I'm considering a career change into programming (worked in accounting for 2 years). Have a little experience in VBA and Python, mostly used to automate data extraction. How can I get a software engineering job?
Career change advice
Asher White
Benjamin Bailey
teach yourself to code and then start applying to jobs, make a github with a small portfolio and you won't have trouble getting interviews
phrase your experience deceptively to emphasize that you code
Kayden Hernandez
How can I compete with the tens of thousands of people who have CS degrees and are also good programmers? How do I stand out?
Jason Garcia
your advantage is that you have experience. the field has high demand and having worked at all is a big advantage compared to the field of junior devs and grads with no experience or at most a few internships. companies hate hiring people who haven't worked a few years. spin your experience to make it seem more related to programming than it really is.
if you teach yourself and get decent it won't be that hard to make something out of it. but make sure you actually get good. also make sure you have realistic expectations.
alternatively you can study on your own for a while and then take a masters, which basically transforms your previous degree into whatever your masters was.
Angel Peterson
>people who have CS degrees
>good programmers
I don't think this Venn diagram is as weighted toward the middle as you think
Dominic Wilson
CS Degrees are less employable than guys who did courses focused solely on programming.
Brody Williams
Hmm I will have to do the first option, teach myself to code, because I definitely don't have the knowledge to do a CS Master's degree. And my undergrad GPA was pretty awful. Thanks for the tips.
Christopher Cook
One way is to leverage the knowledge that you already have. If you worked two years in accounting, I'm guessing you know the field somewhat. If you're eventually looking for programming jobs related to that, you'll have a step up on the competition. Else, just build a portfolio, and worse comes to worse, or best case scenario, depending on how you see it, whatever you build for it might let you do your own thing and enable you to starting working for yourself in some way.
Jason Torres
yea I mean teach yourself to code is definitely where you start no matter what. I have sort of a similar background in that I did math and stats and had to teach myself all the CS and coding stuff on my own. when I got to grad school there was suddenly an expectation that I knew how to code at a fairly high level even though I never actually was taught much other than intro level stuff.
as far as how to teach yourself to code, I mean there's really no guide. you sort of just start doing it and googling/reading/messing around and shit. it's actually pretty fun if you figure out how to enjoy it. as time goes on you slowly get better.
from my experience though a huge suggestion for any self learner is to actually try and do projects, and also to try and make stuff that you can post on a github portfolio. I spent a few years in sort of a training cycle where I was reading and learning a lot of material but never actually using it in practice. I ended up forgetting a lot of it and never had projects from all that work I did to post on my portfolio. almost all of the projects I actually did were really useful and I still refer back to many of them.
Charles Wright
You could check if your current employer offers positions that's a bit heavier on the programming side so you can learn on the job as addition to learning at home