Ask HN: Best "entry tech" jobs to learn coding?

Get into a PhD program that is quantitative or mathematical. You’ll pick up coding on the way.

When I got hired as an associate engineer in 2015 the job was 50% coding and 50% technical customer support. 2 of us got hired at the same time and we would switch off weeks.

On customer support weeks I would take bug reports from customers, repro them, write down the repro steps, then try to figure out the right engineer to take it to. Eventually I started going deeper to try to find what part of the codebase was broken, then eventually I tried actually fixing the bugs myself. It was a great way to slowly ease into a real production codebase while simultaneously providing some actual value to the company without having to deliver features. It gave me a ton of customer empathy that I’ve carried with me through the rest of my career.

I did this for about a year before I was competent enough to get promoted to regular engineer and focus on product work full time.

Idk if any other companies do it like that but it was a really great way to upskill very green engineers.

I know a few people who have gotten in through Customer Support. Worst case scenario, you get experience working at a tech company, working with engineers, PMs, designers, etc. It's all very valuable. I suggest against the remote angle while you're still learning and making connections in the industry.

Jobs that are hard to fill will often teach you how to program, because it’s a better value for the employer to burn money on the right people on that education ramp up than spending equivalent time and money finding a less strong fit whom is already trained.

This is the position I am in. Last year I was laid off from a job writing JavaScript. I made a promise to myself to never write JavaScript as an employee ever again. A different group eventually picked me up to learn something unrelated just because I had all the required criteria and 15 years of experience writing software.

I have chosen to abandon writing JavaScript after 15 years because it’s extremely immature. I love the language and what you can do with it but most people writing JavaScript professionally absolutely hate writing software. They tend to be interested primarily in code vanity and tools because they are insecure about writing original code. If I were interested primarily in trends and fashion I wouldn’t write code for a living. Beware of people claiming to want to do something, such as write code, but actually hate doing it.

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