Ask HN: From zero to IT career, what is the fastest path?

My advice: buy a subscription to teamtreehouse.com. Take ALL of the courses on HTML, CSS, Javascript, and PHP and/or Rails. They should then take what they've learned and build one or more projects, preferably hosted in a public GitHub repo, that act as a portfolio for potential employers. If they prove that they've actually built a real project(s) that actually does something, they'll be on a good track to find a job.

IMHO, they should avoid programming books. You don't learn how to play baseball by reading a book about baseball; you learn baseball by playing baseball. The same is true for programming: they'll learn more by building something, anything than they would from a book. Books may help them later in their career after they mastered basic programming subjects. For this piece of advice, I'd add one caveat: I have met some programmers who have learned immensely from books, so, if one of your friends falls into this category, discard my anti-book advice. In any case, the focus must stay on project building.

Finally, I would add that if you, or someone else, or a number of experienced programmers could mentor them through this process, that would probably help more than any other resource.

QA, follow online tutorials while you work, ask to help write unit tests, then ask to write code.

My job title went from 'QA' to 'Engineer' in 3 months doing this.

> Be sure to never leave a job unfinished, and always ensure your customer is happy.

Can't agree more about that. Also great advice about the DSP friend. What makes me optimist is that they are based in Vienna / Barcelona, so big cities with some IT scene inside.

A 6 months study time is totally reasonable for them... so basically no "education" (but one is graduated in a different field), but self-education is totally possible to achieve. I guess that in order to buy a reputation they'll need to start with a job that looks serious but maybe without a stellar salary, and evolve from that. Thanks.

I'm a university drop-out because I had trouble paying attention in a classroom. My hobby/interest was development and design since I was 12 years old (am now 25) and created stuff just for curiousity and fun. What I was doing, unknowingly, was creating my portfolio which I would use to land many different jobs and establish a career for myself. The web is booming and we need more masons in the field.

Search for, and go hang out at meetups that cater to programmers and independents. Socialize. Find good people that have some boring, mundane work that they don't want to do, like converting photoshop to HTML or just rote testing, and offload it from them for cheap. Learn more about programming while you're on the job.

It'll be hard to find a "real" job for a while until you prove your mettle this way a bit, even at a small company. I speak as a small business owner; we don't really have time to hand-hold unless you've really proven your ability to learn quickly already.