maths, more often about creative problem solving, and people from a less purely scientific/engineering background can sometime bring a creative skill to bear that others cannot.

I have been in the business for far too long a number of years (started on COBOL for any other dinosaurs out there). For me at least, the only down side was the need to re-train every 2-3 years as a new skill set becomes the flavour of the month.

Coding is a really good, fairly easily transferable skill that can lead to really good job opportunities. That said, I found that being a PM or BA, while nowhere near as much fun, does pay better though... and with less re-training!!

@WhatdoImean is right; I find that most development could better be described as a detail-oriented creative process than something that's strictly scientific (as most people believe it to be).

The thing is...good developers aren't really specific to one language, because being a developer is more about a mindset than knowledge. In my day job, as a web developer, I use six different languages (including markup). If I'm building something new with integration between multiple systems, that will often top 14+.

Mindset and adaptability win here, not learning by rote. The only thing I'd suggest for him over and above what he's doing now is to learn about the non-development side of things too - operating systems, hardware and networking. I've lost track of the number of devs who have no appreciation for anything that's not directly related to the code they're writing, and thus are unable to diagnose problems that don't sit completely within their field of view. Having that extra knowledge will almost certainly set him above other candidates.

Good luck to your dude, he's got an interesting ride ahead of him. Unfortunately, most Hollywood films which have even the slightest bit of computer-related content will be utterly, irrevocably ruined for him.