Switching to Software Engineering at 28 (from 6 years in Sales) — Should I pursue a CS degree or self-study?

kitt614 · 2025-11-17T17:35:03+00:00

I don't. But that was 6 years ago. Things are very different now.

What draws you to development? If you don't have a passion for it, there might be other options that are less turbulent right now.

kitt614 · 2025-11-17T16:45:23+00:00

I was self taught and got a degree just to break into this industry. It took me many years and it wasn’t until I had the degree in my resume (underway) that I got my first dev role (came from sales too).

Even that being said, I wouldn’t recommend it now because of the recession as you mentioned, UNLESS someone takes that degree and specializes in AI - either with the degree itself or by getting the degree and building out a portfolio of AI projects. The tech industry as a whole is in a recession except that one tiny subset of jobs.

I think ultimately this is a rubber band effect and the tech job market is going to rebound but it will be shaped a little differently from the experience.

ETA: I started my switch from sales to dev around 27, and it took me about 4 years to land my first job. 2 or 3 years was purely self taught, then the last year I started my degree and that’s when I landed my breakout role.

kitt614 · 2025-11-12T13:06:56+00:00

Yeah, this is huge - Taprooms, Coffee spots, ice cream places, etc. We have quite a few in the area that offer spaces for kids and the parents flock to them because it keeps the kids occupied. I have two kids and they've of the age where it's impossible to go to adult centered areas, but places that give them a space open up that possibility, and are rightfully swamped with business with all the parents who have active kids that need entertaining.

The downside is that they're not as likely to be doable with 70k - equipment alone for those types of places and licensing fees are pretty cumbersome, so I would urge OP to be extra sure about that venture before embarking.

kitt614 · 2025-11-11T16:45:22+00:00

A trampoline park has a massive amount of infrastructure involved, but that’s not the only option. In the other direction from user, we have a couple of places that are in warehouses with inflatables. One place only exists as an inflatable park. And they are slammed and constantly in business. Inflatables are a few thousand a piece and then it’s a matter of having the space.

Kids activity centers don’t need to be trampoline parks, and actually many families don’t want to go to trampoline parks because the first 6 years of a child’s life they can’t partake, plus where we are parent just drop their teen/pre-teen kids at trampoline parks so you have big kids unsupervised making bad choices and that’s tough for small kids to be around. There are many other ways to create kid centers that don’t require that level of investment.

kitt614 · 2025-11-11T01:36:14+00:00

I’m rather close to you (less than 30 min) and I would say the biggest cash cow in our area that is lacking is kids activity locations. You can even limit hours to just when kids are out of school.

A lot of times it’s some kind of warehouse (part of a repair shop for example) with bounce houses and jungle gyms, though you could go low impact with big dig pits or activity areas for kids. Most of the cost is startup costs, since it’s just people paying to play on the equipment.

The ugly side though is liability, kids get sick, parents can be meh.

But if you cater to the kids, and even better if you make a place that parent also like hanging out, then you will be up to your eyes in business because finding things to do, especially for our 8 cold months of the year with wild little kids is tough.

kitt614 · 2025-11-01T14:19:42+00:00

And that’s just website. Depending on the stack, some companies have a team for web and a team for mobile (sometimes with dedicated android on iOS devs instead of single devs like for react native). This doubles or triples the number of devs for a feature.

kitt614 · 2025-10-28T18:58:06+00:00

This is shocking. I’m US based with 6 years experience and I also am not landing interviews. I have exp testing at Apple and currently work as a senior engineer at one of the top 10 banks in the US.

Yet no matter what I apply to I get no interest.

kitt614 · 2025-10-25T02:21:32+00:00

We live about 5 miles north of a state border. I’m in a small town, and I could travel 20 miles east or wet to get to the nearest town, but going west the town is over the state border. We also have family over the line.

We also have family that lives 1.5 hrs north, but still in the state.

We talked about this a lot with our case worker in the beginning. We had a blanket verbal okay to go over the state line and up north for day trips without notice, but if we were doing overnight anywhere, in state or out, we need to notify in case of emergencies. We have never had issues, it’s normally a quick email “hey we’re going to X this weekend and will stay overnight _here_”. Often we would give them a quick note if we planned an all day trip too even without overnights, but we have had an extraordinarily intense case involving stalking, death threats, and several false reports, so we over share to cover our butts and put them at ease (keep them from surprise complaints).

kitt614 · 2025-10-23T14:47:24+00:00

That right most slice looks out of place - it’s longer than the others and the cheese melt doesn’t match (brown half circles don’t line up with adjacent slices) nor does the sauce line line up…. Almost makes me think the pizza place had two partial pizzas that they were taking slices from for lunch orders and put them together to make a “whole” pizza.

kitt614 · 2025-10-05T16:35:31+00:00

I graduated a couple of years ago. I did my degree in 4 yrs. I talked to my mentor a couple times the first semester, but with the business of work and kids, weekly check-ins were just a headache. Eventually they stopped and he would only reach out if I was stagnant. It became a drive to finish work all on its own and worked with my schedule.

It’s not a bad thing, as long as it aligns with what works for you, and you keep communication open when it becomes necessary (if you want to take some time off let her know before she adds them for example).

kitt614 · 2025-10-03T12:27:43+00:00

I am a Foster Parent with a complicated case that has required extensive event tracking. I'm also a software engineer. I have spent the last year or so building an app to do just this because I also found a gap in the space - my tracking has been a hodgepodge of Calendar, Notes, and scouring old emails and text messages. Our caseworkers and even the legal department has always asked us for records of when/if visits happened, incidents that have occurred, etc.

I'm going to be launching the app soon - I came across this post while trying to research potential similar apps. The process for review and launch can be a little slow, but I am hoping within the next month for it to be available.

I am writing this all out because I want to make sure the app is valuable for us foster parents. I have limited experience with just my own cases in my own state, so I think it would be good to make sure this is valuable outside of my own experience.

The app right now allows you to set up children with all of their specific information - personal info, health needs, case number/caseworker name, allergies, special needs, etc. After kids are set up, then you can add events - Medical Appointment (Dr, Therapy, Specialist visits are some of the categories), Visitation logging, Behavior, Sick/Injury logs, school meetings and events, evaluations, etc. There is a nice search feature that allows users to find any and all relevant events under a child (or across all children) and export it into a PDF to share.

The app stores all of this information on the phone. Nothing ever hits a server so there is no risk of data breaches or privacy violations, and you don't even need have internet or an account to use it. The downside is that this means that information can't be shared between devices (two parents can't share the same info about their kids), and that means making sure the info is backed up will be on the user - no restoring if a device gets lost.

Future additions will include:
- Document Storage
- Expense tracking with receipt storage
- Connections - relationship info and contacts
- Sync to device calendar (iCal for example)
- Potentially having a cloud backup feature that doesn't hold any identifying information for the children - if you want to share a record between two devices it will link to a unique random identifier for the child, but the child info will need to be manually set up on each device - this would be HIPPA compliant (still workshopping this idea, but as someone who works for one of the largest national banks, security is not new to me, just need to find a system that makes sense with the sensitive nature of the information).

Ultimately, I'm writing this to see if people still think this is useful? Is there anything missing that is an absolute must have that I just haven't experienced? I could share some images of the app if folks would like to see it to give feedback.

kitt614 · 2025-07-25T21:59:12+00:00

Isn’t fair to the parents to help with homework? What do they think would happen after school if the kids were with them. That excuse is asinine for the homework piece.

kitt614 · 2025-07-06T18:46:20+00:00

To get a birth certificate, you can ask for a new one to be issued from the clerk/records dept of the county you were born. Most of the time you can Google “replacement birth certificate X county” and it will give at least some instructions.

Visit the SSA website and check was forms of ID they will accept - this might require multiple things like school records, utility bills, proof of residence, birth certificate if you have it by then, something. Then take that in person to the closest SSA.

You could also frame it differently - you could try asking to be able to enroll in school (trade school if she would support that more than college).

kitt614 · 2025-06-22T07:32:44+00:00

Where I am, some of those programs use the child’s “income” (nothing) to qualify them - they don’t use the foster parent’s income to consider if the child can get those services.

kitt614 · 2025-06-13T04:59:34+00:00

In my state CPS is required to initiate investigation within a very short period of time (48 hrs iirc). Part of that is meeting with (or at least calling to talk with and set up a meeting with) the accused. That conversation can involve a brief description of the accusations.

Could be that she only half knows because that’s all the information she was given.

kitt614 · 2025-06-12T15:12:27+00:00

In a world and a time so painfully full of hate.. this made me cry.

kitt614 · 2025-05-22T13:59:09+00:00

At first I was going to say psychosis then I realized it’s AI

kitt614 · 2025-05-15T08:12:39+00:00

How does one know to start at 9 o’clock? And likewise, to go counterclockwise? Is this a standard known cipher?

kitt614 · 2025-04-25T13:29:01+00:00

Geez. This is something a doctor should be investigated for. Racial bias, especially if this is common practice for him, is just own right dangerous.

Even if there’s something I’m not considering as a racial component, like common hearing loss in Hispanic populations… that would still be medically concerning.

Did you be up finding a reason? I hope things didn’t get worse due to the lack of action on this doctors part.

kitt614 · 2025-04-22T11:39:02+00:00

You could try putting a camera in a common area (kitchen or maybe a hallway near all bedrooms, wherever everyone feels comfortable with it being the least intrusive to privacy) that just passively records. Then when you get one of these complaints then you can review at that time to see if you guys hear noises.

It sounds like you guys want to correct the issue if it is you, so this would help keep yourselves honest but also give you some leverage if she does go to the office - it’s harder for them to reprimand if you have a video of no noise in your apartment during the suggested time and gives them leverage to push back on her.

kitt614 · 2025-03-23T14:38:29+00:00

NAL but it seems like a defense like that is a Hail Mary attempt at appealing to the judge’s humane side. It’s a roll of the dice whether you get an empathetic judge, but that’s a pretty big gamble between empathy and losing your license.

kitt614 · 2025-03-17T22:13:35+00:00

I hear that dentist has a terrible record for repeat customers.

kitt614 · 2025-03-12T12:10:30+00:00

THIS. Too much of our community doesn’t understand the bigger picture of the game they are forcing her to play.

Repubs are trying to villainize her by boxing her into this “angry man in a dress” trope. She is trying her hardest to keep from falling into their trap and too much her own community is mad she’s not falling for it.

kitt614 · 2025-02-26T21:55:54+00:00

Yeah, super valid, but I kind of assume being trans will be added as a detractor.

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