Ask HN: How did you get from learning to code to making your first dollar?

On HN, there is a lot of advice for people just learning to code and a lot of advice for people who are making some money with their startup/side project. However, I'd love to hear advice about the steps in between, that is, advice from real developers on how they went from a basic knowledge of coding to actually landing their first paid internship/job/etc.

Some questions to consider:

-Did you learn to program in school or teach yourself?

-Did you do unpaid work to establish yourself?

-Roughly how long did it take you from day 1 of learning to day 1 of being paid?

-What was your first gig?

My hope is to make a website with different timelines and step by step guides that shows new programmers how to go from finishing a basic tutorial like Codecademy to getting paid for software development.

- Taught myself.

- The only upaid work I did was side-projects or OSS contributions.

- Probably like 4 or 5 years. I started in high school, and then started doing freelance gigs in college.

- First gig was with a local magazine. I was doing Photoshop to HTML/CSS work (I also know Adobe CS stuff). Then I started doing PHP scripting for them. Then I moved on to a couple WordPress sites and more PHP work. Now I have one part-time client I do more PHP work for, and I take on a gig in Python or Ruby every once in a while. Though I'm looking for Clojure work.

First, a quick response to your questions. I learned to code on my own, after graduation. I simply took all my savings, moved half-way across the country away from my parents, and locked myself in a room (quite literally) for a while, until I was able to create the applications that I wanted to create.

My background was in Industrial Engineering, which is part design, part engineering, part lots of math and BS courses that I've since long forgotten. I think the degree helped me to be more user-oriented, but I am pretty sure it had nearly 0 to do with my ability to code.

Now, let's get to the paid gig. Technically speaking, I think my "paid" digs were for friends and family. I am saying paid because of course, they all want a discount and you end up being paid minimum wage for a while :) My first real gig was a great experience, but a total disaster, so far as payments were concerned. The guy was very legit, up until the point where he skipped town and didn't pay any of his developers. I was out like 5k?

All-in-all, that was a great experience and a kick in the butt. It opened my eyes to the real sucky parts of freelancing business, and eventually led to me building Scoutzie.com where we built plenty of tools to help freelancers shield themselves from ass clients.

Now, back to making money. This might surprise you, but the most money we made because it had nothing to do with ability to code. In the early version of Scoutzie, circa early 2012 when we just got into Ycombinator, my co-founder Jenn said that it was time to make money. I was actually afraid - charging people money for your online product - that's crazy! So, Jenn put together a WuFoo form[1] and we pushed it live.

It was absolutely astonishing when a day later someone actually paid us $5,000 to find them a designer, without even talking to us. It was totally unreal!

So, my point here is - you don't need to know how to code to make money. Sure, we had an original product that required code and was running and collecting interest, but the actual money part was done manually, for the longest time.

If you're learning to code, that's awesome, but making money and coding has probably little to do with each other. You can be the best developer on the planet and completely suck at making money, or you can hack together a few lines of code and get a consistent income month-over-month[2].

[1](the forms are all private, but here's an idea of how the product started to scale once we realized that people were willing to pay -> http://cl.ly/image/2j2C3m2k3x2A)

[2]Right, I forgot to mention, I built PresenterMate.com once, juts for fun, and it's been in App Store ever since. People are still paying money for it every month, which is very cool :D

I learned some C in a "101" class my first year of uni. After applying the concepts to some fun arduino projects, I responded to a craigslist post and ended up putting a few weeks free time (95% reading&learning) into an arduino device for a hobbyist. He paid me $200 + materials which was probably $3/hr but gained a lot of experience and confidence in self-teaching and project management. After this I did some small game and simulation related projects for myself to learn object-oriented concepts. Then recently I responded to an online posting for a software intern and showed them code I had written, + things I had built. They hired me and now I'm getting quality industry experience, albeit with an old technology stack.

I think that a great way for people to break into the industry is to do jobs for those who have even less software experience than themselves! These people may not pay much but they have lower expectations and will give you time to learn.

Taught myself.

I did projects I thought were fun. But I finished them.

I found work by running into somebody who needed programming done. I was at work at a garage changing oil on cars for the summer. A guy came in, we started talking. Turns out he was a bookkeeper who had just bought a computer and was looking for somebody to program it.

I don't think there was more than a year between when I started playing with computers and when I made my first dollar. But everything I did during that time? It was for somebody else to use: games, utilities, whatever.

I ended up writing an accounting system in BASIC for an Apple IIe. Fun times. I made $250 and probably put 100 hours in on it.

Side note: ran into the same guy like 15 years later. After we said our hellos, I thanked him for giving me a chance to break into programming. He told me that he still used the program! Asked me if I could port it to Windows.

So I did. I charged him a lot more the second time around :)