Going from not working in the industry to leading a team of developers in just a few years is extremely impressive. I have over a decade of experience as developer and have not made it yet to that kind of lead position. Is this because your technical skills were superior to your peers or because you possessed additional soft skills, if so, what advice would you give for moving into Lead Developer/Engineering Manager roles?
How I learned to code in my 30s
131–140 of 208 posts
Re: How I learned to code in my 30s
#132I started to learn to code last November at 37yo. About 30 hours a week for two months I finished the Front End Certificate from freeCodeCamp (highly recommend the site for starters). Then I decided it was better to build my own projects with the tech I wanted to learn (mostly React) using official documentation and tutorials. This is what I accomplished in around 3 months: www.rodrigo-pontes.glitch.me Then I started…
I don't mean to be intrusive, but how much can one earn after this experience?
All depend of your location of course. I live in São Paulo, Brazil. I earn 4500 Reais per month (~ 1300 usd per month). This is actually around 30% higher than what I was expecting as an average salary for a junior web developer. Luckily I landed the job with the highest pay.
My expectation is to double that within two years. I believe my former work experience can accelerate my path to be a senior developer. And then keep going on a more linear growth.
Re: How I learned to code in my 30s
#133Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't mean to be intrusive, but how much can one earn after this experience?
All depend of your location of course. I live in São Paulo, Brazil. I earn 4500 Reais per month (~ 1300 usd per month). This is actually around 30% higher than what I was expecting as an average salary for a junior web developer. Luckily I landed the job with the highest pay. My expectation is to double that within two years. I believe my former work experience can accelerate my path to be a senior developer. And the…
Awesome, thank you. I wish you good luck!
Re: How I learned to code in my 30s
#134When I was a kid, my mom was teaching high school, and thought that she might get laid off due to declining school enrollment in the rust belt. She took a year of programming courses at a community college. The next year, they asked her to teach the course, which she did. Most of her students were 30+, many were working in the auto industry, including assembly line workers. At the time, there were a lot of bright peo…
> Let's just say we guessed wrong. ;-) Not that wrong, imho. > my mom discouraged me from majoring in CS because she literally thought programming was too easy to justify 4 years of classroom training, and she thought that the job market for programmers would quickly saturate. This part is real wisdom. The best developers I know (and I myself, which I consider an above average programmer) learned how to program by th…
Some of the best developers I have worked with had CS degrees and some of them didn't. The ones that didn't were programming from when they were kids (like you say). Based on my experience of working with developers from both backgrounds, I personally wouldn't discriminate based on whether someone had a degree or not when interviewing.
Re: How I learned to code in my 30s
#135I've been programming for 13 years. I started when I was 14 years old and studied software engineering at university. These days, when I take on well-paid contract work, sometimes I find myself working alongside people who only started learning to code at around 25 and never went to university. It's upsetting for me to think of all the fun I missed out on in my early life because I was learning programming and pushin…
If you want money, don't be a jobbing programmer. Either make something with all these extraordinary skills you have and own it. Or go into Sales or Management, where there is real career progression with rewarding financial incentives.
Re: How I learned to code in my 30s
#136I'm facing problem of finding a mentor and space I want to succeed is being able to do anything with power of Python!
Re: How I learned to code in my 30s
#137I read this as "How I learned to code in 30s" and I thought it'd be a parody of "Learn X in Y" tutorials.
Re: How I learned to code in my 30s
#138I've been programming for 13 years. I started when I was 14 years old and studied software engineering at university. These days, when I take on well-paid contract work, sometimes I find myself working alongside people who only started learning to code at around 25 and never went to university. It's upsetting for me to think of all the fun I missed out on in my early life because I was learning programming and pushin…
>ActionScript 2 , ActionScript 3, C/C++, C#, Java, Python, AVR studio....I could wipe out 95% of these skills from my memory and get paid the same.
Yes you're right about this.Programming is quite similar to math in that aspect. Great debugging skills and understanding can replace the requirement for all of this.
But you seem to be missing the point here. There is a difference between learning a language and the frameworks compared to learning _why_ a language and _why_ a framework. This is what ~60% of today's "coders/programmers" miss and are unable to understand.
Learning the why helps you pick up things much easily. The effort you would have to put in to learn any new languages would be considerably much lesser compared to others.
A commonly quoted line in the industry is , "you need more breadth than depth".
And you wipe out a lot of skills on a regular basis. This is not a conscious effort that you make. It just happens to everyone.
I'm not trying to say that the late blooming programmers do not understand the "why" bit, but rather that a lot of programmers do not. I am one of those self taught programmers who loves exploring the why. And it makes my life much easier than those who do not. So revel in knowing that you are capable of picking up new skills much easily compared to others. That IMHO is a much more important characteristic than knowing a million languages/systems/frameworks.
Re: How I learned to code in my 30s
#139I started in my 30s after an earlier stint in high school. It was a real struggle. I work in a SE engineering role now with a focus on data science. My stats and math skills have given me an advantage but I still feel like I'm a rookie in many ways. It is important for more of us who transition to SW careers to speak about our struggles and techniques to hang in there. It will render confidence to those who feel alone as they try to find their footing.
Re: How I learned to code in my 30s
#140I started to learn to code last November at 37yo. About 30 hours a week for two months I finished the Front End Certificate from freeCodeCamp (highly recommend the site for starters). Then I decided it was better to build my own projects with the tech I wanted to learn (mostly React) using official documentation and tutorials. This is what I accomplished in around 3 months: www.rodrigo-pontes.glitch.me Then I started…
This is Quincy with freeCodeCamp. Congratulations on your new job, and your diverse portfolio. Getting a job as a new developer after only 4 rejections is a great batting average. Sean Smith rejected 192 times before getting a job at Trustar. https://medium.freecodecamp.org/how-i-learned-to-code-and-ea...
Thanks and congrats for your work Quincy. freeCodeCamp is something very very special. I consider it of similar importance of Khan Academy and Stack Overflow.
Unfortunately it does not receive proportional attention from more technical forums like HN. Mostly because it is basically designed for non-developers. That's why I particularly like the marketing strategy of students giving stars to freeCodeCamp Github repository. It brings awareness to developers of all kinds and ways of life about what you are doing.
I believe freeCodeCamp will grow to be an essential tool for improving society and individual people's life by democratizing knowledge.
I hope to learn enough to be able to give back to the platform. It's pretty overwhelming to be in the situation I am right now, but once I am more stabilished I will sure contribute somehow.