If you're in Columbus, in state tuition at Ohio state is less than $9000 a year, so it is hard to imagine being unable to find money for school. You can make that kind of money working part time at a bar.
Help a fledgling professional programmer makes some important career decisions.
31–40 of 78 posts
Re: Help a fledgling professional programmer makes some important career decisions.
#32Oh, I'm based out of Columbus, OH, but I'm not especially beholden to the city.
hang out at local user's groups. I've thought of driving down to the Ruby/rails UG, sounds like a really good crew http://groups.google.com/group/columbusrb?lnk= (i bet cincinatti has stuff like this too. Cleveland's pretty, uh, quiet). I'm guessing that there's one job category that there will never be enough people for, anywhere: javascript programmers who thoroughly understand DOM scripting, making things work sec…
2 other things: put a blog out there. write a few good posts that arent' obviously derivative of somebody else's.
put some apps out there. They can be facebooks apps that target your geographic area, or greasemonkies that do whatever. These are like selling rolexes on the street. OR: take all the posts tagged "C#" on delicious and technorati, figure out which are the best x thousand, use those to produce better .nET documentation. This would be like selling heroin to junkies.
Re: Help a fledgling professional programmer makes some important career decisions.
#33I'll be honest, hopefully you'll appreciate it because you need honest advice. I read your post and I can already hear the self-pity string quartet playing and a big screen in the background playing images your hard, hard life. Task #1 is to stop whining, not just to other people, mainly to yourself. What do you mean you could not get any loans? What kind of whiny-ass thing is that? You could not get loans so you dro…
I've often wondered why it is that colleges have gotten away with raising tuition 7% to 10% per year for decades on end.
This post is, indeed, very honest about the reason: Your college degree is a badge of social class that every other college grad will look for. If you don't have one, many college grads will assume that you are shiftless and lazy and whining and self-pitying and that you potentially have a series of pregnant girlfriends.
Colleges are charging you -- are striving to put you deeply into debt for a decade or more -- for admission to a club. And, make no mistake, I do generally recommend that you join that club -- the advice here is correct; you should fight to get a degree from one school or another, because the perks are real. But let's not lose sight of the reason why college grads get ahead and folks like the inventive and hardworking techs in my old fab, or my military-veteran uncles with their high school educations, get sneered at. The reason is prejudice.
Incidentally, I for one am willing to take the OP at his (her?) word when he says he's having trouble getting an affordable loan, particularly given the recent turmoil in the credit markets:
http://www.thinkfinancial.com/blog/index.php/student-loans/s...
Re: Help a fledgling professional programmer makes some important career decisions.
#34Here's what I did; I went part-time off-and-on for 4 years and it seemed like an eternity and sucked big time. Finally quite my job and financed my 1st year of full-time (State) college with my credit-cards, worked in the Unix lab. In my 2nd year I got an internship, as a software engineer, that paid well and continued the internship part-time till I graduated.
One summer (3 months) working as an intern and I made more money than working 6 months at my previous full-time job ... also after going full-time to college I made life-long friends that I would not have met going part-time.
On the other hand, if your want to continue as a programmer, U might not really need college if your really, really good. But, a good Computer Science program (and not a whimsical Informations System program) will teach you skills and knowledge that will be invaluable throughout your career. Also, having a degree can be a requirement for many jobs, they might not consider your resume or cv if you don't have one.
Even earning $1600 a month you can go part-time to a state college and start working your way to a degree. Tis better to have a degree even if it takes too long that to not have a degree and get stuck in a rut.
My advise, find an inexpensive state college with a good CS program, go to their open house, talk to their funding specialists. Be prepared to give up the niceties of life for a few years and you'll manage somehow.
OR, come to Boston and sigh up for Ycombinator! :)
Re: Help a fledgling professional programmer makes some important career decisions.
#35I'll be honest, hopefully you'll appreciate it because you need honest advice. I read your post and I can already hear the self-pity string quartet playing and a big screen in the background playing images your hard, hard life. Task #1 is to stop whining, not just to other people, mainly to yourself. What do you mean you could not get any loans? What kind of whiny-ass thing is that? You could not get loans so you dro…
I appreciate your candor, but you're missing the point. No source of funding, no school.
It's not like I need to "snap" out of anything. I want to go back to school. As I've already said I've spoken with a financial aid advisor, things are grim and don't seem plausible failing a windfall.
My car is mine, I'm not an idiot, I'm just poor.
You're quite right, problems don't fix themselves, they also aren't fixed because you one says to fix them.
As for girlfriend/pregnant whatever, I'm not having kids. This isn't some post-adolescent, "lol I hate kids". It's just...I'm not infertile, it's just that the idea of dumping as much time and money into kids as is required to do a half-decent job or better is a bit repulsive to me.
To illustrate my point, I decided not to pursue a fairly cute girl recently because she would cut into my coding and learning time. Nothing in the world is as important to me as my work and my intellectual pursuits.
I know you got a couple "hear hears" for your bluntness but I'd appreciate it if your tone reflected the generally friendlier and quieter atmosphere here as opposed to reddit/digg. Frankly, this sort of uninformed rudeness to someone you don't know is the sort of thing I'd expect on rowdier places like the aforementioned, and it saddens me to run into it here for the first time personally.
Re: Help a fledgling professional programmer makes some important career decisions.
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
gm is a bit harsh here, but he's on the right track. I have my parents co-signing my loans (thank god) but thats all that they've done for me. Everything else I've done on my own and I'm paying for most of my college as I go and from summer jobs. I know if I needed to I could easilly get my own loans (it's not that hard... you just have to deal with higher rates). Also, a friend of mine is in the same boat as you and…
Some of the point here is that the "college" section on your resume represents not just education, but evidence that you're not a total flake. An employer is going to look at your story and wonder why you couldn't, at the very least, get through a few community college courses or an associates degree. As someone who went to a "top" university and received a ton of financial aid, the money excuse doesn't really hold w…
I'm not a flake, I just don't have access to funds.
Re: Help a fledgling professional programmer makes some important career decisions.
#37I'll be honest, hopefully you'll appreciate it because you need honest advice. I read your post and I can already hear the self-pity string quartet playing and a big screen in the background playing images your hard, hard life. Task #1 is to stop whining, not just to other people, mainly to yourself. What do you mean you could not get any loans? What kind of whiny-ass thing is that? You could not get loans so you dro…
Quite right, stop whining. I don't know your location, but in most states, your local community college is cheap. At my alma mater, it's $1775/semester. At the CC my sister recently dropped out of (note: she takes full responsibility for her choice), it's $20/credit + ~$200/semester. When I was a poor grad student living just outside NYC (income Do 2 years of college. Once you turn 24 (+/-, something in that neighbor…
Well if it's normally that cheap straight up, I'll just pay in cash as soon as I find a school that cheap around here.
Re: Help a fledgling professional programmer makes some important career decisions.
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am not aiming for $85k, I'm not aiming for any sum of money. I just want to make a living coding. I'd be happy with $30k if it were matched with a decent work environment. I have been considering moving to a better IT market, I just felt weak when it came to getting a programming job, so wasn't certain if I'd be able to get one remotely. Thanks for the tips.
With all due respect, you're exhibiting signs of the Dunning-Kruger effect. Degrees matter, sure. But there's definitely a way you can demonstrate knowledge without having one. Here is a good read: http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/03/get-that-job-at-goog... Definitely get some F/OSS projects under your belt. It's a great way to show what you can do, and you can work on them completely on your own schedule. To sho…
I understand what you're saying about Dunning-Kruger, but I could sit here and tell you about the merits of Linux Kernel asm-level syscalls versus DOS interrupts.
I know i386 and PPC asm.
I have a passion for algorithms, in particular, I like in my spare time to create mini-benchmarks of sorting algorithms against various arbitrary datasets.
I know my stuff. I just can't demonstrate the more advanced work I've done because it usually violates US Copyright Law.
EDIT: Let me qualify this by saying there is tons more I need to learn, and want to know. For example, I really REALLY need to learn more about web application development.
Re: Help a fledgling professional programmer makes some important career decisions.
#39I'll be honest, hopefully you'll appreciate it because you need honest advice. I read your post and I can already hear the self-pity string quartet playing and a big screen in the background playing images your hard, hard life. Task #1 is to stop whining, not just to other people, mainly to yourself. What do you mean you could not get any loans? What kind of whiny-ass thing is that? You could not get loans so you dro…
Quite right, stop whining. I don't know your location, but in most states, your local community college is cheap. At my alma mater, it's $1775/semester. At the CC my sister recently dropped out of (note: she takes full responsibility for her choice), it's $20/credit + ~$200/semester. When I was a poor grad student living just outside NYC (income Do 2 years of college. Once you turn 24 (+/-, something in that neighbor…
I just checked with a diff comm college, I'm going there. I can go for ~1500 a semester.
I'm super frugal and have no vices other than computers, I can afford that twice over.
Problem solved until I want to go to Uni I guess.
Re: Help a fledgling professional programmer makes some important career decisions.
#40I took the same job, from a factory - the owner set me up working as a "ebay poster" , I asked the company why they didn't move beyond the 21-23% fee ebay takes and build there own website to sell their products.
- they had already spent 5k and in 2 years without sales, they said "No Way!" ...
- i went home and bought the domain www.econoPalletJack.com for $10.20 - I built the site in 2 days (yeah its not perfect) but with a #5 in google for pallet jack and 20k/mo in sales it all worked out, I have since left the company but the owner and i are still greats freinds (wouldn't you be if a guy left you 20k/mo residual)
- have hope and make things on your spare time, little programs perhaps to sell, find a hurt point that you are passionate about and do it.