Make money programming without degree

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Get help via chat. See the full guidelines for more explanation. How do I get started with programming? What programming language should I start with? Can I get a programming job without a Computer Science degree? Or without any degree at all?

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I'm a self-taught wannabe programmer, and I'm currently psyching myself out I'm having trouble understanding how and why someone who doesn't have a CS degree would be hired for any programming position when there's a horde of fresh grads with credentials clamoring for the same gig. However, I know they're out there, and plenty of them read this forum. So if you're one of these people and you wouldn't mind answering Like, did you make your own open world sandbox game, or did you just have some simple websites and console programs?

I'm trying to gauge whether I should keep putting my energy into this on my own or just bite the bullet and try to get into some kind of accelerated learning correspondence course. Hi, my name is Harrison.

Self-taught programmers how did you get a job? : learnprogramming

I teach programming on youtube http: I also run a few python-based businesses on my own sentiment analysis http: Another third from fledgling startups, another third were total wastes of time, mostly people wanting me to work for equity or something silly. While I have declined them all, and continue to work for myself, I think the amount of job offers that I have received while not even seeking them says a lot.

People find me through my website or my youtube channel. The website used to be more of a blog of tutorials, but now it's a bit more of a tutorials website. The YouTube channel remains unchanged. A CS degree carries absolutely no weight in my judgement for a candidate. I've quickly learned that a CS degree! Some degrees are different than others, but I have seen zero correlation, seriously zero, in the weight a CS degree carries. I am extremely anecdotal evidence, but you should really question more employers.

As an employer, I have found the most success by looking for people who can show either exactly, or relatively well usually a project that is somewhat related, or similar complexity , via a portfolio of actual work done by them People don't want to see some words on paper of what you can do.

A lot of employees do not know what MySQL is, or at least the difference between MySQL and SQLite, or Postgres People want to see what you can do, what you have done, and then extrapolate from there whether or not what you've shown is something that can translate to their needs. I have a very "successful" linkedin too. What a worthless place. No one cares about linkedin. No one cares about my degrees. They all care about what I've shown I can do via written or video tutorials.

You don't need to do tutorials, but you should have github with lots of examples for the CTO to oogle at, you should have a blog with maybe even as few as monthly entries. Employers also want to see that you're current, and you're learning.

Having consistently updating content shows employers that you're continuously learning more. If you're a learner, then they can have you do anything, whether or not you're qualified just yet.

Makes me truly happy to hear things like this. True community and education in the absence of formal institutions. I'm also learning programming myself and I'm happy to hear having a blog helps, because that's something I've been doing since I started. What an amazing world we live in today. I very much love the Internet and the wealth of information available, also the VERY good people that supply that information.

Sorry this took so long to respond to. The job hunting part isn't very exciting - there isn't a magic answer to make a job materialize unfortunately. I applied everywhere I found a posting I felt interested in, even if it wasn't a perfect fit, assuming that it'd be a role I'd grow in to or move up from. I also didn't stop hunting for jobs even if I thought I did really well in an interview. I kept pursuing everything I could until something my current job definitively stuck. That means that while I was interviewing for a bunch of different jobs I held down two bartending and temping.

The learning part I took a similar approach, mixed with some fake-it-til-you-make-it. I looked up tutorials for different things python can do and watched them.

So this approach might not work for you if you learn differently. For instance, I started by searching "python intro walkthrough" and basically had my hand held installing a working version of python and learning to print "hello world" from the terminal. After finishing that video, I just decided to watch the next, and so on. All of these will help to generate ideas for projects you may want to complete just for your own edification.

Don't be afraid to branch out and chase down those weird ideas to completion. Everything you complete will build on previous ideas and previous idea generation, leading to bigger, weirder ideas that you should chase down. And, in chasing down these ideas, you learn how to formulate better questions that lead to better answers. This part is key. Hopefully this is helpful, and feel free to ask questions - I'll make an effort to be better at responding.

I know this is two months old, but I'd be interested in hearing this as well. Both parts, if you please. I responded above just now, feel free to ask more questions if you have them. Harrison, Do you have biography of you? You seem to have a unique personality, with your background and all.

I'm curious to know about your career transition from your Philosophy and Criminal Justice days to where you are now. Why did you change career, how did you teach yourself, how you cope with the change process, what were the setbacks, defeats, triumphs I've considered doing something like that.

I get a lot of questions about it. Most people online know me as a programmer, but most people irl know me as an entrepreneur. I went to college and I have had a few regular part-time jobs when I was younger to make my parents happy, since they thought it would be required for me to get a career.

I don't regret the philosophy degree, I use that one every day, CJ wasn't really very useful besides a few interesting statistics and learning about the process. I am not one of those anti-college people, just think sometimes it's too early, and not right for everyone.

I wish I could have majored in Economics, and maybe would have tried to get into a better school. I did well enough on the SAT to just get auto accepted in a bunch of places so I didn't need to bother with the application processes, so that's what I did. Lots of setbacks, and lots of being on the edge financially, with days max until nothing left. Lots of people thinking I need to get a "real" job, whatever that is. Lots of people telling me how "lucky" I am, usually the same people thinking I need a "real" job, and almost always people who hate their real job.

I've just always made sure to have multiple backup plans. A college degree has always served as a backup plan for me, I always thought, if I needed to, I could get a part time job for some quick cash, and leave whenever.

I've always focused on running lean businesses that don't cost much to maintain, since it's just me footing the bill. Probably one of my favorite stories that can be told in a few minutes trading a motorcycle for pounds of lego: To reference the change of career, I am not sure I really ever did change my career. I was always self-employed, and I hated all the part-time jobs I got. My last job ended abruptly without warning, the place went out of business and didn't even bother to warn the employees.

I usually bring that up when people talk about "security" in jobs. No one really knows when they'll be laid off. Larger companies probably wont suddenly go bankrupt, but people getting laid off suddenly isn't unheard of. I stayed self-employed through college, but I did work as a waiter for a year as well, I needed more money than I was making to fund my startups, that's the place that went out of business.

For coping, it helps to have a significant other who supports you, or close friends. My parents have always been on the fence about supporting what I do. My dad supports more than my mom, but neither of them really know what I do. My then-fiance, now wife, has always been a huge support, and that helps. It was literally valentines day when I told her I wanted to trade my motorcycle for enough lego to fill the apartment living room because I felt like it was a very good deal, and she was content with trusting my judgement.

Having backup plans also help settle worries and stress, and stops you from wasting time worrying about if things go wrong. If you really are staring into the abyss of bankruptcy, and you don't know what you will do if you get there, it's hard to focus on anything else. It's almost never the case though that you literally have nothing. Ending up on the street with nothing is actually pretty hard. In the end, the best thing you can do for yourself is find what you're passionate about.

Not everyone wants my path. I work hour weeks. I get paid a pathetic wage compared to the offers I get to trade in my freedom. It's hard to keep going when people are offering six figures and I am making junk, but I love what I do My wage isn't the only thing I earn either.

Every hour I put in, is an hour towards my business, and my equity, not someone else's. There's value in that too. I've never really seen anything as a defeat. I have failed in a lot of businesses, but I've never had "just one" business. I plant lots of seeds. When one fails, it's a setback, but I almost always learn something valuable.

Programming Jobs without CS Degree : Python

As for teaching myself: I really wonder what I would have done a couple decades ago. The programming community is so very giving, and generous with sharing knowledge. I still haven't had a problem that I haven't found the solution to by Googling and maybe mixing in a little trial and error. I think you might misunderstand me then, maybe I was unclear. I spend most of my time learning about new things. I really enjoy that part of it, you might too. I spend the least amount of my time actually "working" at something.

My work requires me to constantly learn new things. I would wager that most jobs will hinder you from learning new things. You wont have time for it, and your employer wont appreciate you spending so much time on new things rather than focusing on the current projects. You also will rarely get the choice in what new things you learn, you will be learning and doing what the manager wants of you.

Some companies give employees some time to "hack" on their own and do what they want, but this is really rare. It's hard for me to really convey it, as my work is actually what I love to do. Learning new things is the biggest thing I do, and I am paid to do it. Work, interests, passion, and hobbies are all meshed together for me.

That's the best part! Freelancing is usually what I consider my "work" to be. This is the stuff I wouldn't normally be doing on my own time. Writing books, making programs for people, consulting Freelancing allows you to work as little as you want, but not necessarily as much as you want. You're also competing heavily with the Indians as in the country. Luckily, I have a bunch of niches, and I can take on wide-ranging jobs, so I get a lot larger of a rate.

If you can do that, then sure, you can make a healthy living on freelance I have only a few employees, and it's all for one business that I decided to stop running since I was no longer interested in it. The rest of what I do is solo. Would love to have a team, but I am having a hard time finding a good group of people.

I do make some money from freelance, I take freelance jobs, I just don't really care for them much. I make money via ads on youtube, ads on pythonprogramming. But yeah, I wouldn't expect it to be for everyone. It works out well for me since my interests, passion, and work are all intertwined nicely.

I am not sure what you would do, but I would still suggest you try to seek it. You be surprised how little you care about money if you work a job you're passionate about. You'll spend the majority of your life working, so it sure as heck should be doing whatever you're truly passionate about.

Just because the back bone is programming, it does not mean the fields that you use it for are close at all. You can spread yourself thin if you want, but I am not sure that's a great idea either. You can either do a lot of stuff, and do them all poorly, or you can do a handful of things really well.

I'm guessing I would need to look at your PHP tutorials? I'm just wondering because my dad is a software engineer and he said a lot of what I would need to know it built off the same principal of setting up a login page that actually interacts with a database. Thank you for confirming what I was feeling about freelance I dipped my toe into it with the little bit of knowledge I do have in web design and javascript plus jquery, I felt like there are a ton of people willing to work for horrible wages in freelance though??

When I did charge what I thought I was worth, it was a constant struggle to not let them squeeze more work out of me I ended up getting stressed and discouraged right away. I'll have to check out your videos, it probably didn't help that I tried freelance while working full-time elsewhere as well You have a strong mindset, what Carol Dweck, professor of pyschology at Stanford University calls a "growth mindset".

You keep going through, no matter what. Growing up I had a 'fixed mindset', and it wasn't until recently that I started learning more about having a growth mindset.

It's been an amazing discovery. After countless years of trial and error, I finally found exactly what I'm looking for in the field of programming. Being in a field that I detest with a Masters in Health Administration I thought about returning to school for a Computer Science degree. But your insights have given me more hope and information about making the next decision. It could be CS degree, or another route. Either way, I"m determined to get a job in programming, no matter what.

It's what I look forward to every day. Thanks for quite an interesting read. You should consider writing a short book. You could really give the community so much! Thanks again for your contribution to this thread. It has given me hope and much to think about. His tutorials on sentimental analysis were my main goto resource for my final research project.

He even responded to my email from a total stranger when I got stuck with a problem. Glad I could help. How did the project turn out? I try to answer all emails, but I know some go forgotten. I also purposefully ignore some. A lot of "do my homework" and "help me do XYZ for my job that I am not qualified for" come through. I don't mind helping, but a lot of people are not afraid to be absurd. I used sentiment analysis to see if there was some detectable bias in news articles.

The lexicon I used isn't something I am proud of, but my project guide was sufficiently impressed with my work. Considering it from an academic-requirement standpoint, it is a grand success. With your help I didn't forget to acknowledge you in the report , the project fetched me my best academic score in the last 6 years. Glad you like them and they're of help. Yep, I like Reddit, usually come here for all my news. I dunno, I think LinkedIn is actually pretty good; it's a popular medium and another place to have presence to show you skills.

I wouldn't play it down that much. Obviously put all those relevant links at the top in the about me area. I have a decent Linkedin. I've gotten nothing from it. Not much else going on. Certainly no real professional networking happening, besides people who find me elsewhere, then add me on Linkedin.

I have been interested in learning about computers for a long time, I have been learning as much as I could, I found programming was the way to go, since I loved controlling computers, it also opened up a new way of thinking about computers, and I also learned to think of problems in a new way breaking them down and building from there. I have tried for so long, but as soon as I reach some intermediate topic, I don't understand anything, I try for weeks, sometimes skip it and go over the next topic, but I just don't get it.

I have a general idea of primitives, loops, conditionals, and all this basic stuff, but I have barely made anything. The most I could get was make a Task Scheduler type of program without GUI or hack around with javascript, redirect pages etc. Nothing good enough for the amount of time I put in it. I have a choice to leave my current field medicine and go to 4 year college for either software engineering or CS, but I don't know if I can do it, people are doing in weeks what I couldn't do in years.

What languages have you tried? Honestly, I hated programming for years. Python just suites me perfectly. It was only when I found Python that I really got anywhere. It just fits me. Python is just something else. I wonder, have you tried Python? If not Python, have you tried a multitude of languages? There are lots to choose from, I am sure there are people who think Python is stupid, but Java is the cat's meow.

Also, what do you want to do with programming? Do you really want to make GUIs? I hate making GUIs, but I do happen to like web dev. GUIs with QT Designer, which I just recently bothered trying Part of what got me through Python was I really wanted to do sentiment analysis with it.

I found the NLTK book ntlk. It allowed me to learn the language that I wanted to learn around the topic I wanted to first use it with. While I have a "Python 3 basics" tutorial series, I rarely link people to it who want to learn Python. I usually ask them what topics they are interested in, and tell them to start there.

Then, when you find yourself confused, reference the Python 3 basics series for the confusing part, or ask and I will link there. Don't worry about complexity, but DON'T skip sections. I know that method all-to-well.

If you stick to that, you will definitely learn it all. I used to skip sections like that, still try to get away with it Nowadays, to learn something, I usually find sample code that does it, and then go line by line, understanding every function, method, and logical statement along the way. That works really well for me to learn new stuff. If you get stuck, hit up reddit or stackoverflow.

People will help you if you show that you're putting in effort too. If the problem is Python related, my door is always open too. Email, reddit, youtube works for me. I have never been able to confirm whether it's because of I am unable to teach myself or not, I have always done all the other subjects myself due to lack of good teachers, so I studied nearly everything myself and applied it. With programming, I just get stuck on something, maybe sometimes I don't even know how to search it up, and then I try to ask a bit but don't get much response either and I also fear asking on forums because I may clutter up threads like a lot of people do, and just try to google as much as I can.

I have tried Actionscript, Java, Python, C , Ruby, Javascript. I'd say I am not much interested in making GUIs, but I am interested in making games, which was the first thing that I started with with Actionscript , I like webdev, and put a lot of time in HTML and CSS, I tried to make websites too, but it feels too cluttered up and not like a systemized approach. I've tried python, I have been following this book "DiveIntoPython3" but I just got stuck up on Closures and Generators, plus, so far I have only written stuff without adding classes or making my own modules, this wasn't so hard for me to do in Java, but in Python, most terms just completely eluded me and even in these books there aren't so great explanations.

I've been doing " Interactive Programming in Python " at Coursera and already did the first three mini projects and hope to complete it till end. Thank you for all the advice, I'll try my best to not skip anything and be sure to stick with it until I understand. Do you have any talks, videos, etc. Are your two business related? Is your sentiment analysis software a major factor in your bitcoin trading operation? Only a very small handful, nothing that I would recommend today.

You don't need to risk the bank. My problem with doing much on bitcoin trading is what exchange I use. They are all so friggin risky. I do have a tutorial on connecting to the BTC-e api to execute trades, but not on algorithm creation on BTC-e. Sentdex is getting a lot of work done lately, hoping to turn it into a sentiment search engine for anything.

Getting closer and closer to that goal. As someone who wants to get into this field, I'm curious if you have to create innovative and original concepts and upload to github to impress potential employers or if you simply need to demonstrate your ability to code with good form.

Innovative or original concepts are probably worthless to many employers, but can be highly valuable to some. They're usually looking for tried and true stuff.

Some companies do want to see innovation creativity , however. Really depends on the employer. No one is expecting you to come up with the next best crypto algorithm though Instead of innovation as well, you can also show a broad range.

If you make games, you wouldn't want them all to be basically the same You have probably heard this a lot but I absolutely LOVE your videos dude. They have helped me with so many problems and starting off with python. All I can say is THANK YOU!

Awesome to hear every time! I learned the programming I know from others in the programming community who were also willing to share. This is one of the few fields that shares to this degree. Thanks for your links! I'm currently attempting to learn PHP and wanting to learn other languages as well. Have favorites your website and tutorials. I'm glad to have read this. I'm actually going to be watching your videos about Flask in hopes to get into Python web development.

Yeah, it's always interesting when someone asks me what I do for a job. Usually just say "programming and finance" now. Most people are content with that. Python web development is awesome. It took me a very long time to swallow it.

Goes against traditional structure, and almost seemed overly complex to me. I started by trying Django, which I just didn't, and still don't like. After finally learning Flask, I went through one by one updating all my sites to Flask.

Programming is a super power, and web development is the icing on the cake. You can start launching businesses and ideas right away, and you don't need to hire anyone else for it. Aside from my own, nope. I have been offered web development jobs, some not even in Python ruby.

I do not enjoy web development much, honestly. It's not so bad when it's for myself though. It feels much more like a hobby than a chore. I'm going to be going through your flask course for sure.

I do enjoy your tutorials on YouTube. Check out Quantopian if you haven't. Working on a series there. I had checked into them in the past, and was left pretty "meh" feeling about their service. I have been digging into them lately and it's an awesome service. Definitely worth looking into it. Dude, I am so glad I came across this post - Data analysis and web development are exactly the two areas I want to learn programming for.

Your site and videos are just the ticket! Thanks for sharing your knowledge, I expect to be devouring all of your content for the next several months at least. So right now I'm learning python but have no idea what I want to do with it.

My gf has suggested maybe backend website stuff but I really don't know. Also I know this topic is old so sorry if I'm just randomly asking you a question out of nowhere.

Start wherever you want to start, it really doesn't matter. My first topic with programming was natural language processing, which most people would have told me was a horrible place to start. As the OP is trying to narrow it down to just Game Development as seen from his 2nd paragraph , what considerations or pathway should he take to even clinch a career in the Game Industry?

I myself am having difficulty to secure a university application and trying to figure out how to even better myself. I would love to get a Bachelor just for the sake of getting a degree tough to get a job in this country without one just so I could even get an interview or rather through the hoop of the HR Well, I got a book deal to write a PyGame book, based on the channel. Again, they came to me.

I actually took that deal, almost done with it. Games aside, they came to me because they saw I could teach PyGame in the way that they wanted me to. I didn't have some paper that said so, I had video and text that backed it up, that was identical to what they were actually looking for.

I've had a lot of other book deals for the same, just not as good, so I turned them down. With games, how about some apps? Mobile is the fastest growing industry, so maybe make some phone games. People are spending more time on their phones now than on computers, on the internet, so maybe go down that route.

Show the schools that you're already passionate in the field, and you understand it. Lots of people look in on the outside and think game dev sounds fun, but they don't know much about it.

These people have a high drop out rate. If you can show that you're not one of those, that's probably a good thing.

Sounds like you're more trying to get the degree first, then the job, so things might be a little different, they might not care at all about a blog, but I think being able to quickly put down some apps and their download count could go a long way. A lot here can depend on your previous school performance, test scores if it's a public school, their funding depends on you scoring well Programming is definitely a wonderful thing, even though it can be stressful or tedious, it's amazing.

Making your first website, or programming a new application is like a 'high'. It's such an amazing feeling to get something to work, that you want to keep on it. We live in the 21st century, where technology is being made every single day. It'd be nice if everyone knew how to program, just a tad bit. Unfortunately, the choice for you putting your own energy into programming is up to you, but I recommend it.

Hey, thanks for this info i'm teaching myself the front-end side as well and i'm wondering, when you replicate sites, is it okay to put those on your portfolio? Are employers okay with this? Also since at that time you didn't know backend, were your sites mostly static sites, or maybe with some JS but they weren't full applications right? I built loads, hustled and networked. I freelanced for a while picking up a day or two here and there. One of the projects i worked on turned into the business i now have worked on for years later and has allowed me to travel the world- I have stood on the great wall of china, I have partied in vegas and got a tan in Punta del Este in Uruguay all from punching code on a laptop.

What did i do to "hustle"- i wrote as much code as possible and read as much as possible but that wasn't enough I went to every event locally i could find that would be beneficial, i built a website and learnt seo and how to market the website.

I ended up running ads on google adwords and blogging which paid of. I eventually started running events as well which gave me the oppurtunity to share my knowledge to audiences. Edit Reading the comments here- i have never had a job interview either. I got hired for the initial project based on my website and a quick discussion on the phone, i then done a few projects with the same guy who raised money for the current business i work for.

I am aware that I am self-taught. Because of this, I can lie about any skills needed because I know I can acquire them whenever I want. I can't speak for people that picked up the job off the bat but, my situation is very unique. A year later, I inquired for a position to transfer to a QA analyst. They immediately transferred me in because my manager in the data entry department put in great words for me.

QA analyst here was just doing the high level testing and just simply playing with new features being developed and breaking things. One thing that was mentioned to our QA analyst group was that having core tests automated would be incredibly beneficial. I pretty much proactively took a look in to it and learned python and selenium webdriver. I have recently pushed our first repository to the companies github and all the senior developers have taken notice of it.

I'm the only person on the QA team that knows how to program now and I plan on leveraging this in due time. After I write a few comprehensive tests, which should also align with my 1 year mark of my last raise, I will ask to have an official job title update and a salary that would match it.

Seems like we're kind of following the same path. I haven't gotten around to learning Selenium yet my company uses Robot Framework and SOAP.

What resources did you use for learning Selenium or are you just using the web driver for browser interaction with your Python scripts? If so, you might like the Watir Web Driver a bit more. It is written in Ruby, but it's more stable, IMO. I'm currently working on you guessed it Jenkins to help automate testing.

The QA group I am in has had 2 people transfer out to Development or to infrastructure QA, so the precedent is there. I have half a computer systems diploma. Taught myself Python in addition to the C and Java stuff we did at tech. I met with him the CTO and the CEO, and they took me on on a part-time basis. As of February, I've been employed here full-time as a junior developer.

I probably get paid a little less than others in my position, but they're giving me salary reviews every 3 months so it's growing fast.

Having said all of the above, this is South Africa. There are probably not nearly as many CS graduates around as in the US or Europe. I only did this because I had been coding since about as a hobby or some such, and people who knew me said "Man, you are so good at this, you ought to do it for a living! I probably would have never even considered going into it as a profession if not for this fact.

At the time, I really kind of wanted to be a psychologist or a chemist I never actually have had an actual job in the field where I worked as a "regular employee" for some other company. I did go to college however, and have my CS degree Master's , but that was kind of after the fact, and not before. My first "serious" language was the old Pascal p-system, on an Apple ][, no less. D And my first successful commercial project was a sort of "chemistry assistant" program, kind of an interactive periodic table that I sold to a local community college.

Way back when, when I first started all this, I was in Southeastern Virginia, but I have hopped around and bounced all over the place since then. My "home" if any, could be considered Southern Missouri, although I now live in Salt Lake City, and have for the past several years. If it is because of a love of the subject, or fascination with the processes involved, then by all means, go ahead and maybe make an investment and get yer degrees.

It's not gonna help as much as you would think, not with "getting a job", or in the salary department, but the experience and knowledge will make you a better programmer. If, however, your motivation is to use this as a gateway to "make a lot of money" or to "get a good job", my advice would be to seek life elsewhere. You will probably not do well, or last long, if financial matters is your only motivation here, so no point in wasting your time and money on something you will eventually never make use of.

I have a math degree and been programming forever. I said the right magic words on an interview and had obscure enough skills that it impressed the hiring manager. The lesson from this would be diversify your knowledge base.

Don't try to beat the CS grads on their home. Beat them on unix, beat them on python, ruby, cobol, anything else. You can move into their turf later. My wife is also self taught programmer, her degrees are not in any science.

She was also able to impress the hiring manager by demonstrating herself as a rapid learning who was willing to put in the effort and prepare for the interview. She now works at the same company I do, but hr didn't realize we were married until near the end of interviewing and I do not think it was part of the hiring decision.

She wanted to get the job on her own merits. One advantage this gave her was knowing the company culture. The takeaway from from her experience I would say is prepare for the interview. There are pages out there with common programming interview questions you can blow them away by acing those quickly and easily especially. Additionally know the company it isn't usually easy but maybe take a minute and look them up on something like glassdoor and find positive things to say about the work environment or whatever you can find positive there see if you can find reasons to be genuinely interested in working for the company.

It's a job it's kinda bullshit there will be shitty days but bring some enthusiasm to the interview. If you can network at all to get more information about the inside of the company that is even better. One last thing, we both moved to a place where programmers are not necessarily well paid and are in short demand.

Get out of the big cities and you start to find a lot of companies actually have bounties for their existing employees to help recruiting. That ties back in to networking. You weren't asking for advise on how to get a job but if you can do some or all of the above then you stand a chance of getting in to it if you keep at it.

TL;DR answering what you actually asked. I have been programming since I was a young teen, my wife got into seriously studying about a year prior to getting the job she has now. We are located in South Dakota. I know many languages but in my case it was SQL and perl, and familiarity with VIM and Linux that clinched it for me.

I work on the unix backend of the product and other than perl each of those skills I use daily and they helped set me apart from many other new hires who come from CS programs where they did Java or. Net in windows only environments. My only previous official programming education was first semester computer science.

I could reference a few tasks I had done but did not have a portfolio of completed or in progress projects to demonstrate. My wife learned some VB in college and then spent her time studying. She has not been programming for years and years, and as I said she does not have a science degree I do not know the details of her interview or how she conversed about the experience aspect. She did put together a webpage for a local indie movie promoter and used that as part of her portfolio.

It's probably their favorite or the one they most want to foist off on someone else. Yes, tl;dr fail I tried to at least separate out the answers the poster asked for from everything else I had to say. If you move to the omaha, kansas city, or basically any larger city in the midwest, programmers are paid a tad less, but there are jobs galore. I just spoke with my friend who's a job recruiter and said he never has less than 5.

We may get paid a little less, but it's so much cheaper to live out here, that makes up for it.

I can vouch for this. Yea, considering a house like mine would cost double in other areas, I don't think I'll be leaving any time soon. There is the other side though; my student city didn't have many job for programmer so I moved to Montreal about km away so I guess it's not like that everywhere. The few programmer job my city had were severely underpaid when the cost of living was basically the same even rent which is abit cheaper.

Yea I agree with you there. There are tons of jobs close to me though. Like I could always go somewhere else if I wanted.

Actually, I looked up houses similar to mine in the entire state, and the cheapest one I found was k. That's close to the same sq footage and same rooms and baths. And I don't live in Omaha, that's just close to me: And by close, I mean Nebraska close, so like miles. I don't think you know what actually goes on at most CS curriculums.

I got my CS degree at a top 5 school. Java was only taught in the intro to CS class because it was used mainly to teach OOP. There isn't a single class that uses. NET as far as I know, including all the senior level electives. Linux is a really big deal once you hit sophomore year and you are expected to use it in most classes. But more importantly, CS isn't about which programming languages you learn at all. The purpose of a CS degree is to familiarize one with things like algorithms, data structures, running time analysis, resource management, as well as concepts like TDD and OOP.

These are all things that really begin to matter when your project grows to a over a dozen developers, thousands of concurrent users, and hundreds of thousands of lines of code. At the same time, these are things you can usually disregard in a personal project which I think is why many self-taught programmers think a CS degree isn't that important. Thinking that the purpose of a CS degree is to establish yourself in ". Again, I am not myself a CS major. Also again I live in a flyover state.

I can only comment on the hires I see come in the door right out of college. It may have more to do with location and the quality of local universities than with what good CS programs teach. We don't exactly attract people to the middle of nowhere. You went to a top 5 school, you probably aren't looking at moving to South Dakota to get started since your school background offered you better options.

You school also provided better curriculum. I doubt a single peer of yours in college would consider moving here for a job. Hence what I said about don't beat them on their own turf, it applies geographically as well as in terms of skill set. I am in the process of teaching myself my first language Python, and I really enjoy it. I really feel like I am getting the core functions and processes down, just waiting to start my own project to test my knowledge.

I am using Code Academy to learn, and using MIT Opencoursware in conjunction to listen to a great teacher talking about the material in hopes of filling in the blanks theory wise. I am wondering you or she thinks of my learning method? Namely referring to the two resources I am utilizing, Code Academs and MITOC.

Btw, really, really enjoying coding, it is very much exciting, interesting, and intuitive to me, I am also not turning back! In the UK it's pretty easy considering how worthless the CS university course is compared to how much you'll learn by yourself.

I found a specialization front end development , learned HTML, CSS and JS fluently, learned industry standards such as JQuery for javascript and correct terminology. I've flown through every interview I've had easily by showing them portfolio and technical knowledge that is more valuable through experience as opposed to a degree.

No matter where you are, experience is greater than a degree. These are creative industries, would you hire a painter who had his own gallery or would you hire someone with a uni degree? Someone will hire you if you have PROOF of your skills with a good portfolio than they would hiring someone who has it written on paper. Just make sure before you go to an interview you know all the typical CS student questions, for me I get things in interviews such as "How do you prefer to make a website responsive", "What's a HTTP request?

Most software development is about writing software solutions to fix real world problems. It's not bleeding edge but instead all that is needed is creating system that improve productivity. I once wrote a simple software reconciliation system that turned a daily 3 person hour manual process into a single person 5 minute role and naturally the managers were happy with the outcome.

But that solution was not some new rocket science solution, but instead simple software automation system. How long did you study before you got your first job? What language s did you learn? What skills did you have in those languages? What concepts did you understand? The only question you need to ask is can you write code in a way that makes the computer do something useful?

If the answer is yes, you are employable, if no then no amount of theory is going to change that fact. Most software development is not overly complex as it just involves taking some complex, convoluted human process and replacing it with a cheaper cost saving, automated process. I do front and back end web design. Been doing it for about a month now.

I was very lucky. That Tuesday i went over and bam, he offered me the job. Im learning as i go and its really not that hard. Just show your interest and look for an internship! With the last two companies I've worked for, I applied for positions that were not programming related, but I've ended up coding in both of them. With the first one, I worked for a large e-commerce company, and in my third week on the job, I realized that my productivity would be better if I had better tools.

So I coded some. Within days, a bunch of people were using the tools I created. Throughout my tenure with the company, I continued coding things when the opportunity arose, even though I never wanted to be a developer.

With the second job, the company was using some older technology because they didn't really have an application development team. I happened to be familiar with the tech, so I started modding it to make it better. Eventually, I put together a proposal of how to replace it with something better, and I got offered a software development position. I don't know if any of this helps you, since I guess I never went looking for a software dev job.

However, it might be important to take into account that I actively look for opportunites to use my skills to make an impression on others. I was working as an IT guy at my company and learned programming while I was working and gradually turned it into what I was doing full-time. I guess it took a year of studying and practicing before I was able to like, create useful programs. I've been fulltime programming for almost 2 years now and I feel like I'm pretty competent at least with the kind of programming I do for work; if you asked me to start doing 3D graphics or something I'd have a hard time for sure.

Let's get myth 1 out of the way: The things you learn in school are not necessarily the things you need on the job. There may be some overlap, but there are enough "non-degree skills" you need to be a successful, employable software developer.

I can't even remember how many people I've interviewed for my automation team who have CS degrees and can't write a single line of code. On top of that, they can't problem solve -- and they don't understand how to seek out the best tools to handle a problem, instead of trying to force a problem to fit into their current toolset.

Seems like a lot of people have given you the run down on what I would say, but I want to contribute this: I recently landed a job as a front end dev with no formal training or degree in any sort of web programming. I honestly think i got it because when they brought me in to interview i told them how much i love to learn, i learned everything on my own and i spent all my free time learning what i could.

They understand that my skills may not be as developed as someone with a degree in CS, but they know i am willing to put in the work and time to be the best programmer possible. Just make sure you learn to balance and spread out your learning in your free time. You'll hit burn out fast. Don't stop, just average it out. Yes this is a very important part of it.

I usually spread out learning so i will only do hours a night. I love the nights when i have an intense 3 hour workout and and intense 3 hour programming session. I feel like im training my mind and my body. I've actually done high school of computer science and am now in faculty of computer science, but everything I know about programming is self-taught because I didn't listen at all at school.

And the job that I've got now has nothing to do with the fact that I have finished high school of computer science or that I am now going to faculty of computer science, so I guess I can answer your question. The only thing that is going to land you a job in your case are your own projects.

You need to have a nice portfolio. Even if you only have one project to show, let that be a very good one. When I was still learning programming, I started a project and kept updating it and making it better.

It was parsing data from some huge website in my country and displayed it in a really nice and convenient way for other people to use. Basically turning their website into an app without accessing their database at all parsing html.

Before I've done this, I even asked the owner of the website huge company if they are ok with it and they said yes. So after my app got pretty good, the CEO contacted me and said that if they ever need another guy for Android or whatever, he'll contact me.

Well he never got me the job, but he was cool enough to talk about me to his other CEO friends at other companies and he landed me a job at an even better, bigger, programmer-friendlier company! So I guess the point of my story is to create your own projects, make sure the right people see those projects and connections will get you a long way. No degree, at all, no previous dev job and I'm currently working for one of the biggest ecommerce security companies in the world;.

First of all, want to get a job as a developer? Go for web development. It has easily the lowest bar of entry and once you nail your basics down enough, transitioning between languages and field of work is way way way way easier once you write code full time. I learned, in this order: HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Java. I knew them well by the time I got a job and I understood all things OOP. I feel qualified to comment here as I had many of these same questions, thoughts, and concerns. I work as a generalist.

NET programmer front end and back end , at a large company and have no degree. I only made it 2 years in to the CS program before I succumbed to boredom and Eve Online. I learned programming "formally" while working at a retail store. This was probably a period of years, but the pace was slow cause these were also my uh If I had to estimate the actual amount of time studying and learning, it would be under a year.

In my area and I believe in general, based on what internet browsing I have done , the demand for. NET developers is huge and will continue to be huge. Beware, a general programming language book will give you "the basics", always. There are very few beginner language books out there that have the breadth to cover a lot of real world scenarios.

It's hard to list things like skills and concepts because there are so many. Thankfully a lot of modern languages share these, so if you learn them in one place, they are generally translatable somewhere else. See later in this comment about where to get a good base. Hiring managers and interviewers in my experience, want and LOVE to hear about real world scenarios where there was an issue and you did something to provide a solution.

I used my retail job as a platform for designing my own software to solve business related issues. If you work, you can do the same.

It makes it relevant to your experience if you currently have a job, otherwise at the minimum it gives the person trying to hire you a sense of what you are capable of. For example, I worked in a retail establishment that had a terrible time card system. I wrote a time card system that blew it out of the water, it had a slick UI, cool features for managers that used algorithms and employee rankings to generate schedules automatically based on peak revenue hours, etc.

IMO nobody will care about simple websites and console programs, unless that console program is solving a real problem.

If you can bring a laptop and demonstrate some of your work during your interview, that's killer. In my opinion at minimum to have a good shot at securing a position as a self-taught programmer making good money not shitty money, and to go toe-to-toe with anyone else not just new grads, including other seasoned programmers you need to:.

You appear to be operating under the assumption that a CS degree teaches you how to program. While it may teach you some programming, it teaches you to solve problems, it teaches you algorithms, it teaches you theoretical properties of computers. It is programming agnostic, letting you to decide what language to pick up if you desire.

You'll have a good foundation in how computers work, allowing you to master things like programming languages. While you can learn a programming language, you'll only know how to program in that language. Learning CS allows you to understand theories and general properties of computers, making learning a language nothing more than it's syntax not really, but that's the basic idea.

I think it is experience. People can build up a portfolio. Education is great yeah, but experience is even greater in the eyes of an employer. Not saying students don't get a lot of experience. They just might not have a large portfolio coming straight out of school. I started a business ecommerce platform, took me 3 months, used php , and accidentally contacted my first boss about something unrelated and got a job.

I got recommended by a sysadmin friend and made a relatively decent job at selling myself on the interview, then worked a few months and started changing jobs using the previous as "experience". The reason people hire self-taugh developers is that they're competent, university doesn't teach you how to work they have a curricula and exercises but that's useless in the real world unless you're a researcher.

I started off in ChE in school but I had a bunch of CS friends. I'd been coding since I was a kid so I had some chops. One of my friends was getting a ton of contract work in school I don't know how he was getting this work -- I imagine through his professors because he was incredibly bright and a phenomenal coder and hard worker. He mentioned that he couldn't keep up so I offered to do some.

After a few months of a good arrangement we ended up forming a small company with one sales guy and four founding developers a very nice ratio BTW doing contract work. We brought people on board and were doing really well but, alas, five founders is about three too many and we had different ideas on the direction of the company when we started making real money and we split.

I ended up working for one of our clients full time and started getting work on the strength of my resume and doing contract work for various contacts made while doing contract work and my own projects. Now I own a fairly large stake in a couple of companies that more or less operate independently of me, and am a director of a startup that is currently transitioning out of the startup phase and into the 'throw gasoline on this fire' growth phase and still pick up the odd contracting job here and there, mostly on a consulting basis, for old clients or friends of friends.

No one outside of Big Corporate cares much about a CS degree. It is kind of like hiring an artist based on whether they have an MFA or not. Sure, you are not going to teach without it, likely, but everyone else just cares about the work you've done. If you can show that off you're golden original projects in github and open source contributions carry the most weight.

There are plenty of CS grads that just can't get it done and don't have and can't generate a body of work. Hell, I've met guys on standards boards that likely affect your life that can't code or are unwilling to in their area of 'expertise'. And don't get too hung up on working for other people. If you can create value you can make money.

You don't necessarily need a boss. You can do it on your own. Aside from making math more accessible and comfortable to me and having an engineering like mindset when it comes to breaking down problems into manageable parts, I don't think so. Though there does seem to be some professional courtesy among Real Engineers -- i. But that's the extent of it. I haven't done any modelling or anything that leans on what I learned though I did once work with a company that did high performance computing cluster infrastructure and back end stuff that other much smarter people than me did use for those kinds of things.

I'm just glad I'm not working for an oil company. I got my job first doing data entry. Having completed that ahead of schedule I was asked to investigate the feasibility of using flash interfaces for some in house eLearning modules we were making. I took the initiative and just build them myself using some XML to add or remove modules to the flash interface.

After that I was assigned the task of maintaining some web properties on a full time contract. I learned a lot in that summer. My BA is in art history but stupidily I always thought CS would be my backup. I studied on my own for under a year, went to meetups, hacknights and networked.

I did two short internships where I could work on my own projects and see their dev process. I wasn't hired by either company but through networking I was introduced to my company and landed my first front end dev job, now fulfilling full stack requirements, and I just got my first raise and promotion to scrum master. Dont be disheartened by rejections, every company is looking for different talent. Go to meetups and be social you never know who will offer you a job.

As someone who just started learning to program and has a History degree, this is seriously uplifting and motivating. Especially after my managers told me to basically piss up a rope about getting hired in a temp to hire job that I'm currently doing.

I plan to leave this place as soon as I can get the chance. Smaller companies and any networking events you can find. A lot of them won't be posting to job boards, so you gotta do the leg work. If you're just sitting on LinkedIn and waiting for recruiters to call you may be left in the cold. Check around for something like a startup weekend.

It's a great chance to show your chops as a developer and meet startups that are looking for devs. Creative embellishment and willingness to throw self of cliff and build plane on way down. Added stuff to Github every day well tested, cleanly written stuff , read a lot of blogs and attended the local Ruby user group. Meeting people and making an impression is half the battle I think!

This is probably more of an outlier situation, but I didn't even goto college and got a job as a developer. I was running a freelance development biz and needed a secondary income. Found a job on craigslist doing, basically, fancy data entry. Over 6 months I was able to show my work to the right people in the company and got moved into development. I have an Arts Degree. While working a job I hated, I decided to switch to a part-time job and studied non-stop Ruby on Rails via The Odin Project.

It was about 6 months before I landed my first part-time gig at a tiny web design firm as a contractor. Pretty soon I was getting contacted by recruiters via Linkedin and received Interviews from organisations I contacted semi-directly. When I was hiring coders, as long as you could show you have programming knowledge, I could care less if you graduated high school.

Having some grammar and writing skills is a plus, but not a necessity. A lot of times. And for the most part, if programmers don't find something interesting, they don't do very well at it. Point and case, I tested out of college algebra and went straight into calc 1 my freshman year of college.

I ended up just teaching myself college algebra as I was taking calc 1, to be able to simply things the way I needed to. I did fine in that class.

My sophomore year, I had to take physical science , as it was part of my degree requirements. I'm talking the science you take as a freshman in HS, albeit in one semester. I got a b- in that class because attendance was part of my grade, and I just simply never showed up. I didn't feel it was necessary when I could do a week's worth of homework in one class sitting.

So, just start applying places, maybe even for paid internships. Getting experience is the best way to learn. Perhaps start voluntarily to work on free projects you rent a job.

RedHat , for example , typically employ good reviewers. Anything useful I know is self taught and I don't have a degree I'd get hired on yet, so the short answer is: I know a guy. It literally seems like the only constant in how to get a job: Know people who'd either you a job or recommend you for one. I started working for my company about 13 years ago as a technician. Learned the software and supported it over about 5 years. I slowly transitioned into a developer.

I was in the Air Force in an unrelated career field. We had a bunch of information stored on a word document that needed to get updated every day. I started out with ASP but switched to learning PHP to solve the problem and put the data in a database-driven website that we could easily access and update. Well, the program grew and it got to a point where Gen. McChrystal said it was extremely useful and even used it for some decision making.

Anyway, the guy I found that offered to host it on our secure network ended up hiring me a couple years after I got out of the Air Force and that's how I got my job as a software developer. I have two degrees in music and am a senior web dev.

I started in web design, making simple web sites for folks and building a portfolio. From there I got into JS and front end work, and then from there got into back end work. After a certain number of years, "equivalent experience" is more than enough.

You should spend some time thinking about the benefits of some kind of legitimate bootcamp, probably the 3 months ones. That'd be great, but I'm married no kids thankfully and have bills to pay. Bootcamp tuition fees aside, I can't afford to just stop working for 3 months.

Might I recommend checking out freecodecamp. It's self-paced and, like it says on the tin, free. I used it for about a week before I hit the ground running at my frontend dev internship, when before I'd really mostly worked with backend technologies. If you get through the 'lessons', you get to build up your portfolio with projects for actual nonprofit orgs. Not going through each question, but to briefly address how I got my first job if this paid internship counts in your book , I had zero formal education, but I took a few MOOCs, wrote up a description of what I'd learned so far, and approached one local startup I was really enthusiastic about.

This probably would not have worked on most employers, so finding a company that does things differently and is receptive to you doing things differently is key.

It also probably helped to be far from the Bay Area and NYC. Heh, I guess by "correspondence course" you really meant a correspondence course. You could take night classes at college.

I would just start by going through the materials in the FAQ here. I'm not sure why people don't just do that to begin with. I think one thing that shouldn't be under looked here is many of the self taught programmers still have degrees, just perhaps not CS degrees. I started during my last year of university chemical engineering because I did not really enjoy my internship quite so much but really liked coding.

I tried some Kaggle competitions over the summer didn't come close to winning anyway, but learned a lot. As I created projects, I assembled them into a portfolio which was linked from my Dice resume. I ended up with 2 offers after about months of low-effort searching most employers ended up contacting me. I now work on an enterprise application for a software company. Luckly I passed the first interview and I was hired as a junior PHP dev, for the interview I had to do a CRUD aplication from zero.

In an interview it doesn't matter if the project you present them is commissioned by someone, or just you playing with programming. I'm a self taught programmer, co-founder of a startup while I feel like I'm mostly wasting my time at college. I don't have to do much so that's something while I'm almost developing full time for my startup server backend, administration and android.

I've gotten some job offers, but nothing that interested me and that I have time for. I graduated in with a ba in pop music and I'm not a musician This was my entrance 12 week Seo work experience job as a chat host. No technical ability required. Typing to people about anything.

Like a call centre. Attend marketing related interviews super rough website up. Basic Photoshop and fireworks done as I'm applying for email marketing roles oh the tables! It's direct not an agency. Land job as U. X exec due to knowledge of marketing, business psychology and now basic web and keen to learn. Learnt so much in such a short time. I got lucky- I had great referees. I studied a lot, I know shit loads of overlapping theory psychology, layouts etc but had zero practical skills.

My company is small, family run and nowhere near my city which is a British post-industrial wasteland. I'm now in the countryside surrounded by cows. Where I think I'd do better in hindsight- I wish I'd learnt jquery. I refused as I wanted to understand js properly first.

I found it made everything more logical and I now understand its base language better now. I've been taught angular js, sass, terminal yeah I'd never used that , git and have an awareness of grunt.

I'm still the most junior- cs degrees are not what they look for. Its gusto and a portfolio and willingness to put in the hours: I got my first job with a sales based resume, and word from a friend, who worked at the place already and was really talented telling the hiring manager that I'm more than capable of doing the work. Over the last 8 years of being a professional I've interviewed with a number of places.

Degrees were almost never brought up. Hiring managers only care about what you can do. I've also learned, over that time, that I have grossly over estimated the number of reliable, skilled, developers in the area.

This gleamed from having candid conversations with hiring managers about positions that have been open for a while, to folks trying to fill positions I've left. That blows my mind. Here's a blog post where I wrote about my experiences going from leaving a job, to learning about software development, and how I prepared for interviews: I studied from about January to May months. I spent about 2 months learning about software development and learning a programming language, and about months developing an application for the purposes of extending my learning and also to do something fun.

After months and lots of learnings along the way, I published an iOS app onto the App Store and started applying to software developer opportunities. After a couple weeks, I was able to land an internship at a small software consulting firm.

I stayed at this position from June - August working mostly on iOS. During this period, I spent about 2 months of my off-time going through an algorithms textbook as well as online resources on this topic and learning about different data structures, recursion, sorting methods, etc.

The main goal here was to get through a technical interview at a large firm. After a couple weeks of interviewing, I was able to land a position at a large firm and the rest is history. I didn't have any skills in Objective-C before I started learning about it. I studied biomedical engineering in undergrad so I was familiar with basic concepts like for loops and have taken a college course in Java. After about 2 months of going through the Objective-C language and going through many tutorials and practice projects, I felt like I was in a place to start developing an iOS app.

I developed and published an iOS app before I started applying for software developer opportunities. I left a job in biotech market research in consulting and was living in San Francisco at the time, so I continued to stay there, study, and look for opportunities there when I was ready.

As it turns out, it was a great area to look for software development opportunities. Anecdotally, San Francisco may be more accustomed to hiring software developers without CS degrees relative to other cities. Even if you dont know a lot, and the topics seem to difficult, keep going. Keep learning programming, and one day, when you are ready, give a talk.

Prove to everyone in that room that you are smart and capable, and then end with a slide saying "Hey, Im looking for a starting position somewhere, Jr level, I am ready to do what it takes". Started out in tech support. One eventually hired me away from IT, then another hired me away from that department, etc. Programming since I was Got a "Teach yourself C" book for my birthday. Coasted through my first two years of CIS because of prior experience and most of the stuff was really simple.

I did learn a lot about version control software, object oriented patterns, and working with a team, struggled my second two as a I realized that I didn't really like CIS, I just enjoyed programming, ended up flunking out my fifth. Restaurant closed down near the end of my third year due to head chef being meth addict and manager embezzling money. After a year I was promoted to Sys Admin, did that for about six months then the whole development team was fired because of a major bug that cost the company a lot of money.

They moved me to development doing LAMP webdev. Did that for about another year, then quit because I was really unhappy working there and the CEO was a tyrannical asshole. Got kicked out of school for bad grades while interning, they offered me a full time job. Been here for almost a year now and am absolutely loving it. I had a shared hosting account and just started to play with little PHP scripts.

Started very basic, made my own blog no framework , and just re-invented the wheel repeatedly. Make a user system with a login page and logout functionality. Make a simple pagination feature. None of it was object-oriented, but it worked. As dumb as that may sound, it actually helped me. I learned how certain components or features worked, and it also gave me an immense sense of satisfaction.

Can programmers without CS degrees find jobs? | Hacker News

I knew that I was just barely beginning and there were scores of people better than me, but I was learning, progressing, and creating. While in college and working for the school as a student programmer glorified position, mostly gave me paid time to dink around with PHP, HTML, and CSS I had a buddy who was already a designer at a large company give me a call. I asked for some design advice every month or so, then showed him what I was working on.

He let me know that the company wanted a Front-End dev in Salt Lake City, Utah. I was persistent in getting an interview set up and doing the follow up. Here's the worst part, PHP wasn't parsing squat when I tried to show off my work in the interview. During the entire interview and in front of the entire Front-End dev team, all the PHP failed to include any of my files and I was using it to include CSS and HTML fragments on each page.

In spite of that, they still hired me. I'm not sure but I have ideas. When they initially talked to me on the phone before the interview, they gave me a salary range. They seemed to agree on the spot that it wasn't a problem. Less than an hour after I left, I got a call with the official offer. The reason I include that is because it blew me away that I could just ask for it and they gave it to me.

No degree, never really been paid to do meaningful work of any kind, never worked on a site for someone else. Just crap I played around with when I could. What I think makes the difference is when someone comes in with just the degree and a little bit of work that is all related to their college course work, some times what they represent is that someone will do what they are told but have little initiative outside that.

If you have someone come in with no college degree, some pot holes in their knowledge, but similar amount of work that is entirely driven by their own desire, they can represent someone very self-motivated and doesn't need to be instructed step-by-step.

They can see the problem, learn what is required on their own, and implemented a working solution. Do you want someone who will be like a computer and do exactly what you ask, or be able to give someone just enough direction and trust them to figure out the details? The more I've worked in the industry, the more I see that attribute having huge pull even if it's silently valued.

I still haven't broken into development for longer than 2 years, but I am self taught. The one thing I would encourage is to write some Open Source software so that in the interview, you can just slap down not literally of course your GitHub URL and they can check out your code.

It helps if it is ALL your code, and not part of a giant OSS project where you can't prove which code is yours easily. If it takes longer than a minute to explain which code is yours, then you just lost the hiring manager's attention. I had many requests for this, but all the code I wrote belonged to my previous employers, so I had nothing to show.

Hence why I am in SW QA at the moment. With nothing to show other than acing their tests and interview questions , it was hard to prove my abilities. So if there are any other self taught java devs out there wanting to get a project for their portfolio I'd love to chat. So, I had almost a decade of hobbyist experience before I actually tried to get a job. I didn't really have a plan, I just figured it's what I should do for money at some point in the early s. Eventually segued to C for windows desktop apps , PHP, Ruby, Python, Obj-C for iOS , Java for Android pretty much in that order.

Had to fill in the gaps over time relating to design patterns and algorithms, it's commonly passed over by self-taught people and I was no exception. You can also "self-teach" through Coursera and such, some of which have certificates upon completion.

These could help verify your abilities. In general I shy away from certifications because they're usually a rip off, but MOOCs are free and fun. Otherwise, build real shit. Some jobs require a CS degree, but most jobs only require someone who can Get Shit Done. Another option is to start off getting a QA position for the job experience and try to find someone there to mentor you for software projects and work your way into what you want to do, which I assume is not QA, no one likes QA.

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Please read the FAQ and posting guidelines before submitting! When using GitHub, do most people use the GUI on GitHub or locally through console? Anyone want to buddy up for. NET plus any other tech topic discussions? This is an archived post. You won't be able to vote or comment. I think your true curiosity is better aimed at employers. It just so happens I am one of those too! My best suggestion to you is to start a blog.

Best wishes in your hunt! Thanks for the tutorials! Glad I could help! Could you talk about your process? The learning part or the job hunting part? This is probably too long already, I'll stop: Thanks for your unknowing support: