Ask HN: need advice for a friend who's just starting out

I have a fairly smart friend. He's not a programmer - he dabbled in it in high school, thought it was kinda cool, but didn't think of it as a future career. Having spent a good few years in other jobs (manual / small managerial) he's now quite keen on the idea of writing code for a living :-) He's now in a position where he can allow himself some 4-5 months of uninterrupted studying. That's a reasonable amount of time to learn something, but far from enough to get to a graduate level. He asked me something along the lines of, "what do I need to learn to get a job, and what can I learn on the job?" Thing is, I'm a fairly junior Java developer in a huge corporation. In a way such a company would be great - they are fairly tolerant towards juniors and give them time to learn. But they won't even look in your direction without a CS diploma and/or relevant experience.

I wonder if some startups/smaller companies would be willing to take on a junior developer (@junior salary), and if so, what deliverables would he have to show to get through the door? e.g. an end-to-end RoR|django app on github?

Otherwise, perhaps with some knowledge of M$ technologies he could get a job doing business reports or something similar. His degree was in business management, so that might help a little.

(He's in London, by the way).

So, fellow HN'ers, what advice would you give? All opinions welcome! Thanks!

I was quite impressed with their approach. It's very hands-on and really teaches people to think from the fundamentals in terms of problem solving, rather than just copy pasting code.

It's an option worth looking at.

Disclaimer: I'm considering taking up a teaching role at Makers Academy.

Build a project on nights and weekends and use that as a talking point in an interview. Besides that, just keep interviewing.

I think there's enough of a demand that he may be able to slip through the cracks at one company even if not fully qualified.

If he only wants to do development as an interesting way to make more money or have greater job security, some combination of self-learning and mentoring over a year's time I would think could get him into a development position somewhere, which I'm sure could lead to bigger and better things down the line.

However, if your friend thinks he might truly be passionate about coding, I highly recommend he (rigorously research and) attend one of the coding "bootcamps" that has sprung up over the past year. I'm sure that not all of these bootcamps are created equal, but the good ones seem to be run by passionate, skilled, and dedicated people that will do their part and more to give you the necessary tools to be a developer in a desirable segment of the industry. The job placement statistics at many of these schools would seem to bear that out. You can look up lots of info on them on Quora or at www.bootcamper.io (seems to be down at the moment).

The "highly selective" part of most of these schools is not based on a candidate's level of past experience (part of the point is to give opportunities to candidates with little CS experience). I'd say if your friend can present himself well-to-very-well in written communication, show that he has great desire and commitment to learn (assuming that he does), and show that he is already taking basic steps to learn on his own, he has a good shot at making it into one of these bootcamps.

Simply put, I think they're worth it (at least the top 3 or top 5 bootcamps -- can't speak for the others). The beginning of anybody's career is a time where investment of time and money can return outsize benefits. More investment yields exponentially larger results in terms of career trajectory.

And, to encourage you/him, if he doesn't think he's cut out for one of these programs, of course he can accomplish the same things on his own, if he wants to badly enough. I just happen to think that the programs are well worth it, and therefore he should consider them.

Hope that helps! I'll obviously know more when I've actually made it through Dev Bootcamp and hopefully find employment, but this is the best advice I could give your friend, knowing what I know so far.