Ask HN: How many of you are employed, self-taught SWEs?

I was in finance and a lot of the job was getting repetitive. Update excel sheet X times every X days, etc. You soon want to automate the boring repetitive stuff but formulas in excel only get you so far. So you reach to VBA that exposes you more to coding. Then you reach limits there and you look at scripting languages like Python. Ultimately, I decided I enjoyed that part way more and wanted to do it full time.

- What are you doing at your job? Is it everything you dreamed of and more?

I work on backend services. I think the job is better than probably a lot of others. However, it's not all that rosy all the time. On-call is something you probably don't hear about before going into the field, and I think it negatively affects quality of life significantly. The beauty around software is that it runs all the time without you having to do anything, but that also means stuff can break all the time at all hours and you might be tasked to fix it.

The agile work framework is pretty common and I don't like. It's very common to have daily meetings (they call them standups) where you have to tell everyone, what you did yesterday, and what you're doing today. Feels super micro.

More recently, D&I activism has taken engineering by storm. It's hard these days to focus on your job and role without getting dragged into this topic. Hiring based on physical traits (i.e. discrimination) is live and well (and encouraged/required) at tech companies, especially in engineering departments.

Lastly, the hiring practices in this field are complicated. Hiring is predominantly based on obscure algorithm and data structure problems, things that 99% of people don't care about in their day-to-day job. This makes finding new jobs a bit more difficult, because you actually have to allocate a good amount of time to learn these things again.

- How did you break that first-job barrier? I went to a bootcamp and did a lot of algorithm practice problems. The job I ended up getting was through a referral.

- What were you doing before this? excel heavy work

- Any tips for the rest of us? You should generally enjoy problem solving or you wont enjoy it that much.

It all started with playing games. When I was 11, I wanted to host my own CS 1.6 server to make some money by selling VIP. To advertise the offer, I wanted to customize the welcome message you get after connecting to a server. It's coded in HTML/CSS which I had known nothing about so I asked my ICT teacher, who happened to build websites as a side job at the time, if he could help me with that. He taught me the basics, pushed me in the right direction whenever I had a problem and showed me programming is a ton of fun. So from the welcome message, we moved onto building dynamic websites in PHP... Then games in C# using MonoGame. Then came my first professional jobs - CMSs, CRMs, first Java backends and so. And well, here I am. But to answer your question, I focused mainly on web first. I got into it because I was curious, I loved building things and I immensely enjoyed solving problems I had no idea how to approach.

- What are you doing at your job? Is it everything you dreamed of and more?

I'm working on a backend of a service that's used to send RCS marketing campaigns. It's very different than working on your own projects because the business side of things is more important than having a pretty codebase and using a shiny new technology plus most of the people I had a chance to work with were pretty mediocre, so it's definitely not ideal. I've always dreamed about having my own company so I hope that's going to happen one day (I'm making active steps towards this goal of mine).

- How did you break that first-job barrier?

Being 16, I was already ahead of lots of people who have even finished their degrees. So that plus the fact I didn't care about money, I was excited to work on some real projects :)

- What were you doing before this?

I was a kid haha.

- Any tips for the rest of us?

Plenty of my friends tried to learn SE by putting in lots of effort first but they never persisted. It takes months to start connecting the dots. It might be hard to not understand the whole picture, it might be hard to always have problems, it might be hard to always come across a new technology you had never heard of. But trust me, if you persist, it'll get better. Be consistent.

I've always been fascinated with technology and trying to figure out how things work. I got my first computer at age 8, it had QBasic. I programmed a small number of games on it. I spent a lot of time dis- and reassembling this computer, reinstalling DOS, Windows. We didn't have internet or manuals, nor did I speak English. Later on played with Linux which really helped me understand how all of this works under the hood. Actually programming came much later.

- What are you doing at your job? Is it everything you dreamed of and more?

I've been in the field for 11 years now, currently in an SRE role. SRE seems to be a different thing wherever you go. Not really my dream role in its current form right now.

- How did you break that first-job barrier?

QA internship in the gaming industry. Turned into full-time position, later on QA Engineering and then Software Engineering. I jumped on opportunities when they cropped up. I made myself useful in QA rather quickly as I have a low tolerance for doing repetitive tasks manually, which got me into automation and tools programming.

- What were you doing before this?

I tried my luck studying computer science for about 2 years but that didn't really work for me. That opportunity for an internship came at the right moment and I took it.

- Any tips for the rest of us?

Find yourself a mentor. In my first role in QA there was one person in particular who was very open to all my question and taught me how to approach complex problems in legacy code bases. It really helped me gain a lot of knowledge and also confidence in my craft. I should reach out to my first mentor and thank him, I am not sure he's aware of the impact he's had.