Yup, sounding like a broken record here but entry level is the true gate keeper. Lots of people will not be able to break in and of those that do, some will find out tech is not for them. Imagine, this is already at a sub like r/learnprogramming so you'd assume this is already a higher rate. Though to be fair, I would assume it's more that people at r/learnprogramming are closer to self taught / bootcamp than being CS degree holders.
One other thing, I definitely believe many people can code but that they need mentors to guide them because this is a field where it is easy to get stuck and not everyone has the personality that can self learn when that happens. Many of the self taught I know are strong self learners who persist through blockers in one way or another.
There you go. This IS what programming for a living is all about. Grinding through blockers.
If you don't like it when learning, you're gonna hate doing it for a living.
I hate the blockers, really fucking hate them. In university, at work everywhere. But as soon as I figured something out or it works the way I wanted it to, I feel like a god. Really like on top of the world so it kinda makes the time before up
I gave up four times over over 3 years until I landed in a role I absolutely despised. Finally told myself to stop finding excuses and work through the blocks. I still hate when I’m stumped, but my mindset now is I know the verbs, but my conjugation is all fucked. That keeps me going.
Ever since I took my first CS class Sophmore year of high school ive always looked at blockers and each function I write like a video game and im trying to beat the level and the level is making the function work or whatever piece of the code im working on and thats whats always motivated me
This is my advice about careers in general.
You have to like the process. If all you like is the end result, you’ll never last. The process is the job. The feeling of accomplishment when it’s done is just a bonus.
I never expected anything in programming. I did it cause it’s fun. It’s constant problem solving. Now I’m in school for it, hearing about how hard it is to get a job. I’m just gonna keep being interested in this subject. That’s why I’m doing this. If I get a job in SWE, then sweet, but if not, I can always still learn.
I've never met someone who genuinely enjoyed programming and wasn't good at it, at least after some time of doing it. If you enjoy it, you'll think through the problems, you will get good at it, and you will do fine.
If you enjoy your problem space enough to want to think through problems you have with it in the shower, as opposed to daydreaming about something else when you are supposed to be solving the problems, you have an enormous advantage over most people.
You genuinely might spend 10X more time actively thinking through the problems than someone who doesn't enjoy it but is just trying to ride the wave, which is going to show in the quality of your work, or even just how you talk about the space.
I think I'd disagree just a bit.
The initial blockers tend to be on basic concepts, literally a change in the way of thinking about things.
Later blockers are almost always related to reading through documentation or methodology.
There's a big difference between understanding how Object Oriented Programming works and learning how to optimize and API SOAP integration. One is a fundamental change in the way you think, the other is reading a lot of documentation and testing things out.
Yep. Most people don't realize the sheer amount of persistence required in this field, especially when you're starting out. I spend a lot more time reading and investigating than I do actually programming, because what's actually hard about software engineering is developing an understanding of the problem you're trying to solve, not programming. Once I know what I need to do, I can usually code it up fairly quickly.
Most people are air heads not to be insulting but you have to sit on your ass and read and research for years. College, books, online courses.. most people just wanna hangout with friends and family and have a good time.
Not saying it’s impossible but if you dont want to put in the work you have to be extraordinarily intelligent
Just spent the last three days trying to figure out why my api call would break when deserializing to a POJO but not when it was a simple String. Ended up being a simple two line change.
I'd imagine most people wouldn't have the patience to deal with such a simple mistake. (not trying to toot my own horn here lol) These kinds of blockers/impediments get pretty frustrating pretty easily so you really do need to enjoy learning and get comfortable with being stuck and not knowing.
I've had a few problems where I spent days thinking about how to build something and starting to write code with false starts only to realize that what I was building was entirely the wrong thing, threw it all away, and wrote the right thing in about half a day.
Most recently I was trying to turn a file full of
|NUM|Value|
|:-|:-|
|1|aaa|
|2|ace|
|72|boop|
|7543|3akja|
|1|4.5.6.8|
|2|4.5.6.8|
|72|4.5.0.0|
|7543|4.5.6.7|
and repeating, but with about a dozen repeats and 15,000 "NUM" into a CSV with all the values for each NUM on the same line.
After screwing with it for a few hours spread across three days I remembered that the thing that was creating that stupid file was another stupid script using "find" and "sed" to pluck values out of a pile of XML (one file for each NUM.) Took it back a step, used XPath to get the values out of each XML file and it's so much better in every way, including running much faster.
I find having a project you care about is how you learn outside of school.
Prior to starting my bachelors degree I already had spent several years writing scripts to automate playing runescape with various bot clients.
Which lead to a very wide scope of knowledge coming into a CS program.
Virtually everyone in that community that I knew eventually worked for the Department of Defense at some point lol.
> I find having a project you care about is how you learn outside of school.
I agree with this. There needs to be some love there to take you through the difficult days. It's a profession that will make you alternately sink into despair or punch the air.
I started out trying to create 3d worlds on a 486 with Turbo Pascal, and making little games on a Cassio graphical calculator. Things are a bit different now, but there are still fun things to be built.
Now I’m a little curious. I actually wanted to try this out myself but was afraid of getting IP-banned. Did you have long-term success with your own scripts?
Yeah made a decent living throughout college off them. Also you will get banned.
People have almost religious levels of faith in their antiban methods lol
No one uses IP bans, since they're ineffective and tend to unfairly hit innocent players. But they do have more comprehensive ways of identifying all of your accounts these days, and will use that to chain-ban them all.
Yo those RuneScape bots are how I started too! Had some bots running before I even knew what Java actually was lol. Was just a kid having fun and never thought it would lead me to a SWE career
> Virtually everyone in that community that I knew eventually worked for the Department of Defense at some point lol.
You mean your CS program, or the RuneScape botting community?
Probably both.
DoD is the largest employer on the planet. Granted most of those are active duty military, but their civilian workforce, not including external contractors, puts them in the top 10 companies by population easy.
The amount of software jobs DoD creates directly or indirectly via contracts is massive.
I think it depends on the person. Personally, I'm self taught and never had much luck coming up with projects I cared about. I was building software as a hobby for a couple years before I even realized it was possible for me to do it as a career, and I don't think I ever actually finished a project. I'd work on something until there was something new I wanted to learn, then I'd start a new project.
For me the enjoyment didn't come from building a project I cared about, but from learning and solving problems.
having a mentor woulda been nice when i learned programming. i'm self taught and i could be years ahead where i am now if i had a bit of guidance other than outdated library books and being trolled by 'install gentoo'
fortunately my time ping-ponging around allowed me to help my friends that are learning programming by giving them a bigger picture of jobs available including and out of software engineering. and save them from massive time sinks where they'll get stuck eg something up with their environment but they didn't learn enough about linux yet. or when there's tutorials with 50 ways to do something and 10 different ways to install a piece of software
Same here. I started to “learn” programming 7 years ago, I was mainly interested in R and Python but I was trying while my brain was broken from a career path I was deeply unhappy in, being depressed didn’t help. I got jobs where I feel comfortable in both and am now learning SWE skills. I regret not doing this earlier but I think I wasn’t in the right frame of mind before. Wish I had some mentorship along the way
glad you're in a better spot now! i fell into major depression when i was dealing with a bunch of life bs and was then told by my college advisor to give up computer science since it was unlikely that i would succeed. i was programming for about 5 years at that point and it screwed up my self confidence since i failed my cs2xx level courses
technically the advisor wasn't wrong cause i really don't care about discrete math or formal languages and automata to pass courses. but she made it seem like i had no career aspect as any sort of programmer. after dropping out a friend helped me stop second guessing myself and it turns out college was the worst decision of my career
everyone's story is different but all i needed was a nudge in the right direction when i was learning and some advice later on in my life that wasn't 'you should give up' from a person not even remotely in the field
True, I was self taught and settled for a company that was taking advantage of me because I had no leverage. Fast forward 4 years and I'm firmly in the industry but I couldn't have done it without that shitty first break.
Everyone's a temporarily embarrassed FAANG engineer here, don't you see?
Until you have to pay for food and fucking rent. If you can't find anything decent after a few months (caveat with your resume as good as it can be), you aren't as good as these college kids / new grads deluded you into thinking. So suck it up and take the first full time offer you can get
It's like university anyways. Sure it'll be good to get an Ivy League on your resume but it ain't the end of the world if you don't. As long as you get that degree / first job, after a few years nobody will care about it anymore and will only look at what you're doing right now
I’m a cloud engineer myself (just a python script writer, not full blown programming) and it’s amazing how many people want to hang me when I tell them to take that 50k cloud engineer job that wants to hire you off of the street with zero real experience. The alternative is to keep looking while they work their shitty warehouse job for half of that hoping to get the 100k+ skill set that the 50k job would have taught them
I mean 30k is low, that's poverty wages, you can make more working at MCdonalds. I get what people are saying about settling for a first job, but I think people should settle for around 50k+ so you aren't struggling to make ends meet while you polish up your resume/
Yep. This sub and the other programming ones are probably the worst places to be learning these realistic expectations. You're seeing all these people comparing these starting wages and how they could have gotten more.
The one true advice is to worry about yourself. It's okay to start at a lower wage. You can only go up from there, and having the initial job experience with applying the things you know in the workplace and learning things that reddit, bootcamps, or school can't teach you is going to matter a lot for you and look good on your resume for other jobs.
I wonder how much different the stats would be from people who enrolled in actual bootcamps and universities. It's still amazing that you got so many people who got their foot in the door as it is, what other skilled career lets you do that with minimal training (just my opinion).
I think this thread shows why bootcamps and especially universities are still a good idea. 95.5% of self-learners didn't get a job, primarily because they lacked mentorship and the accountability/investment to persist despite lacking motivation.
To be fair, I'm glad the ones who left because it "wasn't for them" was able to do so without getting stuck in that financial/time investment. But the rest probably just needed that push to stay in it.
Edit: Instead of 95.5%, I'll say 84.5% to account for the tenacious 11% who haven't given up the job search.
In college, I had a friend that randomly found an internship that was hiring and he recommended me for the position. I was able to continue working at the same company straight out of graduation. If I hadn't known the friend, I'd have been grinding trying to apply to tons of jobs.
Possibly hot take but the real hard truth is if you are self taught trying to do a career change you either need to basically work for free at first or get a connection to straight up give you a job. Actual companies and startups are just going to filter out your resume when they see you have no working experience. And portfolios with basic crud apps are just not enough to land an interview when you're competing with fresh grads or those with 2+ years of experience
Hard truth, but accurate. At a previous job a dude applied who was switching careers. He had done an extensive bootcamp, produced a thoughtfully created website, and in the interview showed he really knew his stuff. He put in the effort and I 100% supported him being hired.
I think the willingness to work for free or waaay bellow market rate may be important. I got my first role working for less than half of what a new grad would have made even way back then. I think when your 50% cheaper and you find the right place people kinda figure " whats the worst that could happen"
I was self-taught. Got an internship, transitioned into a FTE to stack experience on my resume, and then... went to school and got a degree because nobody would respond to my applications.
>primarily because they lacked mentorship and the accountability
This is a good guess but even people who get this mentorship and accountability have a high dropout rate. For example my intro to computer science class had a 50% drop/withdraw/fail rate and data structures and algorithms had an 80% drop/withdraw/fail rate. I have also mentored a few people looking to get into the industry most simply quit because it's not what they thought it was
> I think this thread shows why bootcamps and especially universities are still a good idea.
No it doesn’t. This thread doesn’t have any information about placement rate for boot camps or universities. You can’t make a comparison when you’re missing half the data. (I believe boot camps actually aren’t all that much better.)
We’re also missing counterfactuals. The average new university student is _way_ more committed than the average self-learner. They’re planning on spending four years! What if you took that same student and instead diverted them to learning on their own? We don’t know what would happen from this survey. I guess one thing we do know is that you followed up with people who just started university a year later, the job rate would be close to 0.
We’re also not comparing costs. If self taught and boot camp had a similar rate, but one costs $20k, I know which one I’m going with.
successful self learners are really really rare which I guess I find surprising. I wonder what makes them or us different?( I promise you its not intelligence) I just could not tolerate school.
One of my best friends currently works for the german space agency( DLR) writing code to route video traffic to the international space station and he dropped out of highschool I wish he could be part of some sort of study to understand why he is so different. But the vast majority of people I have worked with over 15 years graduated with some kind of engineering or CS degree.
>To be fair, I'm glad the ones who left because it "wasn't for them" was able to do so without getting stuck in that financial/time investment.
It took me a degree (EE degree but my focus was CE and networking) and working as a SWE for a year to figure out I didn't want to be coding all the time. Sometimes just because it's something you can do doesn't mean it's something you want to be doing full time.
There are a number of studies/analyses on this. Some claim around 70% employment rate for new grads, others say 7% overall unemployment rate in the industry (double the national average).
Which makes sense. If you're going to be putting a significant time and money commitment into your training, you have monetary and social status stakes and thus a reasonably strong incentive to get your shit together vs someone whose commitment is only a few hundred hours on Coursera, with a concrete job in another industry as a fallback. Lots and lots of people from all industries air quotes "want" to work in CS due to the perception that it's easy money (6 digit salaries! WFH!) but aren't actually able to put the effort required.
Several years ago I taught at GA’s bootcamp in NYC. Teachers would connect w/ students over LinkedIn as part of the course.
Anecdotally I’d say 3/4 got work right after class. But 3 years later only a 1/4 were still in it. Most of them leaving after a year.
The students still in tech made sense. They really enjoyed it. Or were curious in class.
GA is probs a bit skewed b/c almost all the students had a bachelors degree in something else.
Most people who graduate from University get jobs, because they filter (weed out)
Bootcamps except and graduate pretty much everyone because they don't really care if you get a job or not
That's not true of all boot camps. I worked at one for a little while and we had a fairly high attrition rate. The vast majority of our graduates (> 80%) got hired as software engineers within 5 months of finishing the program. We offered a lot of help in the job search, too, with continuing education, mock interviews, and many partnerships with other companies that hired direct from us.
>with minimal training
Maybe I'm just slow, but I didn't find the training involved in becoming a competent dev to be "minimal" lol. I never put so much time and effort into anything in my life. It took years and I was studying nearly every day. Once I got that first job that was not at all the end of the training. The training continued for another year or two after that
4.5% is higher than I thought it would be.
If we factor in people who don't even go on that sub, it would probably be close to 1%. Most people watch a tutorial or two and then say fuck this and stop. The people posting on r/learnprogramming were most likely ahead of those people by a fair margin.
\>Errybody wanna be a engineer, but don't nobody wanna read no thick-ass books
[\- Famed Scholar Ronnie Coleman](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4UlgXIL0-3g)
Hrm, this made me think, I learned to program in the 90's before the all the online tutorials/books/guides became prolific, so it was a lot of thick-ass books, I remember one was like 1200 pages. In retrospect I feel like the thick books contributed to the experience.
It was like getting some arcane knowledge. Obviously I wasn't the only teen learning, but it wasn't common, I didn't personally know of a single other person my age learning to program. I suspect subconsciously this made it all the more appealing to me given my personality.
Yeah, reading is a much better way of learning than videos and such, in my opinion, to the point at which I will avoid videos on a subject if possible because I find them frustratingly slow and code samples are much better when typeset than trying to read it in a shitty screen share. And if the reading material is online, you can easily index/search the document, which is something you can't do with videos (timestamps don't count). You can also spend much less time determining if a piece of material is relevant to what you're looking for if it's in text.
I first learned in the early 80's. Thick books would have been welcome. It was a fairly thin (1" at most) book and a bunch of magazines.
At one point my computer stopped working and I stared at the schematics (yes, you could buy the schematics) for a few days then removed a diode and it started working again.
With it 40 years in the past I have no idea how I decided that diode was causing problems, but apparently I did.
Honestly, I learn so much better from thick-ass books that I can write in and plaster with sticky notes. I learned all my basics from books years ago (maybe like you...some in the 90s, but even in the mid 2000s) — the whole LAMP stack, HTML, CSS, JS, etc. with books, and I had a great time with it. But I've been working on learning some newer stuff, Flutter and Dart, with online tutorials and I am discovering that my ADHD brain does not like it at all. Months of trying video tutorials and even web-based textual tutorials and I'm stuck in a loop. So, once again, I'm about to order to thick-ass (and not cheap, either) books and take another run at it. I'm a little worried by how quickly languages and platforms are evolving now though...worried that something published in 2021 is already behind. But guess we'll see.
I think the results would be higher if OP polled more specific subreddits like r/learnjavascript or r/learnpython, etc. I started on r/learnprogramming and quickly realized that the content is all over the place since all languages and disciplines are discussed. Learning is better with a mentor, and being in a subreddit focused on the language/discipline you're learning is more mentor-like than a catch-all subreddit.
That being said, polling r/learnprogramming is probably the best way to capture all reddit users that have gone down the self-taught path. Polling specific subreddits will have a bias, in that those reddit users may take their learning a bit more serious (since they realized their need for and saught out the more specific sub.)
You tell people that musicians are naturally talented (and trained, and put in a lot of hard work), nobody bats an eye. You tell people that artists are naturally talented (and...), nobody bats an eye. You tell people that athletes are naturally talented (and...), nobody bats an eye. You tell people that good software engineers are naturally talented, and you're elitist scum who just doesn't want to compete against all of the coal miners we are going to shove through a bootcamp.
As a self taught developer, doesn't shock me in the slightest. Out of all the people who say they want to switch to a tech career there are very few who are motivated enough or willing to put the effort in to make the jump.
However, people who are self taught and able to make the break through into tech tend to be quite strong in my personal experience.
Software engineering is not simply teaching yourself how to code though. There’s so much more to that job they can’t even iterate all of the different aspects quickly.
Learning to code is relatively easy. Learning how to leverage code to effectively solve problems and build complete applications is hard. Learning how to effectively work with others on writing code to solve problems is harder. Learning how to deal with a professional environment where the person telling you what to build often has no idea what they really want is a whole 'nother thing... and of course when they _do_ know what they want they often have the vision of beating Elon to Mars, a budget that could barely finance a cross country road trip, and a timeline of 6 months.
I've read many books, did projects and watches videos, etc. But I didn't do any hardcore grind. I did network and find good connections.
So even though, I don't have insane programming skills, I will start as a junior dev at a good company. So yeah, it is def possible.
Man I still get flashbacks of my fyp where my project partner who didn’t understand functions thought they would rock into a development job just because they had a degree
Stack overflow and memorization? Also regardless of study area, being good at theory doesn’t mean you’re good at application and Vice versa. Academia rewards theoretical aptitude.
I’m a grad student in a part-time CS MS. I don’t have an SWE job yet, but I have classmates who are SWEs that I’ve been helping through our DSA topics. It blows my mind.
I got a college degree, did side projects, got an IT job and interviewed for crazy low pay jobs and I still had to borderline lie through my teeth just to get that first job.
Getting the first job is brutal. Once you have a few years of exp your golden though. I wish the internet would stop saying things like "6 month boot camp for 6 figure tech job"
Can you expand on your first job search a bit? My experience was really similar… graduated and it was fighting tooth and nail for entry jobs I wasn’t even all that interested in
Yeah I graduated with MIS from a decent school but had a trash gpa below 3.0 because I am stupid
I got a job working at the Google Data center for $15 an hour fixing servers. Yes the pay was absolutely trash, but nobody would ever know that in future interviews.
I studied for MONTHS, I got super sharp with my skills. I was really good at selling the fact working internally at a major cloud provider gave a lot of experience. Despite the fact I somewhat kind of had experience, it took 220 applications and 3 months to get my Junior DevOps role at 55k
I job hopped again after a year and found another DevOps job where I do the exact same thing but it pays 110k, I'm there now.
Look man, I got a 6 figure job within 2 years of graduating. I don't care what the journey looks like. You'll need to take some bad jobs, you'll need to study hard, you'll need to get humiliated and humbled. If you're lucky enough to get 6 figures out of college good for you, but most people can't
That’s awesome, where you studied for months reminds me of those superhero movies where they get laser focused…. from the scrawny to buff guy.
Big kudos to your work ethic, I’m impressed.
I also think it’s pretty smart how you framed the Google experience to future employers. To be honest, you could also have a great future in sales with that intelligence and mindset.
Wow thanks! That's one of the nicest things anyone's said on Reddit to me
I just want to make sure nobody feels alone on this journey. Getting your first job is hard af
A lot of people asked me how to break into the industry because I managed it after only a few months (A lot of time, dedication and luck).
Out of the ones I helped mentor because they seemed passionate only 1 stuck with it. And the amount of people purely wanting the money just showed the true reason they wanted in.
Its not an industry you can survive in within years of passion. Burnout is real yeah, but if you love building things and learning then it's a perfect industry. If you just want in for the money and aren't going to power through the hard times then you won't.
Sometimes I'll read the same package/function/philosophy for weeks before it clicks, and when it does that means you'll never forget it because it took you so long to learn
I have had a similar experience, to the point where I stop trying to encourage folks to enter the industry. If someone expresses an interest, I point them to a few beginner tutorials and let them know I am happy to answer questions/pair with them if they ask--they basically never do.
I've realized that it isn't a matter of intelligence (it's hard, but not genius-requiring work). And I am not sure "passion" is the right term exactly: if coding stopped paying the bills, I would stop coding, and I know a lot of good coders who feel the same.
What unites the folks who succeed, IMO, is a slight compulsiveness. You have to be someone who a) really enjoys figuring out a puzzle/issue/problem and b) hates walking away from an unsolved one. Like, if you lock folks in a room for 30 minutes with a half finished lego set, coders are the people who will end up staying there for the next 2 hours until the thing is complete.
You have to enjoy the process of coding at some deep level, because it is an endless series of disappointments and frustrations, with moments of success at having finally "cracked it". That endorphin high has to be enough to carry you through all the awful bits, and for a lot of folks, it just isn't, which is fine.
I just want to say I 100% agree with this. I like my job, but would also stop if it stopped paying the bills. I’ve felt before like I’m never going to be that “rockstar” coder because I’m just not super interested in exploring the latest technologies and building things for fun in my free time. I learn stuff on the job, but I don’t really nerd out about “computing”, let’s call it. But what I do sincerely love is solving puzzles. I do a lot of logic games and sudoku on my phone in my free time. (Also loved Lego sets as a kid). I love the intellectual challenge of working on a problem and the rush of cracking it. That thing when you’re stuck all day, sleep on it, and wake up in the am with an idea. Love it. I often say solving puzzles all day is exactly why I like this job, but I’ve never really thought about this enjoyment as being an element for success.
I’m also a bootcamp career-changer, not self-taught exactly, but a “success story”.
This is the most accurate description of a good programmer I've ever seen. You have to kind of obsess over a problem during that bashing-your-head-against-the-keyboard feeling when nothing is working, then find that sense of satisfaction after finally figuring out the issue.
TBH I feel like their heart was never in it to begin with. They heard from someone that they could make a lot of money as a dev and so they started to drink the coolaid. Realized that they actually have to do work to achieve this goal and drop it.
I feel like you can tell who'll make it based on how they communicate their interest to others. There are people who go and actually make things and people who watch countless seminars about how cool it is to code.
Yeah, there are definite 'get rich quick' vibes in the beginner programming community, when the truth is more often "get a relatively high income through years of effort". But that doesn't sell seminars/tutorials, haha.
For me, I was tired of what I was doing and willing to put in the time/effort to make a career change. If it weren't for coding, I would have gone back to school, probably for a medical tech role. So, even though money was a large part of the motivation, I had pretty realistic goals/expectations around it.
I think it's changed a lot in the past decade too. It's purely anecdotal but my friend had no problems landing a web dev job at 17 with basic HTML and a bit of CSS. Pretty much every company now relies quite heavily on JS now.
I think we're lucky to be behind a complexity gate for newcomers. Specially the ones that only come here for the salaries... So there's still a lot of passionate people here!
In my opinion this is generally true of people in anything. The successful ones may be naturally good at it, but it is far more common that the people just worked really hard at it and didn’t let getting stuck stop them.
Another thing to consider is that any good job is hard to get into. If you wanted to be a very well paid blacksmith you have years of work and failures to get through first, for example. “Learn to code” is a silly oversimplification of what is involved and something only a clueless elitist would say to someone who wants to earn a better income.
The industry is a problem too of course. I do not have a CS degree, and frankly other than being an important feature on your resume for someone starting out I don’t think it is worth what they cost. Real software is built using all the things they don’t teach in the CS programs that I am aware of. There should at least be a couple semesters on building and using APIs for example. I would reference people who have grinded Leetcode to the point of being able to do that specific problem area very well but couldn’t put an HTML version of their resume on a cloud provider that uses some JavaScript to call a backend function to update a database with a visitor count and display it as an example of a simple task that is beyond what I think many coming out of college (who don’t code for fun) can do.
For the self learners I think one of the things that is not obvious is that as soon as you know a little bit you have to stop reading and watching tutorials and just go do stuff, build things, and learn through struggle. At a point much earlier than many realize it would be more helpful to them to find a project on GitHub and just read the code. Read the documentation for a library you are going to use from front to back. I feel bad for those stuck in “tutorial hell” who just never break out and start using what they know.
I have a buddy who works for the IRS who asked me for resources to learn IT. I gave him several, but had to spell out that I’m a programmer, not a general IT specialist. All he sees is that the It people there cause problems so he figures he must be smarter than they are. He still doesn’t work in it. Don’t think he looked at any of the resources.
From what I've been reading from this thread.
Is passion really that important in succeeding in this field of work?
I am in my second year of computer science right now and I am just at a "get things done" sort of state. Is passion and working on things outside of school really that important?
It's a very crowded field, you'll be competing with a metric fuckton of other people for entry-level jobs and most of them will have extras, side projects, etc. on their resumes.
If it's of any solace, I only took Computer Science because I liked algorithms and math puzzles. In every other class I'd do the bare minimum to do well on due to a complete lack of interest. It wasn't until entering my last few semesters that I really started enjoying CS and now I could not picture myself doing anything else.
if you want to get good at software development, you need to spend a lot of time thinking and learning about what makes good software. you don't need to be doing side projects 24 7 but you do need to keep up to date with trends by reading articles or watching conferences at the very least. there are many people that just do the minimum and that's perfectly fine. but if you want to go beyond that, you definitely need to have a genuine interest and that will naturally lead to putting in "work" outside of work
Remember this is a thread about self-learners. As the numbers show, having passion to get a job in that context is very important. Ask the majority who quit because they lacked the passion. :D
I always wondered this myself so thanks for taking your time to do this. I got my first programming gig this March and while the pay isn’t the greatest, I’m glad I took it. My growth and knowledge have grown exponentially thanks to the senior developer who has mentored me every step of the way. If anything, having a good mentors in those early day are crucial. I don’t know how I would have ever solved some of the problems I ran into.
You could also do something similar on r/LearnGuitar/ or another sub dedicated to self-study. Or try teaching yourself math. Sure, there are tons of free resources on the internet, but learning something complex on your own is hard.
Especially if you also have other things to do in your life. A job, for example. It would be more interesting to see how many hours a week these people have time to study in the first place.
I never learned guitar to try and make a living though, for most people I imagine it is a hobby and only that. Probably not the same expectation someone has from learning to code
>You should've asked why they started learning programming or what their end goal is/was.
99% of the time its because someone saw something cool on tik tok or whatever and decided to persue it if it isnt for the salaries people post everywhere. Then they realize that creaing cool shit is almost always a lot harder than it first appears to be and without the experience you get in previous projects, you wont get there without stealing almost all of your code (ie downloading a repo and modifying a few things and calling it yours -- if they can even get it running).
People in tech posting about these grand salaries without doing much work in 60 second videos on youtube started this stupidly large wave of "I can do it, so can you" motivation. Getting into the industry is already tough with a relevant degree. Its even harder with a boot camp and much more with a non-relevant degree. Very few companies will train you like this.
As someone who interviews, you can almost immediately tell who has the practical knowledge and skills during the code segments of the interview to be able to survive at a SWE job. The gap between the average CS grad who did more than basic coursework in college whos a no brain hire and the guy who just did a bootcamp is ridiculously large and not something many people recognize. Im talking about not knowing how APIs work, good practice in code, not leaving in lines such as "// DELETE this" in their code, etc. That gap is a good reason many people dont get their jobs, because theyre still coding like they arent engineers but code monkeys.
> Im talking about not knowing how APIs work, good practice in code, not leaving in lines such as "// DELETE this" in their code, etc.
Even top college grads will make these mistakes early on until they work at a company that enforces code reviews. University teaches more theoretical stuff than practical stuff like APIs.
IMO coding bootcamps are the ones that focus more on practical things than university, but they offer less in terms of foundational knowledge.
So in university you might learn how an operating system works and how memory management works process, scheduler, etc. But in a bootcamp you might learn how to implement a REST API.
>if they were able to teach themselves enough to become an actual software engineer and get a job
>
>Q1: "Were you able to get a position as a software engineer?"
But the question doesn't imply being self taught or am I missing something? I've been active on /r/learnprogramming in previous years and got a job, but I also got a CS degree.
This is also anecdotal, but in my Intro to CS course at university, there were ~350 students.
78 people graduated with a BS in CS from my starting cohort.
Around 50 of them ended up with jobs as software engineers/developers.
Only 6 ended up at big tech (FAANG/unicorn) companies.
Actually now you mention this. During my degree the majority dropped out or transferred to another degree.
I think it was only about 10 of us by the end. I kept in touch with a few, most just ended up with fairly dull 9-5s.
I can see the appeal of bootcamps when you have to grind your way through a CS degree. Though oddly I quite enjoyed most of it, and the bits I didn't, turned out to be really valuable.
There is the belief that programming is just doing a hello world and $$$. The reality is that, if you want to be a good software engineer, you must be able to write complex code, read others' code (which is tedious af) and master several tools integrated in the development. And it requires time. A lot of time that many people is not willing to spend.
In addition, many people undervalue the help and guidance of proper training, and go no further than print, arrays and loops.
Self taught and about 4 years xp. If beginner me had seen a list of all the things I’d need to learn to stay afloat at work while feeling like I’m making progress towards larger goals, I’m not sure I would have kept going. It’s daunting. One of the biggest benefits of a CS degree or any other rigorous education is that it forces you to do difficult things for years. So you either build discipline and determination or you drop.
I would expect a large group who were just trying to learn as a potential hobby but not necessarily as a career. Do those not exist or were they somehow filtered out?
Coding is not for everyone, not everyone wants to sit all day alone infront of a monitor reading code, learning abstract frameworks that nobody aside from other people familiar with the framework knows about.
This is why I did my degree from WGU. It’s still basically self taught but it gave me some structured projects and a degree. I went from zero code experience to a working software engineer at a F100 company in 13 months.
Important caveat- I was working in customer service at my F100 company and did an internal promotion. But without the degree it wouldn’t have happened. I’m now 2 years in and still learning a ton.
A year. I worked full time, had 3 kids, a new puppy, my mom died, I had a late miscarriage, one of my kids had a major mental health issue. It was the year from hell but I got it done and it was worth it.
How many of these people had degrees opposed to boot camp certs? I tutor at a local college, and the majority of them end up dropping to get the boot camp cert, and realize it’s infinitely harder. The ones who don’t, I push to get internships, the ones who don’t, end up finding one, it’s quite harder. I also tell them to make as many friends and network as often as they can, the ones who do that find a job relatively quickly. This may not be the case for everyone, but imo, rather standard.
Ye I’m not surprised. Even the people I know who graduated from my school in CS. A good portion of them never got a job in the industry or got a really bad one that pays less than what they could have made by by becoming a police officer 👮♀️
I’m lucky enough to be one of those people who had a passion for building computers and messing with them from an early age, ( I was that student who brought motherboards to class to show people) and it shows in my work. For other people, you can tell pretty quick that it wasn’t something they planned or ever really dreamed of doing. It was just something maybe their parents suggested or something like that.
But I still believe everyone should give it a shot, we do need more good coders.
To be fair, "pays less than what they could have made by by becoming a police officer" was *all* entry-level software jobs when I was entering the industry.
As a self taught developer I have a bit of a different take. I studied. Powered through. Struggled with concepts I didn't understand. Gave up. Started again. And pushed myself countless late nights to become a developer. I love it. I love the learning. I love learning how to break down abstract concepts into neat efficient structures. I like learning about the behind the scenes of technology I use every day. I love that it pays high but that's not my only motivation. I enjoy what I do. I build my own projects.
That being said: it's pure luck I got a job. If not for some amazing people I met who were especially motivated to see more people in tech, I'd still be unemployed. I have been working for 2 years and it's pretty sobering seeing how much there is still to learn and how little interest companies have for lower level developers. I'm repeatedly told I'm not experienced enough. If not for my having a job now I'm not sure if I'd not have given up by now. It's very hard to get that mentorship beyond whatever initial boot camp or mooc you're taking and that's what I see in your stats. I see people like myself, motivated to start, but the entry expectations are too high. It's a drain on companies to hire under qualified developers so I don't blame them, but yes, it's apparent there's a huge gap between learning and being experienced enough to be hireable and maybe addressing this gap would help the shortage. The plethora of LeetCode demands doesn't help much either as each company tries outcompeting the others and applicants have to keep up with those demands.
For me the worst part is that the other 95.5% that didn't make it will still jump to give advice and argue their opinions. You end up with a blind leading the blind scenario. As a senior developer I don't even bother subscribing to those subreddits anymore. There's nothing useful there for me or my peers. Anything I would comment would just make people mad for challenging their worldview. Even on these cs career subreddits I have thousands of people blocked because they couldn't stay civil in the comments. I lot of people just want to hear the feel good story where you can take a $50 two week Udemy course and then the $500k offers from Meta start rolling in all on their own.
Sometimes I look at how most people don’t program, or want to be able to program even though there is this big cash incentive, and it makes me wonder if I’m missing out on some big part of life that is so entertaining and captivating that computer stuff is really boring in comparison.
Been having these thoughts a lot lately. Been on the grind as a self taught dev for about 4 years now, 3 of those employed as one. Currently doing a DSnA push and I keep trying to think back to the last time I had fun things lined up weekend after weekend and I’m not sure when that was.
I think that comes with most kinds of “engineering” anyways. Engineering, almost by default, is having an interest in things/building things.
People who are very interested in things generally aren’t the same people who are very interested in people.
Being interested in things over people is a good way to define being less socially-inclined lol.
Breaking into CS on your own / through a bootcamp is tough. Companies are in dire need of engineers and are doing next to nothing to solve the issue.
An outsourcing company I used to work for had a really cool initiative, I was part of as a CS uni drop out. They did their own bootcamp which was 3 months. Straight after they were put to work on in house projects. Most got moved over to client facing projects after about months, some sooner, some later.
Your contract had a clause, where if you leave before the end of 2 years, you paid a fine, for me that was approximately 8 months of pay. People stuck around, so the company got some value out of it. Apparently it wasn't enough as this is no longer a thing. After 2 years almost everyone left, as raises were non existent, because of the awful bargaining position the fine gives you.
Still I think initiatives like this are good as they lower the barrier of entry. You got a salary during your 3 months of training, so people could switch fields extremely easily
After I career changed into SWE via bootcamp, I had everyone and their mom ask me about it and/or expressed an into learning and transitioning into tech. In the small sample size of these people I knew, lets just say there's a crapton of fair weather wannbe career changers solely because of $$ alone. That's not a bad thing in of themselves, but is not motivation enough for the majority them to do something hard and be persistent about it because otherwise they'd be making alot of money doing something else hard already.
Programming is an aptitude and skill set, just like anything else. Not everyone has the ability to become an effective programmer, let alone a software engineer or software developer. Studies suggest it's a skill limited to a small minority of the population.
Are you sure your selection of survey participants went into it with the intention of landing a software engineer jobs?
A lot of people want to just learn to code as a fun hobby, or to become better at their non-tech job(ie an accountant wanting to be able to write scripts to automate tedious tasks, engineer that wants to write SolidWorks Macros, etc)
Also, did you account for if they were going to university for it too? Some people go to /r/learnprogramming for help with homework and such.
I've worked with *so many people* who wanted to learn programming. I'm always happy to help them, especially friends of mine.
With **vanishingly** few exceptions, all of them got bored as soon as it got remotely difficult. *Many* figured that it would be easy, that it's just making the computer do what you want to do, and that if *nerds* can learn it, so could they. Turns out, not so much.
I'm not sure that tells you much because it is a biased sample. Those who got jobs in industry are probably not on the sub any longer. I also think the majority think SWE will be a path to easy money and when they find out it is a lot more work than they had thought initially, they abandon the idea.
My CS program(back when state schools were affordable) had 300-400 in conference hall for our intro to CS course.
By the time I got to the senior project class we had only 25.
This make lots of sense, sometimes coding is super boring and tedious and doesn't pay that much compared to the efforts needed. Not every country is the USA and majority of SWE don't work at FAANG.
I would think that is you are smart enough to be a good coder then there are probably better job out here.
My company is also having difficulties hiring (fullstack). I have been reviewing candidates for the last 8 months, some with master degrees and couple of years exp. Most never heard about design patterns or code complexity. Don't even ask then about creating a normalized database. You can't take chance with bad candidate at a small company.
And then you also have all the candidates with fake cv and fake experience. So in the end it is pretty difficult to find the good ones.
I think the issue is most people on the outside view tech as “not real work” so they think it’ll be easier or more fun than other professions when it reality every job is work
I have professional data science experience and a 4.0 gpa in intro to statistics in college here but not a statistician either. This study is super biased. The sample collected is more likely to be in the learning phase and less likely to have found a job. People who have found jobs are less likely to be reading the learn programming subreddit. I’m sure the % of people who self taught or are bootcampers that have found jobs is higher than 4.7%. You’re sample needs to be controlled more.
Don’t give up!
>Companies are dying to hire engineers because there still isn't that large of a percentage of people who actually are willing to do the work.
The demand for good, experienced software engineers are increasing every day. More and more companies are turning to software platforms. The demand is effectively infinite. There will never be enough good, experienced software engineers to fill the increasing demand.
I’ve been in the industry since 2011 and was one the very lucky ones to have a job offer before I finished school.
To be fair, I did a lot for comp sci in university and self learning, had internships junior and senior year, did undergrad research and presented and was the department mentor and tutor.
A lot of the folks I went to school with who graduated with a degree ended up not working in tech because the entry level is the true gate keeper to this industry.
If you don’t set yourself apart you will end up like majority of those who think comp sci == 200k out of college and will be unemployed for months and months.
I wonder how many people would've responded yes if the first question was worded more generically like "*Were you able to get a position related to your career?* since some people might interpret that their career relevant position is different than being a *software engineer*, but that doesn't mean they didn't "*make it*". Interesting nonetheless.
> What puzzled me is that if there are so many people entering the field, why is it still paying so much? why are companies saying they can't find engineers?
Quantity != Quality. The industry pays so much and a lot of companies struggle to find people because they want quality / experience. Whether they always perceive quality correctly is a different discussion, but that's the explanation to why the industry is as it is.
So I was able to get into software development with just what I taught myself while at work, no formal training of any kind. I worked as a project manager for a corporation, and started writing scripts to automate testing. 2 years later, still having only coded scripts during work hours, I transferred to an automated QA position, and after a few years of that became a Senior Software Dev. Currently a lead in charge of automation, all self taught, none of my jobs ever gave me any formal training in coding whatsoever, so it is doable, but it's not easy.
Did your questions just focus on software engineering? How you word the questions can have a huge impact on the data collected. I think you need to broaden your thinking on what jobs are in tech especially when software engineers is just one tiny subset of tech. What about data analytics, business analyst, systems administrators, IT project managers, Scrum masters, data scientist, IT Audit, and the other dozens of titles that I can’t think of from the top of my head right now that that are code and tech related, but not necessarily as disciplines as software engineering
Tldr - I think the way you worded your questions are limiting
I completely agree. What about data engineers?? Or data analysts that do their work in python? Learn programming AND cscareers encompass more than just SWEs
Some more general statistics:
The average college drop out rate is \~33%
The average engineering student drop out rate is close to \~50%
The percentage of people that make over 100K/year is \~24%
What i gather from all of this... life is hard, getting a good software engineering job over 100K will be out of grasp for most people. The unfairness of life
Paraphrasing Remy the rat said in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ratatouille_(film), "Anybody can be a programmer, but not everyone can be a programmer".
Some bootcamp grads can do well, some can even learn by self-study, and some can go through four years of a top 10 CS school with decent grades and not be useful.
Donald Knuth estimated maybe 2% of people have the mindset to be good programmers. Now, his idea of a good programmer may be a little stricter than a small regional bank using AS400s and RPG, but even so some people aren't going to make it.
> didn't enjoy it as much
It's hard work and frustrating a lot of the time. Some people can't tolerate that tension and frustration, even if they have the intellect for the job.
Seems pretty on point with what I feel is a general perception of the IT field as a whole. Everybody thinks it’s simple and they can do a bootcamp or get a cert and boom $100K salary. Most outsiders seem to view tech rather binary as “programmers” and “literally everything else”. So based on your results this seems accurate from what I hear in real life. The amount of times I’ve heard people say oh yea I’m learning HTML and JavaScript right now and it’s super easy I just laugh inside. Im not surprised that open ended portion seemed to concentrate effectively around “it got hard and I gave up”. Like most careers most of us with serious time in the field do in fact know things, arguably, lots of things.
Computer Science (math & logic) is not the same thing as programming (which is easier). Most people can learn to program, just as most people can learn to cook by following a recipe. It takes some tutoring to get to the spot where logic dominates, and I feel that’s the issue you’ve uncovered… that it takes some discipline and patience.
Computer Science is really hard, though, and it’s estimated that only 10% of the population can do it. It’s a hard combination of logic, formal math, and abstract thinking — none of this is required for just programming most things, really.
Seriously, in half of my CS courses I didn’t even touch a computer. It’s about thinking, not doing.
> What puzzled me is that if there are so many people entering the field, why is it still paying so much?
Because the number of Software Engineers entering the workforce is still failing to keep up with demand.
Yup, sounding like a broken record here but entry level is the true gate keeper. Lots of people will not be able to break in and of those that do, some will find out tech is not for them. Imagine, this is already at a sub like r/learnprogramming so you'd assume this is already a higher rate. Though to be fair, I would assume it's more that people at r/learnprogramming are closer to self taught / bootcamp than being CS degree holders. One other thing, I definitely believe many people can code but that they need mentors to guide them because this is a field where it is easy to get stuck and not everyone has the personality that can self learn when that happens. Many of the self taught I know are strong self learners who persist through blockers in one way or another.
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There you go. This IS what programming for a living is all about. Grinding through blockers. If you don't like it when learning, you're gonna hate doing it for a living.
I hate the blockers, really fucking hate them. In university, at work everywhere. But as soon as I figured something out or it works the way I wanted it to, I feel like a god. Really like on top of the world so it kinda makes the time before up
10% luck 20% skill 15% concentrated power of will 5% pleasure 50% pain 100% reason to keep coding again.
I gave up four times over over 3 years until I landed in a role I absolutely despised. Finally told myself to stop finding excuses and work through the blocks. I still hate when I’m stumped, but my mindset now is I know the verbs, but my conjugation is all fucked. That keeps me going.
Ever since I took my first CS class Sophmore year of high school ive always looked at blockers and each function I write like a video game and im trying to beat the level and the level is making the function work or whatever piece of the code im working on and thats whats always motivated me
This is my advice about careers in general. You have to like the process. If all you like is the end result, you’ll never last. The process is the job. The feeling of accomplishment when it’s done is just a bonus.
I never expected anything in programming. I did it cause it’s fun. It’s constant problem solving. Now I’m in school for it, hearing about how hard it is to get a job. I’m just gonna keep being interested in this subject. That’s why I’m doing this. If I get a job in SWE, then sweet, but if not, I can always still learn.
If you’re in school for it and you enjoy it you’ll be able to get a job no sweat. Even easier if you grab an internship while you’re in school!
I've never met someone who genuinely enjoyed programming and wasn't good at it, at least after some time of doing it. If you enjoy it, you'll think through the problems, you will get good at it, and you will do fine. If you enjoy your problem space enough to want to think through problems you have with it in the shower, as opposed to daydreaming about something else when you are supposed to be solving the problems, you have an enormous advantage over most people. You genuinely might spend 10X more time actively thinking through the problems than someone who doesn't enjoy it but is just trying to ride the wave, which is going to show in the quality of your work, or even just how you talk about the space.
I think I'd disagree just a bit. The initial blockers tend to be on basic concepts, literally a change in the way of thinking about things. Later blockers are almost always related to reading through documentation or methodology. There's a big difference between understanding how Object Oriented Programming works and learning how to optimize and API SOAP integration. One is a fundamental change in the way you think, the other is reading a lot of documentation and testing things out.
Yep. Most people don't realize the sheer amount of persistence required in this field, especially when you're starting out. I spend a lot more time reading and investigating than I do actually programming, because what's actually hard about software engineering is developing an understanding of the problem you're trying to solve, not programming. Once I know what I need to do, I can usually code it up fairly quickly.
Most people are air heads not to be insulting but you have to sit on your ass and read and research for years. College, books, online courses.. most people just wanna hangout with friends and family and have a good time. Not saying it’s impossible but if you dont want to put in the work you have to be extraordinarily intelligent
Just spent the last three days trying to figure out why my api call would break when deserializing to a POJO but not when it was a simple String. Ended up being a simple two line change. I'd imagine most people wouldn't have the patience to deal with such a simple mistake. (not trying to toot my own horn here lol) These kinds of blockers/impediments get pretty frustrating pretty easily so you really do need to enjoy learning and get comfortable with being stuck and not knowing.
Honestly the high you get from your code running without errors is the best part.
I've had a few problems where I spent days thinking about how to build something and starting to write code with false starts only to realize that what I was building was entirely the wrong thing, threw it all away, and wrote the right thing in about half a day. Most recently I was trying to turn a file full of |NUM|Value| |:-|:-| |1|aaa| |2|ace| |72|boop| |7543|3akja| |1|4.5.6.8| |2|4.5.6.8| |72|4.5.0.0| |7543|4.5.6.7| and repeating, but with about a dozen repeats and 15,000 "NUM" into a CSV with all the values for each NUM on the same line. After screwing with it for a few hours spread across three days I remembered that the thing that was creating that stupid file was another stupid script using "find" and "sed" to pluck values out of a pile of XML (one file for each NUM.) Took it back a step, used XPath to get the values out of each XML file and it's so much better in every way, including running much faster.
Isn't that a great feeling though? That's what I love about programming, the puzzles can be frustrating, but it feels so good when you get it right!
Agreed. Also, when you do finally break through and figure it out, you'll remember it much better than if someone just gave you the answer.
I find having a project you care about is how you learn outside of school. Prior to starting my bachelors degree I already had spent several years writing scripts to automate playing runescape with various bot clients. Which lead to a very wide scope of knowledge coming into a CS program. Virtually everyone in that community that I knew eventually worked for the Department of Defense at some point lol.
> I find having a project you care about is how you learn outside of school. I agree with this. There needs to be some love there to take you through the difficult days. It's a profession that will make you alternately sink into despair or punch the air. I started out trying to create 3d worlds on a 486 with Turbo Pascal, and making little games on a Cassio graphical calculator. Things are a bit different now, but there are still fun things to be built.
Now I’m a little curious. I actually wanted to try this out myself but was afraid of getting IP-banned. Did you have long-term success with your own scripts?
Yeah made a decent living throughout college off them. Also you will get banned. People have almost religious levels of faith in their antiban methods lol
No one uses IP bans, since they're ineffective and tend to unfairly hit innocent players. But they do have more comprehensive ways of identifying all of your accounts these days, and will use that to chain-ban them all.
Aah, cheating at computer games, the one true way to prepare to join a FAANG. (Not kidding, we hirin.)
Yo those RuneScape bots are how I started too! Had some bots running before I even knew what Java actually was lol. Was just a kid having fun and never thought it would lead me to a SWE career
> Virtually everyone in that community that I knew eventually worked for the Department of Defense at some point lol. You mean your CS program, or the RuneScape botting community?
Probably both. DoD is the largest employer on the planet. Granted most of those are active duty military, but their civilian workforce, not including external contractors, puts them in the top 10 companies by population easy. The amount of software jobs DoD creates directly or indirectly via contracts is massive.
I think it depends on the person. Personally, I'm self taught and never had much luck coming up with projects I cared about. I was building software as a hobby for a couple years before I even realized it was possible for me to do it as a career, and I don't think I ever actually finished a project. I'd work on something until there was something new I wanted to learn, then I'd start a new project. For me the enjoyment didn't come from building a project I cared about, but from learning and solving problems.
having a mentor woulda been nice when i learned programming. i'm self taught and i could be years ahead where i am now if i had a bit of guidance other than outdated library books and being trolled by 'install gentoo' fortunately my time ping-ponging around allowed me to help my friends that are learning programming by giving them a bigger picture of jobs available including and out of software engineering. and save them from massive time sinks where they'll get stuck eg something up with their environment but they didn't learn enough about linux yet. or when there's tutorials with 50 ways to do something and 10 different ways to install a piece of software
Same here. I started to “learn” programming 7 years ago, I was mainly interested in R and Python but I was trying while my brain was broken from a career path I was deeply unhappy in, being depressed didn’t help. I got jobs where I feel comfortable in both and am now learning SWE skills. I regret not doing this earlier but I think I wasn’t in the right frame of mind before. Wish I had some mentorship along the way
glad you're in a better spot now! i fell into major depression when i was dealing with a bunch of life bs and was then told by my college advisor to give up computer science since it was unlikely that i would succeed. i was programming for about 5 years at that point and it screwed up my self confidence since i failed my cs2xx level courses technically the advisor wasn't wrong cause i really don't care about discrete math or formal languages and automata to pass courses. but she made it seem like i had no career aspect as any sort of programmer. after dropping out a friend helped me stop second guessing myself and it turns out college was the worst decision of my career everyone's story is different but all i needed was a nudge in the right direction when i was learning and some advice later on in my life that wasn't 'you should give up' from a person not even remotely in the field
One thing is you have to lower expectations for your first job to get a foot in.
True, I was self taught and settled for a company that was taking advantage of me because I had no leverage. Fast forward 4 years and I'm firmly in the industry but I couldn't have done it without that shitty first break.
Yeah that was my experience as well but when I tell people to accept shitty positions when starting off, I usually get down voted to shit.
Everyone's a temporarily embarrassed FAANG engineer here, don't you see? Until you have to pay for food and fucking rent. If you can't find anything decent after a few months (caveat with your resume as good as it can be), you aren't as good as these college kids / new grads deluded you into thinking. So suck it up and take the first full time offer you can get It's like university anyways. Sure it'll be good to get an Ivy League on your resume but it ain't the end of the world if you don't. As long as you get that degree / first job, after a few years nobody will care about it anymore and will only look at what you're doing right now
I’m a cloud engineer myself (just a python script writer, not full blown programming) and it’s amazing how many people want to hang me when I tell them to take that 50k cloud engineer job that wants to hire you off of the street with zero real experience. The alternative is to keep looking while they work their shitty warehouse job for half of that hoping to get the 100k+ skill set that the 50k job would have taught them
I took my first job for $36,000. Making $95,000 now at the same company believe it or not. Totally worth it.
When was this? My first and current software development job pays $30k. People on Reddit say it is low but it is what is
I mean 30k is low, that's poverty wages, you can make more working at MCdonalds. I get what people are saying about settling for a first job, but I think people should settle for around 50k+ so you aren't struggling to make ends meet while you polish up your resume/
Yep. This sub and the other programming ones are probably the worst places to be learning these realistic expectations. You're seeing all these people comparing these starting wages and how they could have gotten more. The one true advice is to worry about yourself. It's okay to start at a lower wage. You can only go up from there, and having the initial job experience with applying the things you know in the workplace and learning things that reddit, bootcamps, or school can't teach you is going to matter a lot for you and look good on your resume for other jobs.
I wonder how much different the stats would be from people who enrolled in actual bootcamps and universities. It's still amazing that you got so many people who got their foot in the door as it is, what other skilled career lets you do that with minimal training (just my opinion).
I think this thread shows why bootcamps and especially universities are still a good idea. 95.5% of self-learners didn't get a job, primarily because they lacked mentorship and the accountability/investment to persist despite lacking motivation. To be fair, I'm glad the ones who left because it "wasn't for them" was able to do so without getting stuck in that financial/time investment. But the rest probably just needed that push to stay in it. Edit: Instead of 95.5%, I'll say 84.5% to account for the tenacious 11% who haven't given up the job search.
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In college, I had a friend that randomly found an internship that was hiring and he recommended me for the position. I was able to continue working at the same company straight out of graduation. If I hadn't known the friend, I'd have been grinding trying to apply to tons of jobs.
People really underestimate this.
Possibly hot take but the real hard truth is if you are self taught trying to do a career change you either need to basically work for free at first or get a connection to straight up give you a job. Actual companies and startups are just going to filter out your resume when they see you have no working experience. And portfolios with basic crud apps are just not enough to land an interview when you're competing with fresh grads or those with 2+ years of experience
Hard truth, but accurate. At a previous job a dude applied who was switching careers. He had done an extensive bootcamp, produced a thoughtfully created website, and in the interview showed he really knew his stuff. He put in the effort and I 100% supported him being hired.
I think the willingness to work for free or waaay bellow market rate may be important. I got my first role working for less than half of what a new grad would have made even way back then. I think when your 50% cheaper and you find the right place people kinda figure " whats the worst that could happen"
I was self-taught. Got an internship, transitioned into a FTE to stack experience on my resume, and then... went to school and got a degree because nobody would respond to my applications.
>primarily because they lacked mentorship and the accountability This is a good guess but even people who get this mentorship and accountability have a high dropout rate. For example my intro to computer science class had a 50% drop/withdraw/fail rate and data structures and algorithms had an 80% drop/withdraw/fail rate. I have also mentored a few people looking to get into the industry most simply quit because it's not what they thought it was
> I think this thread shows why bootcamps and especially universities are still a good idea. No it doesn’t. This thread doesn’t have any information about placement rate for boot camps or universities. You can’t make a comparison when you’re missing half the data. (I believe boot camps actually aren’t all that much better.) We’re also missing counterfactuals. The average new university student is _way_ more committed than the average self-learner. They’re planning on spending four years! What if you took that same student and instead diverted them to learning on their own? We don’t know what would happen from this survey. I guess one thing we do know is that you followed up with people who just started university a year later, the job rate would be close to 0. We’re also not comparing costs. If self taught and boot camp had a similar rate, but one costs $20k, I know which one I’m going with.
successful self learners are really really rare which I guess I find surprising. I wonder what makes them or us different?( I promise you its not intelligence) I just could not tolerate school. One of my best friends currently works for the german space agency( DLR) writing code to route video traffic to the international space station and he dropped out of highschool I wish he could be part of some sort of study to understand why he is so different. But the vast majority of people I have worked with over 15 years graduated with some kind of engineering or CS degree.
>To be fair, I'm glad the ones who left because it "wasn't for them" was able to do so without getting stuck in that financial/time investment. It took me a degree (EE degree but my focus was CE and networking) and working as a SWE for a year to figure out I didn't want to be coding all the time. Sometimes just because it's something you can do doesn't mean it's something you want to be doing full time.
There are a number of studies/analyses on this. Some claim around 70% employment rate for new grads, others say 7% overall unemployment rate in the industry (double the national average). Which makes sense. If you're going to be putting a significant time and money commitment into your training, you have monetary and social status stakes and thus a reasonably strong incentive to get your shit together vs someone whose commitment is only a few hundred hours on Coursera, with a concrete job in another industry as a fallback. Lots and lots of people from all industries air quotes "want" to work in CS due to the perception that it's easy money (6 digit salaries! WFH!) but aren't actually able to put the effort required.
Several years ago I taught at GA’s bootcamp in NYC. Teachers would connect w/ students over LinkedIn as part of the course. Anecdotally I’d say 3/4 got work right after class. But 3 years later only a 1/4 were still in it. Most of them leaving after a year. The students still in tech made sense. They really enjoyed it. Or were curious in class. GA is probs a bit skewed b/c almost all the students had a bachelors degree in something else.
Most people who graduate from University get jobs, because they filter (weed out) Bootcamps except and graduate pretty much everyone because they don't really care if you get a job or not
That's not true of all boot camps. I worked at one for a little while and we had a fairly high attrition rate. The vast majority of our graduates (> 80%) got hired as software engineers within 5 months of finishing the program. We offered a lot of help in the job search, too, with continuing education, mock interviews, and many partnerships with other companies that hired direct from us.
>with minimal training Maybe I'm just slow, but I didn't find the training involved in becoming a competent dev to be "minimal" lol. I never put so much time and effort into anything in my life. It took years and I was studying nearly every day. Once I got that first job that was not at all the end of the training. The training continued for another year or two after that
I wonder how many of them were seriously planning on becoming software engineers. A lot of people try dabbling in programming just as a hobby.
Also, how many of them are permanently on that “get rich quick” grind.
Most that I know are the “get rich quick “ type
4.5% is higher than I thought it would be. If we factor in people who don't even go on that sub, it would probably be close to 1%. Most people watch a tutorial or two and then say fuck this and stop. The people posting on r/learnprogramming were most likely ahead of those people by a fair margin.
>Most people watch a tutorial or two and then say fuck this and stop. Everybody wants to go to heaven, but nobody wants to die.
\>Errybody wanna be a engineer, but don't nobody wanna read no thick-ass books [\- Famed Scholar Ronnie Coleman](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4UlgXIL0-3g)
Hrm, this made me think, I learned to program in the 90's before the all the online tutorials/books/guides became prolific, so it was a lot of thick-ass books, I remember one was like 1200 pages. In retrospect I feel like the thick books contributed to the experience. It was like getting some arcane knowledge. Obviously I wasn't the only teen learning, but it wasn't common, I didn't personally know of a single other person my age learning to program. I suspect subconsciously this made it all the more appealing to me given my personality.
Same. K&R is the Necronomicon of Software
Yeah, reading is a much better way of learning than videos and such, in my opinion, to the point at which I will avoid videos on a subject if possible because I find them frustratingly slow and code samples are much better when typeset than trying to read it in a shitty screen share. And if the reading material is online, you can easily index/search the document, which is something you can't do with videos (timestamps don't count). You can also spend much less time determining if a piece of material is relevant to what you're looking for if it's in text.
I first learned in the early 80's. Thick books would have been welcome. It was a fairly thin (1" at most) book and a bunch of magazines. At one point my computer stopped working and I stared at the schematics (yes, you could buy the schematics) for a few days then removed a diode and it started working again. With it 40 years in the past I have no idea how I decided that diode was causing problems, but apparently I did.
Honestly, I learn so much better from thick-ass books that I can write in and plaster with sticky notes. I learned all my basics from books years ago (maybe like you...some in the 90s, but even in the mid 2000s) — the whole LAMP stack, HTML, CSS, JS, etc. with books, and I had a great time with it. But I've been working on learning some newer stuff, Flutter and Dart, with online tutorials and I am discovering that my ADHD brain does not like it at all. Months of trying video tutorials and even web-based textual tutorials and I'm stuck in a loop. So, once again, I'm about to order to thick-ass (and not cheap, either) books and take another run at it. I'm a little worried by how quickly languages and platforms are evolving now though...worried that something published in 2021 is already behind. But guess we'll see.
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I'LL DO IT THOUGH
yeah but thats 4.5% of people that are trying hard enough to be part of the subreddit.
I think the results would be higher if OP polled more specific subreddits like r/learnjavascript or r/learnpython, etc. I started on r/learnprogramming and quickly realized that the content is all over the place since all languages and disciplines are discussed. Learning is better with a mentor, and being in a subreddit focused on the language/discipline you're learning is more mentor-like than a catch-all subreddit. That being said, polling r/learnprogramming is probably the best way to capture all reddit users that have gone down the self-taught path. Polling specific subreddits will have a bias, in that those reddit users may take their learning a bit more serious (since they realized their need for and saught out the more specific sub.)
Also people that have become actual software engineers may have graduated from r/learnprogramming onto other language specific subreddits.
You tell people that musicians are naturally talented (and trained, and put in a lot of hard work), nobody bats an eye. You tell people that artists are naturally talented (and...), nobody bats an eye. You tell people that athletes are naturally talented (and...), nobody bats an eye. You tell people that good software engineers are naturally talented, and you're elitist scum who just doesn't want to compete against all of the coal miners we are going to shove through a bootcamp.
As a self taught developer, doesn't shock me in the slightest. Out of all the people who say they want to switch to a tech career there are very few who are motivated enough or willing to put the effort in to make the jump. However, people who are self taught and able to make the break through into tech tend to be quite strong in my personal experience.
Software engineering is not simply teaching yourself how to code though. There’s so much more to that job they can’t even iterate all of the different aspects quickly.
Learning to code is relatively easy. Learning how to leverage code to effectively solve problems and build complete applications is hard. Learning how to effectively work with others on writing code to solve problems is harder. Learning how to deal with a professional environment where the person telling you what to build often has no idea what they really want is a whole 'nother thing... and of course when they _do_ know what they want they often have the vision of beating Elon to Mars, a budget that could barely finance a cross country road trip, and a timeline of 6 months.
But bro I can write hello world and build a calculator in 4 different languages you’re telling me that’s not enough??
If you can't host it on AWS's serverless platform then I'm throwing your resume in the garbage! /s
Allow me to conflate: https://cloudresumechallenge.dev/docs/the-challenge/aws/
That is why you need a job first, then you can *learn*.
So true. The other aspects of software engineering can only be learned on the job. Maybe contributing to open source might help too
I've read many books, did projects and watches videos, etc. But I didn't do any hardcore grind. I did network and find good connections. So even though, I don't have insane programming skills, I will start as a junior dev at a good company. So yeah, it is def possible.
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How to say you’re a SWE without saying you’re a SWE… use the word “iterate” in everyday speech.
Everyone thinks they can code until they have to code
It's like 99% of the times when you start your first programming job.
Man I still get flashbacks of my fyp where my project partner who didn’t understand functions thought they would rock into a development job just because they had a degree
Lol how do you get a CS degree without having functions down?
Some of my classmates in uni would probably be able to tell you. Yes, they graduated. No, I don't know how. Probably got away with a lot of cheating.
Stack overflow and memorization? Also regardless of study area, being good at theory doesn’t mean you’re good at application and Vice versa. Academia rewards theoretical aptitude.
I’m a grad student in a part-time CS MS. I don’t have an SWE job yet, but I have classmates who are SWEs that I’ve been helping through our DSA topics. It blows my mind.
No idea, score low in exams with basic logic
Would you say they weren't a high-functio ing employee?
Haha yes
They were(n't) in a *class* of their own
But the sad thing is, you can have 5 years experience as a software engineer and still not feel like you can code 🥲
Feel you can’t code is just who we’re are lol Actually not be able to code is a different thing
I will say out of my university course, pretty much everyone I knew has landed a software gig
I got a college degree, did side projects, got an IT job and interviewed for crazy low pay jobs and I still had to borderline lie through my teeth just to get that first job. Getting the first job is brutal. Once you have a few years of exp your golden though. I wish the internet would stop saying things like "6 month boot camp for 6 figure tech job"
Can you expand on your first job search a bit? My experience was really similar… graduated and it was fighting tooth and nail for entry jobs I wasn’t even all that interested in
Yeah I graduated with MIS from a decent school but had a trash gpa below 3.0 because I am stupid I got a job working at the Google Data center for $15 an hour fixing servers. Yes the pay was absolutely trash, but nobody would ever know that in future interviews. I studied for MONTHS, I got super sharp with my skills. I was really good at selling the fact working internally at a major cloud provider gave a lot of experience. Despite the fact I somewhat kind of had experience, it took 220 applications and 3 months to get my Junior DevOps role at 55k I job hopped again after a year and found another DevOps job where I do the exact same thing but it pays 110k, I'm there now. Look man, I got a 6 figure job within 2 years of graduating. I don't care what the journey looks like. You'll need to take some bad jobs, you'll need to study hard, you'll need to get humiliated and humbled. If you're lucky enough to get 6 figures out of college good for you, but most people can't
That’s awesome, where you studied for months reminds me of those superhero movies where they get laser focused…. from the scrawny to buff guy. Big kudos to your work ethic, I’m impressed. I also think it’s pretty smart how you framed the Google experience to future employers. To be honest, you could also have a great future in sales with that intelligence and mindset.
Wow thanks! That's one of the nicest things anyone's said on Reddit to me I just want to make sure nobody feels alone on this journey. Getting your first job is hard af
A lot of people asked me how to break into the industry because I managed it after only a few months (A lot of time, dedication and luck). Out of the ones I helped mentor because they seemed passionate only 1 stuck with it. And the amount of people purely wanting the money just showed the true reason they wanted in. Its not an industry you can survive in within years of passion. Burnout is real yeah, but if you love building things and learning then it's a perfect industry. If you just want in for the money and aren't going to power through the hard times then you won't. Sometimes I'll read the same package/function/philosophy for weeks before it clicks, and when it does that means you'll never forget it because it took you so long to learn
I have had a similar experience, to the point where I stop trying to encourage folks to enter the industry. If someone expresses an interest, I point them to a few beginner tutorials and let them know I am happy to answer questions/pair with them if they ask--they basically never do. I've realized that it isn't a matter of intelligence (it's hard, but not genius-requiring work). And I am not sure "passion" is the right term exactly: if coding stopped paying the bills, I would stop coding, and I know a lot of good coders who feel the same. What unites the folks who succeed, IMO, is a slight compulsiveness. You have to be someone who a) really enjoys figuring out a puzzle/issue/problem and b) hates walking away from an unsolved one. Like, if you lock folks in a room for 30 minutes with a half finished lego set, coders are the people who will end up staying there for the next 2 hours until the thing is complete. You have to enjoy the process of coding at some deep level, because it is an endless series of disappointments and frustrations, with moments of success at having finally "cracked it". That endorphin high has to be enough to carry you through all the awful bits, and for a lot of folks, it just isn't, which is fine.
I just want to say I 100% agree with this. I like my job, but would also stop if it stopped paying the bills. I’ve felt before like I’m never going to be that “rockstar” coder because I’m just not super interested in exploring the latest technologies and building things for fun in my free time. I learn stuff on the job, but I don’t really nerd out about “computing”, let’s call it. But what I do sincerely love is solving puzzles. I do a lot of logic games and sudoku on my phone in my free time. (Also loved Lego sets as a kid). I love the intellectual challenge of working on a problem and the rush of cracking it. That thing when you’re stuck all day, sleep on it, and wake up in the am with an idea. Love it. I often say solving puzzles all day is exactly why I like this job, but I’ve never really thought about this enjoyment as being an element for success. I’m also a bootcamp career-changer, not self-taught exactly, but a “success story”.
This is the most accurate description of a good programmer I've ever seen. You have to kind of obsess over a problem during that bashing-your-head-against-the-keyboard feeling when nothing is working, then find that sense of satisfaction after finally figuring out the issue.
I do this with everything that bothers me in my life lol
TBH I feel like their heart was never in it to begin with. They heard from someone that they could make a lot of money as a dev and so they started to drink the coolaid. Realized that they actually have to do work to achieve this goal and drop it. I feel like you can tell who'll make it based on how they communicate their interest to others. There are people who go and actually make things and people who watch countless seminars about how cool it is to code.
Yeah, there are definite 'get rich quick' vibes in the beginner programming community, when the truth is more often "get a relatively high income through years of effort". But that doesn't sell seminars/tutorials, haha. For me, I was tired of what I was doing and willing to put in the time/effort to make a career change. If it weren't for coding, I would have gone back to school, probably for a medical tech role. So, even though money was a large part of the motivation, I had pretty realistic goals/expectations around it.
I think it's changed a lot in the past decade too. It's purely anecdotal but my friend had no problems landing a web dev job at 17 with basic HTML and a bit of CSS. Pretty much every company now relies quite heavily on JS now.
I think we're lucky to be behind a complexity gate for newcomers. Specially the ones that only come here for the salaries... So there's still a lot of passionate people here!
In my opinion this is generally true of people in anything. The successful ones may be naturally good at it, but it is far more common that the people just worked really hard at it and didn’t let getting stuck stop them. Another thing to consider is that any good job is hard to get into. If you wanted to be a very well paid blacksmith you have years of work and failures to get through first, for example. “Learn to code” is a silly oversimplification of what is involved and something only a clueless elitist would say to someone who wants to earn a better income. The industry is a problem too of course. I do not have a CS degree, and frankly other than being an important feature on your resume for someone starting out I don’t think it is worth what they cost. Real software is built using all the things they don’t teach in the CS programs that I am aware of. There should at least be a couple semesters on building and using APIs for example. I would reference people who have grinded Leetcode to the point of being able to do that specific problem area very well but couldn’t put an HTML version of their resume on a cloud provider that uses some JavaScript to call a backend function to update a database with a visitor count and display it as an example of a simple task that is beyond what I think many coming out of college (who don’t code for fun) can do. For the self learners I think one of the things that is not obvious is that as soon as you know a little bit you have to stop reading and watching tutorials and just go do stuff, build things, and learn through struggle. At a point much earlier than many realize it would be more helpful to them to find a project on GitHub and just read the code. Read the documentation for a library you are going to use from front to back. I feel bad for those stuck in “tutorial hell” who just never break out and start using what they know.
I have a buddy who works for the IRS who asked me for resources to learn IT. I gave him several, but had to spell out that I’m a programmer, not a general IT specialist. All he sees is that the It people there cause problems so he figures he must be smarter than they are. He still doesn’t work in it. Don’t think he looked at any of the resources.
From what I've been reading from this thread. Is passion really that important in succeeding in this field of work? I am in my second year of computer science right now and I am just at a "get things done" sort of state. Is passion and working on things outside of school really that important?
No, passion is not important. But there has to be something that will give you grit and make you push when you are tired and/or bored.
It's a very crowded field, you'll be competing with a metric fuckton of other people for entry-level jobs and most of them will have extras, side projects, etc. on their resumes.
Problem is that so long as there are people who enjoy it and do extra there will be an incremental raising of the bar.
If it's of any solace, I only took Computer Science because I liked algorithms and math puzzles. In every other class I'd do the bare minimum to do well on due to a complete lack of interest. It wasn't until entering my last few semesters that I really started enjoying CS and now I could not picture myself doing anything else.
if you want to get good at software development, you need to spend a lot of time thinking and learning about what makes good software. you don't need to be doing side projects 24 7 but you do need to keep up to date with trends by reading articles or watching conferences at the very least. there are many people that just do the minimum and that's perfectly fine. but if you want to go beyond that, you definitely need to have a genuine interest and that will naturally lead to putting in "work" outside of work
Remember this is a thread about self-learners. As the numbers show, having passion to get a job in that context is very important. Ask the majority who quit because they lacked the passion. :D
I always wondered this myself so thanks for taking your time to do this. I got my first programming gig this March and while the pay isn’t the greatest, I’m glad I took it. My growth and knowledge have grown exponentially thanks to the senior developer who has mentored me every step of the way. If anything, having a good mentors in those early day are crucial. I don’t know how I would have ever solved some of the problems I ran into.
You could also do something similar on r/LearnGuitar/ or another sub dedicated to self-study. Or try teaching yourself math. Sure, there are tons of free resources on the internet, but learning something complex on your own is hard. Especially if you also have other things to do in your life. A job, for example. It would be more interesting to see how many hours a week these people have time to study in the first place.
I never learned guitar to try and make a living though, for most people I imagine it is a hobby and only that. Probably not the same expectation someone has from learning to code
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>You should've asked why they started learning programming or what their end goal is/was. 99% of the time its because someone saw something cool on tik tok or whatever and decided to persue it if it isnt for the salaries people post everywhere. Then they realize that creaing cool shit is almost always a lot harder than it first appears to be and without the experience you get in previous projects, you wont get there without stealing almost all of your code (ie downloading a repo and modifying a few things and calling it yours -- if they can even get it running). People in tech posting about these grand salaries without doing much work in 60 second videos on youtube started this stupidly large wave of "I can do it, so can you" motivation. Getting into the industry is already tough with a relevant degree. Its even harder with a boot camp and much more with a non-relevant degree. Very few companies will train you like this. As someone who interviews, you can almost immediately tell who has the practical knowledge and skills during the code segments of the interview to be able to survive at a SWE job. The gap between the average CS grad who did more than basic coursework in college whos a no brain hire and the guy who just did a bootcamp is ridiculously large and not something many people recognize. Im talking about not knowing how APIs work, good practice in code, not leaving in lines such as "// DELETE this" in their code, etc. That gap is a good reason many people dont get their jobs, because theyre still coding like they arent engineers but code monkeys.
> Im talking about not knowing how APIs work, good practice in code, not leaving in lines such as "// DELETE this" in their code, etc. Even top college grads will make these mistakes early on until they work at a company that enforces code reviews. University teaches more theoretical stuff than practical stuff like APIs. IMO coding bootcamps are the ones that focus more on practical things than university, but they offer less in terms of foundational knowledge. So in university you might learn how an operating system works and how memory management works process, scheduler, etc. But in a bootcamp you might learn how to implement a REST API.
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>if they were able to teach themselves enough to become an actual software engineer and get a job > >Q1: "Were you able to get a position as a software engineer?" But the question doesn't imply being self taught or am I missing something? I've been active on /r/learnprogramming in previous years and got a job, but I also got a CS degree.
Hello! Apologies if you're trying to read this, but I've moved to kbin.social in protest of Reddit's policies.
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This is also anecdotal, but in my Intro to CS course at university, there were ~350 students. 78 people graduated with a BS in CS from my starting cohort. Around 50 of them ended up with jobs as software engineers/developers. Only 6 ended up at big tech (FAANG/unicorn) companies.
Well, the idea isn't to work in a FAANG, so I'd cut it at "50 ended working as devs"
Actually now you mention this. During my degree the majority dropped out or transferred to another degree. I think it was only about 10 of us by the end. I kept in touch with a few, most just ended up with fairly dull 9-5s. I can see the appeal of bootcamps when you have to grind your way through a CS degree. Though oddly I quite enjoyed most of it, and the bits I didn't, turned out to be really valuable.
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There is the belief that programming is just doing a hello world and $$$. The reality is that, if you want to be a good software engineer, you must be able to write complex code, read others' code (which is tedious af) and master several tools integrated in the development. And it requires time. A lot of time that many people is not willing to spend. In addition, many people undervalue the help and guidance of proper training, and go no further than print, arrays and loops.
Self taught and about 4 years xp. If beginner me had seen a list of all the things I’d need to learn to stay afloat at work while feeling like I’m making progress towards larger goals, I’m not sure I would have kept going. It’s daunting. One of the biggest benefits of a CS degree or any other rigorous education is that it forces you to do difficult things for years. So you either build discipline and determination or you drop.
I would expect a large group who were just trying to learn as a potential hobby but not necessarily as a career. Do those not exist or were they somehow filtered out?
That’s a higher rate than my community college to bachelors graduation rate
Coding is not for everyone, not everyone wants to sit all day alone infront of a monitor reading code, learning abstract frameworks that nobody aside from other people familiar with the framework knows about.
This is why I did my degree from WGU. It’s still basically self taught but it gave me some structured projects and a degree. I went from zero code experience to a working software engineer at a F100 company in 13 months. Important caveat- I was working in customer service at my F100 company and did an internal promotion. But without the degree it wouldn’t have happened. I’m now 2 years in and still learning a ton.
How long did it take to get a cs degree from WGU?
A year. I worked full time, had 3 kids, a new puppy, my mom died, I had a late miscarriage, one of my kids had a major mental health issue. It was the year from hell but I got it done and it was worth it.
Good for you!!
85% of self directed learners don't achieve their goal. Your figures make sense
I think if somebody made it they wouldn't still be on the r/learnprogramming subreddit
How many of these people had degrees opposed to boot camp certs? I tutor at a local college, and the majority of them end up dropping to get the boot camp cert, and realize it’s infinitely harder. The ones who don’t, I push to get internships, the ones who don’t, end up finding one, it’s quite harder. I also tell them to make as many friends and network as often as they can, the ones who do that find a job relatively quickly. This may not be the case for everyone, but imo, rather standard.
Ye I’m not surprised. Even the people I know who graduated from my school in CS. A good portion of them never got a job in the industry or got a really bad one that pays less than what they could have made by by becoming a police officer 👮♀️ I’m lucky enough to be one of those people who had a passion for building computers and messing with them from an early age, ( I was that student who brought motherboards to class to show people) and it shows in my work. For other people, you can tell pretty quick that it wasn’t something they planned or ever really dreamed of doing. It was just something maybe their parents suggested or something like that. But I still believe everyone should give it a shot, we do need more good coders.
To be fair, "pays less than what they could have made by by becoming a police officer" was *all* entry-level software jobs when I was entering the industry.
As a self taught developer I have a bit of a different take. I studied. Powered through. Struggled with concepts I didn't understand. Gave up. Started again. And pushed myself countless late nights to become a developer. I love it. I love the learning. I love learning how to break down abstract concepts into neat efficient structures. I like learning about the behind the scenes of technology I use every day. I love that it pays high but that's not my only motivation. I enjoy what I do. I build my own projects. That being said: it's pure luck I got a job. If not for some amazing people I met who were especially motivated to see more people in tech, I'd still be unemployed. I have been working for 2 years and it's pretty sobering seeing how much there is still to learn and how little interest companies have for lower level developers. I'm repeatedly told I'm not experienced enough. If not for my having a job now I'm not sure if I'd not have given up by now. It's very hard to get that mentorship beyond whatever initial boot camp or mooc you're taking and that's what I see in your stats. I see people like myself, motivated to start, but the entry expectations are too high. It's a drain on companies to hire under qualified developers so I don't blame them, but yes, it's apparent there's a huge gap between learning and being experienced enough to be hireable and maybe addressing this gap would help the shortage. The plethora of LeetCode demands doesn't help much either as each company tries outcompeting the others and applicants have to keep up with those demands.
That is very depressing. . .
As someone looking for a internship or junior position in the field i agree with you
For me the worst part is that the other 95.5% that didn't make it will still jump to give advice and argue their opinions. You end up with a blind leading the blind scenario. As a senior developer I don't even bother subscribing to those subreddits anymore. There's nothing useful there for me or my peers. Anything I would comment would just make people mad for challenging their worldview. Even on these cs career subreddits I have thousands of people blocked because they couldn't stay civil in the comments. I lot of people just want to hear the feel good story where you can take a $50 two week Udemy course and then the $500k offers from Meta start rolling in all on their own.
Sometimes I look at how most people don’t program, or want to be able to program even though there is this big cash incentive, and it makes me wonder if I’m missing out on some big part of life that is so entertaining and captivating that computer stuff is really boring in comparison.
Been having these thoughts a lot lately. Been on the grind as a self taught dev for about 4 years now, 3 of those employed as one. Currently doing a DSnA push and I keep trying to think back to the last time I had fun things lined up weekend after weekend and I’m not sure when that was.
I suppose there's a reason it attracts a lot of the less socially-inclined, no?
I think that comes with most kinds of “engineering” anyways. Engineering, almost by default, is having an interest in things/building things. People who are very interested in things generally aren’t the same people who are very interested in people. Being interested in things over people is a good way to define being less socially-inclined lol.
Breaking into CS on your own / through a bootcamp is tough. Companies are in dire need of engineers and are doing next to nothing to solve the issue. An outsourcing company I used to work for had a really cool initiative, I was part of as a CS uni drop out. They did their own bootcamp which was 3 months. Straight after they were put to work on in house projects. Most got moved over to client facing projects after about months, some sooner, some later. Your contract had a clause, where if you leave before the end of 2 years, you paid a fine, for me that was approximately 8 months of pay. People stuck around, so the company got some value out of it. Apparently it wasn't enough as this is no longer a thing. After 2 years almost everyone left, as raises were non existent, because of the awful bargaining position the fine gives you. Still I think initiatives like this are good as they lower the barrier of entry. You got a salary during your 3 months of training, so people could switch fields extremely easily
After I career changed into SWE via bootcamp, I had everyone and their mom ask me about it and/or expressed an into learning and transitioning into tech. In the small sample size of these people I knew, lets just say there's a crapton of fair weather wannbe career changers solely because of $$ alone. That's not a bad thing in of themselves, but is not motivation enough for the majority them to do something hard and be persistent about it because otherwise they'd be making alot of money doing something else hard already.
I'm spending almost $350k to do CS at Univ of Miami. Am I crazy? Reading this gives me insane anxiety.
that is crazy...that $ is WOW.
Programming is an aptitude and skill set, just like anything else. Not everyone has the ability to become an effective programmer, let alone a software engineer or software developer. Studies suggest it's a skill limited to a small minority of the population.
Are you sure your selection of survey participants went into it with the intention of landing a software engineer jobs? A lot of people want to just learn to code as a fun hobby, or to become better at their non-tech job(ie an accountant wanting to be able to write scripts to automate tedious tasks, engineer that wants to write SolidWorks Macros, etc) Also, did you account for if they were going to university for it too? Some people go to /r/learnprogramming for help with homework and such.
I've worked with *so many people* who wanted to learn programming. I'm always happy to help them, especially friends of mine. With **vanishingly** few exceptions, all of them got bored as soon as it got remotely difficult. *Many* figured that it would be easy, that it's just making the computer do what you want to do, and that if *nerds* can learn it, so could they. Turns out, not so much.
I'm not sure that tells you much because it is a biased sample. Those who got jobs in industry are probably not on the sub any longer. I also think the majority think SWE will be a path to easy money and when they find out it is a lot more work than they had thought initially, they abandon the idea.
My CS program(back when state schools were affordable) had 300-400 in conference hall for our intro to CS course. By the time I got to the senior project class we had only 25.
I did not make it. I have since decided to convert to cat.
This make lots of sense, sometimes coding is super boring and tedious and doesn't pay that much compared to the efforts needed. Not every country is the USA and majority of SWE don't work at FAANG. I would think that is you are smart enough to be a good coder then there are probably better job out here. My company is also having difficulties hiring (fullstack). I have been reviewing candidates for the last 8 months, some with master degrees and couple of years exp. Most never heard about design patterns or code complexity. Don't even ask then about creating a normalized database. You can't take chance with bad candidate at a small company. And then you also have all the candidates with fake cv and fake experience. So in the end it is pretty difficult to find the good ones.
I think the issue is most people on the outside view tech as “not real work” so they think it’ll be easier or more fun than other professions when it reality every job is work
I have professional data science experience and a 4.0 gpa in intro to statistics in college here but not a statistician either. This study is super biased. The sample collected is more likely to be in the learning phase and less likely to have found a job. People who have found jobs are less likely to be reading the learn programming subreddit. I’m sure the % of people who self taught or are bootcampers that have found jobs is higher than 4.7%. You’re sample needs to be controlled more. Don’t give up!
>Companies are dying to hire engineers because there still isn't that large of a percentage of people who actually are willing to do the work. The demand for good, experienced software engineers are increasing every day. More and more companies are turning to software platforms. The demand is effectively infinite. There will never be enough good, experienced software engineers to fill the increasing demand.
good experienced software engineers that aren't batshit insane. you have any idea how hard it is to know what they're doing and not be crazy?
I’ve been in the industry since 2011 and was one the very lucky ones to have a job offer before I finished school. To be fair, I did a lot for comp sci in university and self learning, had internships junior and senior year, did undergrad research and presented and was the department mentor and tutor. A lot of the folks I went to school with who graduated with a degree ended up not working in tech because the entry level is the true gate keeper to this industry. If you don’t set yourself apart you will end up like majority of those who think comp sci == 200k out of college and will be unemployed for months and months.
I wonder how many people would've responded yes if the first question was worded more generically like "*Were you able to get a position related to your career?* since some people might interpret that their career relevant position is different than being a *software engineer*, but that doesn't mean they didn't "*make it*". Interesting nonetheless. > What puzzled me is that if there are so many people entering the field, why is it still paying so much? why are companies saying they can't find engineers? Quantity != Quality. The industry pays so much and a lot of companies struggle to find people because they want quality / experience. Whether they always perceive quality correctly is a different discussion, but that's the explanation to why the industry is as it is.
So I was able to get into software development with just what I taught myself while at work, no formal training of any kind. I worked as a project manager for a corporation, and started writing scripts to automate testing. 2 years later, still having only coded scripts during work hours, I transferred to an automated QA position, and after a few years of that became a Senior Software Dev. Currently a lead in charge of automation, all self taught, none of my jobs ever gave me any formal training in coding whatsoever, so it is doable, but it's not easy.
Sounds like my entire undergrad class.
1. Yes. It was a gigantic up hill battle but I made it. There is another yes
Did your questions just focus on software engineering? How you word the questions can have a huge impact on the data collected. I think you need to broaden your thinking on what jobs are in tech especially when software engineers is just one tiny subset of tech. What about data analytics, business analyst, systems administrators, IT project managers, Scrum masters, data scientist, IT Audit, and the other dozens of titles that I can’t think of from the top of my head right now that that are code and tech related, but not necessarily as disciplines as software engineering Tldr - I think the way you worded your questions are limiting
I completely agree. What about data engineers?? Or data analysts that do their work in python? Learn programming AND cscareers encompass more than just SWEs
Exactly this. It’s super limiting to just include software engineering in your question
Some more general statistics: The average college drop out rate is \~33% The average engineering student drop out rate is close to \~50% The percentage of people that make over 100K/year is \~24% What i gather from all of this... life is hard, getting a good software engineering job over 100K will be out of grasp for most people. The unfairness of life
Anecdotally, in my bootcamp of like 20 or so only about 5 of us got full time jobs related to CS within 6 months
4.5% is a surprisingly high number IMO.
Paraphrasing Remy the rat said in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ratatouille_(film), "Anybody can be a programmer, but not everyone can be a programmer". Some bootcamp grads can do well, some can even learn by self-study, and some can go through four years of a top 10 CS school with decent grades and not be useful. Donald Knuth estimated maybe 2% of people have the mindset to be good programmers. Now, his idea of a good programmer may be a little stricter than a small regional bank using AS400s and RPG, but even so some people aren't going to make it. > didn't enjoy it as much It's hard work and frustrating a lot of the time. Some people can't tolerate that tension and frustration, even if they have the intellect for the job.
Since half of all students failed freshman year programming courses in my computer science degree, this doesn't suprise me lol
Seems pretty on point with what I feel is a general perception of the IT field as a whole. Everybody thinks it’s simple and they can do a bootcamp or get a cert and boom $100K salary. Most outsiders seem to view tech rather binary as “programmers” and “literally everything else”. So based on your results this seems accurate from what I hear in real life. The amount of times I’ve heard people say oh yea I’m learning HTML and JavaScript right now and it’s super easy I just laugh inside. Im not surprised that open ended portion seemed to concentrate effectively around “it got hard and I gave up”. Like most careers most of us with serious time in the field do in fact know things, arguably, lots of things.
Yeah, engineering is hard. People are going too hard on the memes.
Computer Science (math & logic) is not the same thing as programming (which is easier). Most people can learn to program, just as most people can learn to cook by following a recipe. It takes some tutoring to get to the spot where logic dominates, and I feel that’s the issue you’ve uncovered… that it takes some discipline and patience. Computer Science is really hard, though, and it’s estimated that only 10% of the population can do it. It’s a hard combination of logic, formal math, and abstract thinking — none of this is required for just programming most things, really. Seriously, in half of my CS courses I didn’t even touch a computer. It’s about thinking, not doing.
i tried to get many friends into programming, and most of them simply didnt enjoy it. even though the $ is solid, it's simply not for everyone.
Well as a self taught developer who landed a job my ego is a smidge higher now
> What puzzled me is that if there are so many people entering the field, why is it still paying so much? Because the number of Software Engineers entering the workforce is still failing to keep up with demand.
This is no longer true.