From an Unrelated Career To IT/Programming? 374
An anonymous reader writes "I hate my career of the past few years. For a long time I've wondered what I'd do after I broke even and could get into something new, and I keep coming back to computers. I'd like to get into software, since I always enjoyed coding. I have some background with C++ so I'm not starting entirely from scratch. My problem is my degrees and past employment have no practical application to the field. Where should I start? I have friends in both IT and software development who might be able to pull some strings and get me an interview or two for entry-level positions, but what can I do to make myself hireable in a short period of time? Is it possible to pick up enough of what I'd need within a couple months? If so, what and how?"
hard work, a little determination... (Score:2, Insightful)
and some reserves in the bank (or mattress) should see you through til you can catch up.
Life is too short to work in a job you hate, so go for it dude(tte).
Small time.. (Score:4, Insightful)
Portfolio + demonstrable talent (Score:4, Insightful)
In the absence of professional experience or coursework, I'd look for a portfolio of non-professional software projects you've worked on. Have you worked on any open source projects? If so, in what capacity? Did you submit patches, fix bugs, assist in documentation? Can you provide an example of a routine or software module you have written and are particularly proud of?
Also, good organizations will ask interviewees to discuss, at an abstract level,
* Algorithms
* Data structures
* Pointers
* Recursion
* Object oriented design concepts
And really good ones will ask interviewees to write and read/explain source code during their interview. Be prepared to do that.
Watch out for organizations that demand a certain level of niche domain experience or knowledge of a particular API/language/library/technology, yet claim to be looking for "entry-level" people. You're probably wasting your time talking to someone like that, if you're just getting into the biz.
Re:Be Proactive (Score:3, Insightful)
But then how does a person break into the industry?
The above question was rhetorical. You break into the industry by getting an entry level job. Then you work for 6 months, and get your promotion to the second level, or switch to a better job. 2 years later you have "experience."
Start with what you love. The money will come later.
Re:Are you sure you wanna do that? (Score:5, Insightful)
Seriously. Unless his previous job involved rendering pork fat or defusing mines, he should probably just stay where he is. Leave IT to those of us who made the mistake of getting in years ago and are now stuck because our minds have warped so much that we're unfit for normal society.
Sometimes entry levelers are the best (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm sure there will be a lot of posts about how much expeirence counts. Sometimes it counts in the opposite way.
Almost everytime I hired an experienced developer I was not happy and paid to much. When I got a kid out of school
and was smart it almost always worked out better.
The thing to ask yourself is do you really like coding and are you good at it. If you do and your hungry you'll find a way in.
Chances are you will lap other expeirenced developers that you come across. The kind that have never heard of slashdot for sure.
You can always demo in an interview. Create some silly little app and demo it with excitement. How well you communicate the idea
will let the employer know if you are write for their team.
Academia. (Score:2, Insightful)
One place that you might want to consider looking is academia -- in my experience, colleges and universities tend to be more relaxed about your official background and certifications and more concerned with whether or not you can do the job. Plus, most schools will allow you to take classes for free, which would help you get some "official" education on your resume.
Even smaller schools generally have a dedicated coding team working in the IT department. Send some resumes to the "Director of Information Technology" at nearby schools and see what hits.
--saint
Things to remember... (Score:4, Insightful)
1. You didn't mention what career you were leaving, but if you can have strings pulled, remember that an entry-level position will carry entry-level pay. Have a nice cushion to take up the slack, especially in this economy.
2. Do SOMETHING. Paid experience is best. OSS isn't as good. "Hobby projects" are only marginally better than nothing. For the latter two, something demonstrable is almost nonnegotiable.
3. Get your head examined. :) If you enjoy coding, nothing will kill that love faster than doing it day-in, day-out under the "guidance" of PHBs and Marketing-directed design... (What? Me? Bitter?)
Re:Be Proactive (Score:5, Insightful)
Agreed. I had people look at my freelance experience like it was irrelevant:
HR: "I see here you worked for [company] for only 3 months"
Me: "It was contract work. I was on a team that built an inventory system for them that uses RFID to track over 1,000,000 discrete pieces of inventory, do automatic ordering, etc. We completed it on time, and all got bonuses. The floor guys liked it so much they threw us a barbeque."
HR: "So your work wasn't good enough for them to hire you full time?"
Me: "...It was a contract job."
HR: "I'll just put, 'No' how about that?"
What you've done + computers (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Be Proactive (Score:3, Insightful)
Start. Code Often. Contribute. (Score:5, Insightful)
I was a double music major in college: a BA in Music Ed K-12, and a BA in Music Perf. Percussion. I got my teaching certificate, then promptly went into programming. For me, the key seems to be just programming. All you can. All the time.
My last 2 years of school, I started doing HyperCard scripting, then UserLand scripting, then VB and whatever I could get my hands on, doing whatever departmental projects I could do, like test taking apps, etc. Then I worked my way into web pages, html, and doing the department web site.
I've been at it for 14 years now doing .NET, Perl, SQL, Rails, Catalyst, Django...all without a programming degree or background. So, my advice would be:
1. Don't expect someone to hand you a job by pulling strings
2. Program. If you love it, do it all the time. The best job is one where you get paid to do what you would do as a hobby.
3. Keep at it. Be a sponge, and show you can the job by doing as much as you can outside of that job. Contribute to open source. Work on other projects. Start your own projects. Get yourself noticed.
For the "hiring manager" who say they never hire anyone with o experience on their resume, I'd say we all had none when we started. Conversly, I've seen awesome resumes...by people who can't even tell me how to anything more than MS point and click.
Leverage your existing experience (Score:5, Insightful)
One thing you may find is that generic coding jobs may be boring/unexciting for you and also hard to get into. I would advise you leverage your current experience, and see where new software may help in your current field, or what is it about the existing software that you feel is lacking and/or needs improvement.
It will also make it easier for you to get a job that way. "I don't have software experience, but due to x years of experience in this field, I understand the ins and outs and that will be invaluable while I build up software design and implementation experience."
If you were a biologist, look at bioinformatics, if you were in real estate look at companies building better MLS tracking software, if you were a teacher, look at jobs with a company like Blackboard, you get the idea.
Re:Be Proactive (Score:3, Insightful)
"I have been a programmer and manager. I can tell you that without a formal training in the field I wouldn't even bring you in for an interview."
Then I'd say you're missing out on good talent. I have yet to interview ANYONE just out of school who knew a damn thing aside from how to spell "Java" or point click drag, which tells me formal training is crap.*
*Crap for Web 2.0 Tech, not crap for hardcore stuff like pcb, assembly, medical, science, etc.
They certainly don't teach troubleshooting skills in school.
Re:Be Proactive (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Be Proactive (Score:5, Insightful)
I would disagree. My hiring manager has commented several times on my honesty, as well. I knew I was new and didn't know everything. My response, if asked if I knew something, was "No, but I can learn it." Maybe that sounds tongue in cheek but it's true; I was being considered for a position that I was going to have to learn a lot for, may as well be willing to do so. Furthermore, the people interviewing me actually asked for some examples (e.g., one guy asked about the advantages/disadvantages of Perl, one asked me to write a simple code snippet that would print out an array of somethings, etc).
Depending on who you end up working for/with, honesty can make you a great person to work with. Everybody hates it when someone doesn't answer a question. I have found that answering honestly (but positively) works very well. Lying in an interview would be even worse than lying on a resume. Which, by the way, I've had several interviewing people mention to me - most people lie on their resume. I didn't, but they still wanted to talk to me if they were interested, resume isn't enough.
Re:Be Proactive (Score:3, Insightful)
So you want to work for a company that has incompetent employees? Are you sure you should be lying in interviews and hoping to get the company that can't even hire people properly?
Re:You could just lie and go for it. (Score:5, Insightful)
"I've seen plenty of incompetent people lie their way through HR, so it definitely works."
I blame a lot of this on companies who rely too much on HR to screen the resumes. When you submit a resume in hopes of scoring an interview, the first person to see it is the "Gatekeeper" in HR. Oftentimes that HR drone doesn't know the first damned thing about the industry for which the company is hiring, so they'll often read a resume a little differently from the hiring manager (who would at least have a clue). HR just scans the resumes and relies on bullet points and keywords; as a result a lot of talent can be completely overlooked because someone who otherwise might just have the chops didn't use the right words or format. Many people have found that careers can be affected by some nitpicking secretary so some will "pad" their resumes just to get by the clueless gatekeeper. In fact, I've even heard the argument that a lot of folks aren't necessarily getting their certs for the job itself; instead, they're getting them just to get past HR.
Re:Be Proactive (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:You could just lie and go for it. (Score:4, Insightful)
When you submit a resume in hopes of scoring an interview, the first person to see it is the "Gatekeeper" in HR. Oftentimes that HR drone doesn't know the first damned thing about the industry for which the company is hiring, so they'll often read a resume a little differently from the hiring manager (who would at least have a clue).
That definitely jibs with my experience. I don't think I've ever gotten a job through the usual send-us-a-resume process. (My resume sucks. Forgot to finish my BA, and there's some holes in my experience where I was fighting illness.) But I've had more luck when I've been able to connect with the hiring manager directly and convince them that I could do the work.
(LinkedIn is good for that. But be selective about who you network with, or else the signal-to-noise ratio in your contact list will drop to zero. In particular, refuse all the invitations to network that you'll get from professional recruiters.)
HR isn't the only problem here. Upper management also tends to frown on people with weak backgrounds, no matter how much the hiring manager wants them.
Helps to start as a contractor. You do a good job, convince enough people that you're valuable, and you end up with a lot of advocates that upper management and HR can't ignore.
And of course you want to beef up your resume any way you can. Contributing to open source project (as others have suggested) is good, as is any other kind of volunteer activity that shows you have relevant skills. You should also look at getting some of those certificates and credentials that abound in the tech industry. Yeah, I know, most of them are bogus. But many of them aren't. And even the ones that are bogus help you get past the bureaucrats.
Please learn computer science (Score:2, Insightful)
I know I sound like a jerk, but I've made a ton of money over the years cleaning up after self-taught programmers. There's a difference betweeen "programming" and "computer science". Like there's a difference between being a "builder" and being an "architect". The problem is that many places will bring in programmers to do work that a computer scientist should be doing, and the results are often disastrous.
If you want to get into this field, do it right.
Re:Be Proactive (Score:3, Insightful)
Having worked on many diverse systems over the past few decades (CDC Cybers, VAXen running VMS, UNIVAC OS1100 mainframes, IBM boxes running TSO, Solaris/HPUX/Linux boxes, etc.), I would say that AIX, Linux, and Solaris are at least within the same basic OS family.
Which is my point. To me, separating Linux out from "Unix", and then lumping "Unix" together as something cohesive and separate from Linux just seems odd to me. Semantics aside, if you know Linux then you're already 80% of the way towards using Solaris (and if you happened to have actual "Unix" experience from say, HP-UX, then you're not in any better position jumping right into Solaris than if you'd used Linux, even though the first two are both officially "Unix").
Essentially, I'm just saying that seperating Linux out and branding it specifically as something NOT "Unix" is a bit odd to me. I'm not saying that all OS's are the same (a fact that I'm well familiar with - 4 years ago I had a requirement to learn OS/400 for work - it's very, very, very NOT like any Unix I've ever used :)).
Or more simply, IMHO practically speaking you should either reference experience with specific systems, or for user purposes just lump Linux in with "Unix". The official term means little more than a marketing designation these days.
No kidding I want advice getting OUT of SW Dev. (Score:5, Insightful)
Geez.
It is an outsourced jungle these days. Do you really want to justify why you think you are worth 10 times the salary of a coder in China? Or work for a while then train your Chinese replacements, spend EARLY morning and evenings across the timezones on calls with them to make sure everything is finally working out their new team, so they can cut you.
Meanwhile your company is going down the toilet while your execs reward themselves for reducing salary expenses with drastic moves to low cost centers.
Not a career I would recommend unless you are in some high security area that can't be outsourced.
Best of luck.
Re:Small time.. (Score:3, Insightful)
Whatever, they're all the same. Useless classes and a piece of paper that can get you into an interview.
Which is why our economy is all fucked up. Its inherent in the culture we've built that values bullshit over substance.
Lies and resumes (Score:4, Insightful)
Why would you assume people lie on their resumes? You may, but most people don't. Don't get caught at it though: that's pretty much a definitive career ending move. And the incompetence of a technologically illiterate HR person doesn't constitute a "lie" either. That's something called a mistake. Or a typo.
I second that. I have never lied on a resume or even padded mine slightly. I have, however, been asked to an interview more than once by people who then proceeded to ask me for details about my experience with things that weren't on my resume. I will never understand why employers do that, I don't like it when people waste my time. I can only assume they were to lazy to read my resume. What I have experience with is on my resume, what I don't have experience with isn't and all they have to do is read the f*cking thing. Many HR people and head-hunters are a waste of space. I was recently asked by a head-hunter to put certain claims of experience in my resume. Even after I explicitly told him I had no experience with that technology, he wanted me to put it on my resume anyway so it would be easier for him to "sell my resume" to an employer. This, I resoloutely refused to do. In my time I have witnessed a couple of people get caught who outright lied about their experience and knowledge on a resume or in an interview and let me tell you, that's one thing I don't ever want to experience. I cannot even imagine how that feels. Never mind the fact that ever afterwards you'd have to explain why you were only at a certain company for a couple of months and why you left them. Even if you tell another lie, get away with it and get this new job you still have to worry that some PHB meets somebody from that other company on the golf course, they start chatting, and you are screwed anyway. A lie becomes a web of lies and eventually, when you lose track of what lies you have told to which people... that's when you get caught.
And that concludes my rant...
Re:Are you sure you wanna do that? (Score:3, Insightful)
"You're going the wrong way!!!"
My thoughts exactly. I have two teenage kids and while I'm making sure they both know how to code (Python and pygame FTW!) I'm discouraging them from going into anything that looks like "software development" as a career.
Software development skills are being commoditized very rapidly, both due to advances in technology and offshoring. Better frameworks, better libraries, and relatively simple and safe languages like Python and Java are allowing junior developers to do stuff that you'd only have trusted to a guru ten or fifteen years ago.
The number of well-paid development positions is going to decline in the next decade or two because the bulk of the job will be do-able by a less skilled person. In India. There will still be niches for people with really deep skill-sets, but they are going to be fewer and less lucrative as time goes on.
Freelance work on the resume (Score:2, Insightful)
For the time I was working on short contracts between interesting full-time positions, I list my employer of record (Drew's Software LLC) instead of the individual companies I contracted with.
Re:Be Proactive (Score:3, Insightful)
if you filter out all technical people right off the bat, due to past paid experience or college degree, you may lose a great hire.
This always bugs me - who cares what may happen? What matters is what will probably happen, and when you don't know the guys in the stack, it's a numbers game - optimize your time to make a good hire likely. This implies two courses of action for the submitter - develop your network and get hired through connections, and get experience any way you can. You don't have to choose - do both.
Re:Portfolio + demonstrable talent (Score:3, Insightful)
C# and Perl pay my bills right now, but I was hired based on an interview question that was something like "how do you reverse a linked list?", which is a classical pointer question. As Joel puts it: [joelonsoftware.com]
I've come to realize that understanding pointers in C is not a skill, it's an aptitude. In first year computer science classes, there are always about 200 kids at the beginning of the semester, all of whom wrote complex adventure games in BASIC for their PCs when they were 4 years old. They are having a good ol' time learning C or Pascal in college, until one day they professor introduces pointers, and suddenly, they don't get it. They just don't understand anything any more. 90% of the class goes off and becomes Political Science majors, then they tell their friends that there weren't enough good looking members of the appropriate sex in their CompSci classes, that's why they switched. For some reason most people seem to be born without the part of the brain that understands pointers. Pointers require a complex form of doubly-indirected thinking that some people just can't do, and it's pretty crucial to good programming. A lot of the "script jocks" who started programming by copying JavaScript snippets into their web pages and went on to learn Perl never learned about pointers, and they can never quite produce code of the quality you need.