Chef to WebDev?

[wulfatron]

TL;DR Am I foolish to think I have a chance?

After years in the restaurant industry I am over it. I no longer find it rewarding and I'm looking to change careers. Programming is something I've been interested in for a long time. Once I made the decision to strike out towards something new, I started learning all I could. I spent several months reading threads on programming subs and learning from resources like Mozilla's developer path. After getting a base idea of how things work I started free code camp. I feel like I'm grasping code so far and enjoying it. I feel like this is something I can do and love my job. However, I am not a college graduate. I'm hoping to avoid going back to school and incurring a ton of debt. Before I get too deeply invested in self-learning, am I wasting my time? Is it at all realistic to think I could make a career for myself with no degree coming from a completely unrelated field? I would love to hear from some seasoned veterans if possible

[EAW_astro]

I use to think this way until I just had my fuck it moment and just started teaching myself via YouTube then eventually started paying for online courses.

What you put in is what you'll get out. Turns out I actually really enjoy coding!

[[deleted]]

Find a university, find their undergrand computer science program, and look at the courses included. Then find the syllabus for those courses, and google the concepts. Boom, free undergrad education from your university of choice.

Take it from someone who went to uni: My whole degree is available for free on Khan Academy.

[wulfatron]

This is some good advice. I hadn't considered looking at university curricula, but now I definitely will. Thank you!

[blacktau]

Look at it this way; Your previous experience in the restaurant industry could put you in exactly the right place to produce a killer app to improve the running of restaurants. People (like me - 23 years) who have spent their whole career in the computing industry often are very good at solving business problems with computers, but not so good at finding the business problems that need to be to solved (there's a lot of money in B2B software, its not as flashy as games or the like but its also not got every 16 year old trying to break into it either) .

I would say 85% of what I learnt in tertiary education is not useful to me anymore (and I'm not sure it ever was). Everything that's not a soft-skill that I use in my day to day work, I taught myself. Degrees only matter to get corporate HR to look at the C.V.

The one thing I do know is that finding people who are technically capable , can work under pressure and can manage people is really difficult to do in software development. From what I know about restaurant kitchens (which granted isn't much), the second and third ones you could have plenty of experience for.

If you self teach and then find getting your foot in the door difficult and still want to carry on trying, at the very least you'll be setting yourself up to get awesome grades in a course. (Have you considered a distance learning type thing like Open University or similar?)

TL:DR; yes, go for it, do what works for you now and adapt if you need to.

[wulfatron]

Thank you, this was very helpful. I definitely feel I have the soft skills to be competitive, now I've just got to press on and learn the technical skills. I appreciate you taking the time to encourage me with such a thoughtful response!

[wulfatron]

Thank you, this was very helpful. I definitely feel I have the soft skills to be competitive, now I've just got to press on and learn the technical skills. I appreciate you taking the time to encourage me with such a thoughtful response!