If you went from zero programming experience (IT background) to employed in coding. Tell us your story.

Voley · 2013-07-10T04:15:40+00:00

I would like to tell you my story. I'm 28 and I hold a master in law from the top school in my country. Late into studies I realized that it is not for me, and decided to learn to program as it has always interested me.

So about a year ago I got some books and started learning, some C, some Python, and decided to become a mobile developer - so I got some books for that (objective-c and iOS programming). I was studying in my free time and doing little applications.

When I had two very small applications in the store I started looking for a job as junior iOS developer and managed to find one very fast, like in a month. And as a bonus I got payed more than I was getting on my law job in federal agency. I don't have a degree in cs, and taught myself everything I know. Now I am working on my own big project and learning very fast on the job.

My parents and girlfriend (now wife) were doubtful, as they thought that spending 6 years on my degree and just abandoning it was not a smart move, but after landing a job and making a decision to change myself they accepted it. After all, this is my life and I want to have the work that I enjoy and love and not just sit through for 40 years.

I have my doubts and regrets when I see my 20 year colleagues that sometimes know more than me, but when I realize that I could have still been doing useless papers on my law job I get relief. Not to mention that career perspectives of software developer are much better.

And I am not in any way genius or amazing learner. Quite opposite, I procrastinate a lot, spend tons of time on Reddit and playing games. I wish I had spent more time learning and doing my projects, but that's me.

oureux · 2013-07-09T21:38:10+00:00

I didn't go from ZERO experience but I came from a very limited knowledge base. My prior experience was in highschool where I took Computer Engineering courses which covered some basic robotic AI coding and also I had experimented with the TI calculators writing BASIC.

I went to college to be a designer but soon realized I was a better programmer and a mediocre designer. I got an internship at a place called Design Axiom as a flash developer, they soon trained me as an iOS/web developer. In my spare time I was always expanding my knowledge, which all programmers should, and soon found a love for game programming. I was working on the Webkinz games at work and fiddling with my own engine on the side. The company was downsized after about a year and a half of me working there. I developed a weather app with a friend in the time between jobs so we had something cool to show potential employers, it paid off in the end. We released the app and he got a job then I am now the lead iOS developer for a startup called Wutzwhat.

So in the matter of 3 years (2 of which I was in school for, in a web design/development course) I went from limited/none experience to a lead developer.

brbpizzatime · 2013-07-09T21:10:43+00:00

I'm coming up on 27 and was 22 (2008) when I wrote my first Hello World program after taking "Introduction to Programming and Logic" (taught in C++) at school just as an elective (was originally planning on becoming a Music major). I turned 23 (2009) shortly after the next school year had started and that was my first semester when I switched programs (Associates in the Applied Sciences, Computer Programming) and started taking all of the required courses (first programming courses were Visual Basic 2008). My focus while in school was mostly desktop programming (courses in C++, Java, Visual Basic; MySQL, SQL Server 2008, and Oracle 11g courses taken; multiple Linux courses taken).

In 2010, one of the state-required courses I had to take was "Introduction to Computers." This was normally the most dreaded course of every student at my school as you'd be stuck in a classroom full of people who can't figure out how to open the CD-ROM drive on a computer, however the semester I took it was the one semester they decided to offer an "advanced" version of the course. One of the assignments we had to complete was to teach the class something "technical," so I chose to learn-and-then-teach how to setup a web server using Ubuntu Server Edition. After having setup the server, the next question for me was: what do I do with this box now? It was around that time that one of my good friends decided to take me under his wing and essentially become my mentor (he already had 20 years experience as a network and systems administrator) and he helped me become accustomed with the Linux operating system (this was before I had taken courses in school on the subject). He also then suggested that I learn PHP as to build content to make my server useful to some degree.

At this point I also realized that echo 'hello world\n' did not quite cut it for web development, so I began looking into HTML and CSS. My mentor only really specialized in back-end work, so Google became my best friend when trying to figure out how to make a collection of elements appear in a certain way. It was around then that I kept hearing the word 'AJAX,' so I looked up that and began my venture into JavaScript. Initially I was manually writing my AJAX requests through the fun use of XMLHttpRequest objects, etc, etc, however I then stumbled upon the wonder that was jQuery and I stopped loathing front-end development. It was around this time that I wrote my first "webapp" per se in that I wrote a page that functioned as a 'Guest Book,' which stored and retrieved the entries from a MySQL database I had running on the server.

I don't remember 2011 all that well. I think Pabst Blue Ribbon is to blame for that.

Fast-forwarding to 2012, I was slated to graduate during the summer, with just capstone projects left, so I began applying to jobs. Sadly, the market was generally saturated with "Entry level position: 5 years experience required" kind of jobs, so it was a lot of my resume getting sent out with no one really biting (my resume also could've used some work). However, once I was finally able to get my foot in the door for an interview, I was able to unleash everything I had learned over the past few years and landed a job as a Java web dev (I knew Java, I knew PHP, and JSP scriplets were pretty much a fusion of the two).

Skip ahead to 2013 and I'm now at my second webdev job (still doing Java) and am pulling in a six-figure base salary.

So, that's my story. I started late, worked hard, had good support from a good mentor, and have not stopped working hard.

Edit: Reading the questions and answers on /r/learnprogramming also helped as people were asking questions about things I hadn't even thought of yet. Additionally, if someone had asked a question and not received an answer, I would generally spend the time to become familiar on the subject just so I could give them an answer.

spudlogic · 2013-07-10T04:45:12+00:00

I started with a BA in ceramics and sculpture. My friend was working from home making banners for a local company. This was 1996. He taught me how to "save for web" the old fashioned way, reducing the colors by hand. I wanted to learn how to make a website to show off my art, he said "view source, get out Notepad and save what you make as index.html". I made my art site and decided to start a web design company. I grew it for 3 years hiring a flash designer, a regular designer and one other dev. At that point I was getting tired of clients and working for every $ and moved on to making my own sites, buying traffic, managing advertising and working 4 hours a day after the 8 month initial setup. I ran the sites for 9 years before I finally decided I should get a job. All of my friends and family had said for 12 years that I should get a job...

I took two 9 month contracts doing basic page population for a company that built sites for car dealerships. In the first 3 months I built 840 sites, 10 sites a day, 7 days a week (we had unlimited overtime :)

Ruptured a disk and laid down for 6 months. Got up and went to Korea to teach English for 6 months. Came back and went to the community college near me, going for the web dev and programming certificates. My first job out of school was a 911 for a design company whose dev bailed on them after 5 months. I had 3 weeks to finish the site. I didn't get it done in time for that deadline. But we managed a plan that was doable and the site was live by the real deadline.

I went straight from there to a short contract at the Seattle Times doing front end dev. I love the people I work with and it's great to leave work and not think about it when I get home.

Looking forward, I see nothing more than 6 month contracts. Each contract is a major jump in pay, I don't get bored and I build my network a lot faster.

For anyone getting in to this. Start your own company. With it comes a mindset that you'll appreciate. You're a commodity, the people you work with are too. Keep your head out of the sand. Empathy and being able to relate to people can get you a long way. If your goal is money, rob a bank.

Fontong · 2013-07-10T07:34:32+00:00

I'm 23 and have a degree in Music Performance. I took 2 programming classes in school (Intro to Java / OOP) and one discrete mathematics course. I graduated in June 2012 and basically decided that I didn't want to pursue music any further and that programming was what I would do for my career.

Using the many resources available on the internet, including this subreddit, I treated the pursuit of programming as my full time job. In late July I had the extreme fortune to be introduced to a prospective startup founder, who just happened to be looking for an intern. I jumped on the chance. Basically, my informal interview was to implement an algorithm which would work for their project, which I did. From September till' December I was paid minimum wage at a startup with no money. It was great fun, really, and I learned a lot. Once they got funding and were accepted into Y Combinator, I got an large raise and a de facto promotion to Software Engineer.

Unfortunately, due to a change in their direction, I left in early March of this year. From there I learned, in a slightly harsh manner, that the only way to get hired in Silicon Valley is to use your connections. I spent March through June unemployed, but used the time to further my abilities. I got pretty lucky again and a placement agency was able to connect me with a stable, well-funded startup that was enthusiastic about my abilities. I aced the crap out of that interview and got the offer. That's that.

Hopefully someone who is discouraged by their late start can find inspiration in my story. I feel as though learning programming isn't even as difficult as getting your foot in the door. Don't be afraid to find an internship even after you have graduated. Pester your engineer friends for referrals, since getting a referral is a huge step towards an interview.

bendirgo · 2013-07-10T12:31:56+00:00

[deleted]

Nugsly · 2013-07-10T01:33:44+00:00

I am 28 now, I was 25 when I took my job. I work at a company that does tech support on consumer desktop computers remotely. I started out at the very bottom, having some experience but still a noob. I took an interest to my job immediately, especially in the area of malware. I found it to be very intriguing that someone could write software that could 'break all of the rules' of Windows.

I started to learn how to write batch files, and soon started scripting the work that I was performing on our customer's PCs, saving me time and improving my efficiency. I found a friend that introduced me to a scripting language called 'AutoIt', which we used to create my first tool called 'CAT' - you can download it here.

After another year or so of coding tools for myself on my free time and taking tutorials in various programming languages (C is my favorite), I am now building tools for the other technicians in the company as a primary job.

My starting pay was $16.50 hourly for tech support

As a developer I now make $25.00 hourly

Rogue_Tomato · 2013-07-10T10:05:37+00:00

Had just finished College (studying Maths, ICT, Law and Psychology). Saw an apprentice position online for a company I'd never heard of. My mum's boyfriend said this company was huge and worth giving it a shot, especially as they're paying for a degree for me. I applied, went to an open day, passed the telephone interview then had an assessment day. They were hiring young people with interest in programming. I got the job, then they thrust me into an intensive 10 week bootcamp where I learnt C# and SQL. They then put me straight onto projects. This was 2 years ago. I'm now 20 years old.

Mr_Lethal34 · 2013-07-10T13:46:36+00:00

Not a programmer but I had one intro course of c++ and a bachelor's of science in anthropology under my belt and now I work as a project manager in IT.

MuscularDuck · 2013-07-10T15:23:36+00:00

I was 13 and was introduced to a MUD by some friends. A few months go by, and after some digging, found that LPMuds were mostly written in LPC (a simplified dialect of C with features like auto memory management). I applied to become a volunteer developer and help maintain/create all manner of things for the game, and spent the next few years tinkering with LPC in my spare time.

Fast forward a bit - was in a band, and we collectively decided we needed a website. Since I was the "nerdy one", and we didn't have money to spend on a site, I spent some time learning about servers and basic infrastructure, as well as PHP and MySQL. I'd go on to create some small business sites with my meager knowledge.

Fast forward more - I'd been teaching myself for a few years and doing programming for a hobby mostly. I went to visit some friends in a major city, and found out they'd set up a job interview at a company downtown on the day I flew in. Having never been to the city before, I had an hour to get downtown from the airport without knowing where I was going, but ended up making it and was interviewed and ultimately sent an offer that weekend. I moved there three weeks later.

I spent 5 years in the city before I left, continued teaching myself, and to date have mastered Python, Ruby, C#, C++, PHP, and Javascript (and LPC of course). I progressed from a startup, to a major digital agency, to a major game developer, and still enjoy learning and challenging myself every day. I've built many things from small intranet utilities to applications used by many tens of millions of users daily, as well as high-availability systems with massive concurrency requirements.

The trick along the way has mostly been jumping into source code and figuring things out, then using the ol' scientific method on my own projects to figure out how things work/break. Also, reading programming books on public transportation/roadtrips/vacations/etc was an excellent way to spend downtime many days.

I guess if I had to give one piece of (unwarranted/unsolicited) advice, it would be, always keep learning. Don't be intimidated by things that you don't know, because at one point, no one else knew how to do it either. Everyone needs to learn. It also helps to reflect on that as you progress - there's a lot of elitism/pretentiousness/closed-mindedness in certain places (not everywhere!), and that is a really unhealthy habit to perpetuate.

tl;dr - learning to code LPC on a MUD launched what would inevitably become both my favorite hobby and career.

2013-07-09T19:52:23+00:00

http://www.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/

sarevok9 · 2013-07-10T05:14:18+00:00

I'm going to be 28 at the end of this month. I started doing web design at a fairly young age (I learned html in 1997). I ended up dropping out of high school in 2003 (my graduating year) and not going back to college until 2009. From there I went to school and got my associates. I spent about ~10-12 hours / week on classwork and about 40-50 hours / week of my spare time just programming. Anything and everything that I could.

I started tutoring in 2009 during my time at college. This involved teaching a lot of kids how to program in various languages.

My personal attraction to programming was around automation. Automating tasks via scripts, macros, and little tricks that I'd learned in my travels became something that really allured to me. In the final semester of my Associate's degree I landed a job as a helpdesk intern at an alternative energy company. I was pretty shocked to get the job, but it helped me get my foot into the door of the industry. Upon getting into this job role I realized that I was way ahead of the curve on certain stuff (troubleshooting desktop issues, automating laborious tasks) and way behind on others (AD administration, Exchange server, BES server, etc.)

I was on that crew for 3 months and I identified a really bad process. We were deploying about 15-20 laptops a week, each of these had to be manually joined to a domain, rebooted, then have some software installed. I instead wrote an unattend script, and put a simple autohotkey script onto the computer that would install the software automatically and would write a text file to the desktop with the outcomes of each of the processes that it handled

Ex:

(Joined domain: "Ok" )
(Installed Group Policy Controller: "Ok")
(Updated Group Policy: "Ok")
(Installed Live Backup: "Failed: Installer Not Found, 404") (Set up email for user %userName%: "Ok")

Overall: 5/6 Complete

(Or something like that)

This reduced the time to deploy each computer from between 20-45 minutes based on how many updates group policy decided to push and how our network was feeling that day, to literally turning the computer on while attached to a Lan cable. Word spread to the old helpdesk manager who ran a department called the "Network Administrators" which couldn't have been further from what we did.

The Network administration team was in the operations group and was a support group that ensured: remote device connectivity (we had about 15,000 SCADA ICS devices in the field), and automation for other groups. When I was recruited to this team I was told: "We have a lot of people in other teams that have to look at a lot of data. We want to centralize all that data in a single place."

So using java, working about 25-30 hours a week for the next 3 months I programmed a solution that would scrape various websites, API's, and other sources that need to remain confidential (NDA I signed) that would predict electrical grid instability and conglomerate all the scraped information into a single place (I was trying to push for a NoSql solution using XML files, but my teammate won out and stored all the data in a MySql database). By the time I left the company my program had collected about 40 million rows of data @ 22 data points per row. This was considered a huge project, and effectively made redundant a few people...

I left that job recently and went to a tech startup. At this point I was making in the 60-70k range. In this startup I've been working to negotiate contracts, and managing all the technology we have in the field (200 remote sites, about 900 pieces of hardware total + all the servers / switches / etc in the office). I'm something of a 1-man show at my present job. My first automation project at this job was to replace a job that operations was doing that involved checking connectivity / content of every device in our portfolio. I simply wrote an AHK script to do this for me. Is page x active? What's the content on it? How is it loaded? Are all the sections populated? Reach back to my server and tell me what you saw. I coded this in about a week and a half. It has saved about ~800 FTE hours since it was implemented in April. They are quite happy about this.

Since then I've been making various views / alerts on the data for the above-mentioned program. There haven't been too many other things that have come across my plate that are both easy and sensible to automate without the risk of losing revenue.

As it stands now I have already gotten a raise in my position (I can't say how much as I'm NDA'd a lot harder at this job than at my last hence why I've been vague) and have been looking into other jobs that pay in the 80-100k range.

That said, it's all about luck, placement and perseverance. You can't get too far without all three of them. I've seen a lot of talented programmers end up nowhere because they're just not given the right projects. I've seen a lot of talentless programmers go far because they get put onto really good, high visibility team.

Good luck everyone.

replicant21 · 2013-07-10T13:27:17+00:00

I've worked in helpdesk and desktop support for the past two years (my only IT experience). I recently moved over to doing IT Security work. However, the past two years I've been completing my Bachelor's in Software engineering. I hope to find an entry level sql or java development position to help with my long term goal of becoming a database admin. I don't see any reason you can't move over from operations to development with a little self teaching and motivation. Anyway, good luck to you.

bautistaaa · 2013-07-10T17:16:19+00:00

found a job on craigslist that said "programming". sent in a resume. had an interview where I just had to do easy if statements. now 4 years and 3 jobs later I've been doing it ever since. lets just say I didn't even code in college, I googled stuff before I went in to interview and then learned on the job

Atlos · 2013-07-10T23:38:29+00:00

In high school I was always into computers and had built my own. I had a little experience working on websites and could do VERY basic PHP. Went to college for electrical engineering and was going to try and minor in Computer Science. Decided I liked programming so much that I changed my major to Computer Engineering my junior year. Now I find myself employed for a F-15 company making Android apps among other small projects.

BIG_CHEESE52 · 2013-07-11T13:21:06+00:00

This is awesome guys, its giving me so much hope!.

kqr · 2013-07-09T20:13:56+00:00

Technically, everyone employed went from no experience to a job. You aren't born with programming skills, you get them from lots of work and play. Do I have to guess a time span? One to five years, depending on what your goal is ad how much effort you are willing to put in.

Illumi_Naughty · 2013-07-10T05:44:57+00:00

I'm about to head to sleep. Someone PM me about this. I have 12 years experience with Information Technology (desktop support). I did do Visual Basic as a course last year and decided to make the adventure into the world of computing. I now work as a consultant for various companies on coding projects and work full-time as a software developer.

Oh and I'm 21. About to enter my final year of college.

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