"Learn to code"

[Howaboutnope]

I've read this on a few threads recently - IT is where the money is at. But its all double dutch to me- I'd love to learn and try a new career and earn more money but I'm 34 and really don't have much IT knowledge bar the basics and using a laptop everyday. Is it really that easy to learn?! And how does it translate into a new career? Tips for dummies welcome!

I’m a coder.

There are lots of people who purport to be so, but their productivity and code is crap. Its a very weird job - the best are orders of magnitude better than the average.

However, yeah it is a job where it turns you can earn good money being fairly useless - I know people on 50-60k who I wouldn’t say are worth minimum wage, and it kinda disgusts me that there are people on minimum wage working damn hard when these idiots have blagged themselves into this career.

To earn serious money as a programmer, you need to be very good. Not necessarily at obscure programming techniques - though there are niches for that sort of thing which can pay v well. But in the main you should be the sort of person who is a tenacious problem solver, who thinks about things from different perspectives to others.

The most productive and efficient coders often appear very lazy to the rest of the workforce, because they spend a lot of time thinking.

Thank you @Namenic! My job is very very general at the moment (think business admin and delivery) and I’m conscious I just sort of wandered in to it- I’m basically doing what I like in a very diy workplace culture. I’d be so nervous about going in somewhere more formal without further training. But also think I could do much more than I currently am doing. This thread is very inspiring!

However, yeah it is a job where it turns you can earn good money being fairly useless - I know people on 50-60k who I wouldn’t say are worth minimum wage, and it kinda disgusts me that there are people on minimum wage working damn hard when these idiots have blagged themselves into this career.

As someone who know next to nothing about the programming sector I feel compelled to ask: how do they get away with that? Is it because they're part of a bigger team and there just isn't much oversight for individuals?

Anyway, how would I start? This isn’t for everyone but it’s the sort of things I suggest to the kids.

the suggestion of getting a raspberry pi is very good, because you have a machine running Linux (the operating system of choice for most serious software development deployments) from the get go. You can always install Linux on a more powerful machine - or use a mac as the operating system it a BSD/Unix variant underneath as you get more adept. But you can use a windows machine too.

then come up with silly little projects:

Write a small python program to convert Celsius to Fahrenheit, based on user input.

write something that manages your photo library, by finding duplicates

write a program that manages your household expenditure on some way

write a program that downloads share price data, and does something like creates a diverse equity portfolio that rebalances itself.

write a bigger python program to do something silly like download a YouTube video, and covert it to an mp3. To do this, you’ll need to ‘glue together’ various other programs, libraries etc.

just scratch your own itches.

That is part of it, but the bigger parts of it are

• there is just a shortage of programmers as far as I can tell. Any warm body will do. Managers and executives never read the ‘mythical man month’ 😂

• a lot of the sector operates on ‘growth’ - sometimes, market valuations for companies are driven by them being seen to adding headcount etc and spending almost insanely. ‘If you aren’t growing you’re dead’

The second one can change on a dime as the stock market then viciously switches to looking at profitability in harder economic times, as we are seeing right now.

before anyone asks why I would want to download a YouTube video and convert it to an mp3

• loads of YouTube is songs, but using the typical dodgy command line tools it downloads as a video, not audio. You’ll need to hook together some other utilities to do it.

• turn this into a simple gui, that takes url from your clipboard and does the whole lot as a one click op (the download and convert)

it’s a problem that’s been solved many times, but doing things like that teaches you how to glue together other peoples work, which can be a good way to learn.

I'm probably one of those 'disgusting' people who earned 50-60k as a coder without being very good at it so I've now moved into a management role.
TBF, I was a software engineer who did lots of other tasks as well as coding.
I think coding is difficult unless you have a natural aptitude for it and I suspect (wild guess)maybe 10-20% of the population have this aptitude.
Where I work most of the development is done by Indian suppliers either onshore or offshore. Therefore you are competing with some very clever, hard-working people who are willing to put in very long hours to improve and learn new technologies.
The other thing to bear in mind is that the job keeps changing, new technologies come along, new ways of working etc and you are expected to adjust immediately.
Try and do some programming courses online or in a local college and if you really love it and it seems really easy and enjoyable then maybe try and get some qualifications.

Fair play for your honesty 👍 😁

software engineering management is an entirely different skill. I don’t think I could do it. I was turned down for doing that a while back, because I was supposedly classed as a ’big picture thinker’ who thought more like a director in terms of problem solving, but lacked the discipline to manage a team. Better to stay technical.

I think the real reason is I am too valuable as an engineer 🤷🏻‍♀️😂, and given what I’m paid as a coder, they know I would have asked for absolutely preposterous amounts of money to deal with the shit show of management!

Lots of people can “code” including 7 year olds at junior school.
Fewer people are good at it.
Very few people have the patience to practice enough to be good enough for people to pay them money.
Many people could practice for years and still be awful. I’ve worked with some of these.
A very very small number of us are both practiced and proficient enough to earn 6 figures as a professional developer. Most of us though not all will have relevant degrees so that we know more than just a light shim on the surface of coding.
good luck.

A handy shortcut for all of those people who think they can go on a quick course and walk straight into a highly paid job is this.
Think back to school. Did you actively love solving mathematical puzzles? For hours on end? Did you do calculus for fun? If you’re jumping up shouting yes then go try a free coding course. If you’re still coding at 2am and have forgotten to eat then keep going. “Coding” might be for you.

OP there's a lot of people who know more about this stuff than I do, but I've just started a free Coursera course on SQL. All on-line and really easy to do at my own pace.

I agree with what you wrote, apart from the bit about degrees. Overall, mine had very little relevance to the real world problems of software engineering.

The things I learnt myself from age 7-18 messing about with programming and computers in general have paid far greater dividends in terms of my personal value.

I say this as someone who did a Maths with Comp Sci degree.

@pixie5121 "What are these 'real problems', then? Please enlighten us regarding how your superior skills add more value to the world than what web devs do.

What do you mean by 'omit what is actually useful'? Surely that's a content issue, not a development one?

As for 'fleecing people'.....OK.

What a bizarre post."

I don't want to get too into it. But something like bloated toolsets that are inherently complex get used to create something that doesn't much need to be more than a text file. And thousands are poured into sites that often don't have relevant content, don't get updated, and many are simply not that fit for purpose. Even huge sites like Facebook have broken functionality. It was more a reference to 'bullshit jobs'. I haven't got superior skillsets, and actually am quite modest. But given that society isn't working in its current form, surely this energy could be put into something with more worth. IMHO.

There could be some standard off the shelf systems and standards for shops, church websites etc. Open softwares developed in academia and used the world over. Without duplication of effort.

For many, many aspects of commercial software engineering, Maths and programming are intrinsically linked.

Absolutely - there are parts of software development and code that don’t require it, and you could avoid it entirely in specific cases, but being terrible at maths is probably going to be limiting.

I suppose if you think web development is knocking up something using a Wordpress template, then yeah, you can get away with being mathematically challenged.

I think it's rubbish around people not being encouraged to go into sciences/maths when at school. I'm older than a lot of you and when I was at university in the early 90's half the science course I did were females and this wasn't unusual in the maths dept either...and no it wasn't biology/biochemistry...going into development after that was almost exclusively meb and that's where the disconnect was.

My husbands been trying to break into this field and recently did it.

He started doing bits of VBA for his job, liked how it automated stuff and turned manual tasks into automated ones.

Started looking at other types of code and speaking to other colleagues and started looking at python.

He asked his work to pay for him to do some courses and we also funded some. Some where good, some bad.

He also bought some books on Amazon that take you through different projects.

He then got a mentor in his work who was on the development team and they eventually offered him a role.

It's taken a good few years and him practicing in his spare time to do it but he is so glad he can now leave his old job behind to learn another skill which can be applied to any job sector out there!

This. Same goes for my job.

Most of us can sing karaoke, but not many of us could be trained to be opera singers.

@pixie5121 so you are using a sample of one....you...and I am saying that that generally is not the case hence 50% split across different departments and different years from 30 years ago...or are you saying that schools/universities have become less diverse in the past 30 years?

Where have I been bitchy? It’s a fact that maths and software engineering are related skills for vast swathes of the work that’s done in commercial development.

I didn’t say you did wordpress dev, I said if someone thought that that was typical software engineering - which I’ve heard it described as - you might not need it.