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How I left a 4 year career in finance and became a software engineer in 5 months

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Re: How I left a 4 year career in finance and became a software engineer in 5 months

#51

Post by jonmb »

kyro wrote: post #47
jonmb wrote: post #41

My fiancee and I are both studying computer science at a large university. She's graduating in late 2014, I'll be in early 2015. In terms of employment as a developer, sometimes I wonder if we would have been better off attending one of these San Fran developer schools. I wonder though how much of the fundamentals do they learn? Do they ever hear the words "Big-Oh"? Do they know what a binary tree is? And then I wond…

There is no shortage of online classes for teaching how to code, from Udacity to Coursera to Codecademy to OCW, but what these lack, which I believe to be the most important part of learning effectively, is interaction with teachers, mentors, and other classmates. At times I'm surprised no one seems to be attacking that part of online education.

Right, I know of Udacity and Treehouse and those other services, but I don't believe (just from checking them out) that they go into the same kind of hands-on training that a 10 week, in-person 12 hour/day course would.

Re: How I left a 4 year career in finance and became a software engineer in 5 months

#53

Post by DerpDerpDerp »

noir_lord wrote: post #36
oijaf888 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your list seems very targeted towards website development and not so much towards a lot of other parts of software engineering. I doubt many software engineers who focus on embedded systems would know much JS or those who focus on trading software, etc.

I specifically say in my post "lets say a web developer". That is where my area is, I've no idea what I'd want for an embedded developer but I suspect the list is no less complex.

You'd need to know a lot more about data structures, memory management, hardware in general, and probably be at least passingly familiar with the concepts of verified software and the mathematics underpinning computer science to work on embedded systems.

Re: How I left a 4 year career in finance and became a software engineer in 5 months

#54

Post by jonmb »

nicolethenerd wrote: post #49
jonmb wrote: post #41

My fiancee and I are both studying computer science at a large university. She's graduating in late 2014, I'll be in early 2015. In terms of employment as a developer, sometimes I wonder if we would have been better off attending one of these San Fran developer schools. I wonder though how much of the fundamentals do they learn? Do they ever hear the words "Big-Oh"? Do they know what a binary tree is? And then I wond…

It's not a full online curriculum, but the pre-work for the Flatiron school ( http://prework.flatironschool.com/ ) is a pretty solid introduction to the basics.

Nice! Thank you.

Re: How I left a 4 year career in finance and became a software engineer in 5 months

#55

Post by noir_lord »

csomar wrote: post #44
noir_lord wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think in his condescending way he is implying that 5 months is just enough time to teach someone enough programming to be dangerous. The hard part is I think he might have a point, there is a lot more to been a professional software engineer than I think can reasonably be taught in 5 months (even if you spend that 5 months learning 20 hours a day 7 days a week). Of course this is all entirely my own opinion, I've s…

Let's see - Two programming languages: JavaScript and a Server Side languages (rails) in 5 months is not impossible. - HTML/CSS/JS: A couple weeks. - Databases: A couple days. - Linux: Learn the commands on the go on these 5 months. - Git: A night for the basic add/commit/push/pull. Maybe a couple more nights for branching. - Unit Testing: A couple days at most. To use an analogy (I deal with lots of business people,…

The "guy" is a girl.

A couple of days to learn SQL, triggers, views, tables, database theory...oh dear god.

Unit testing a couple of days.

I'm sorry I'll give people the benefit of the doubt usually but haha I don't want to live on this planet anymore.

Re: How I left a 4 year career in finance and became a software engineer in 5 months

#56

Post by kyro »

md2be wrote: post #50
kyro wrote: post #15

Damn good job. Genuinely happy for you, I think more so because I can relate so closely. I've made the very tough decision to not pursue a residency after medical school and to finally commit to jumping into the startup world. It's both really frightening and exciting to go in a completely different direction after dedicating 4 years of my life to rigorous education. I graduate in May, so I've been trying to absorb a…

My cofounder's residency is making it impossible for her to continue with our healthcare startup. Write me.

You don't have any info listed.

Re: How I left a 4 year career in finance and became a software engineer in 5 months

#57

Post by javajosh »

tieTYT wrote: post #9
javajosh wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Enjoying the myriad little mysteries we call "bugs" is key to being a good programmer. Bugs that we create are opportunities to understand the system better - it's a signal that there is behavior we don't understand.

> Enjoying the myriad little mysteries we call "bugs" is key to being a good programmer. I disagree. I hate bugs and I do everything I can to prevent them from ever occurring. To me I find it fun to get better and better at preventing bugs.

Heh, don't get me wrong: if I never wrote a bug again I'd be happy (more than happy!) But when I do write a bug, it meant that either I had a momentary lapse of memory or coordination (like a mispelling) or, and this is important, that I don't understand how part of the machine works sufficiently - either a dependency or my own code. What makes this particularly interesting is that there are many perspectives on a code base. You can look at it's static structure, it's dynamic structure, it's distributed structure, it resource allocation, as a collection of signals, you can look at it from a maintainability perspective, extensibility, how easy it is to partition work across team, how easy it is to grasp. You can look at a piece of software as a collection of artifacts, etc.(Indeed, it seems like the list of ways you can examine a codebase is monotonically increasing year after year! :)

To bring it back to bugs, a bug can exist in any of these "views" of the system, and sometimes (often) simultaneously in several of them. That's what makes them such a rich signal for our own ignorance.

(Quick editorial: I think that's why rails, Play and meteor have gone/are going in the right direction of removing, sometimes dramatically, some of the ways you have to view your system, and incredibly tight tool integration. People just don't - can't - keep so many views of the system in their head at once. We can't think about the build and low-level plumbing, for example; we need a "synchronization" abstraction. We want the build to just work. We want design- and run-time tools that are easy to update, configure and run. And so on. Meteor is the bees knees, for that reason. Although, ironically, I find my Meteor code to be incredibly bug ridden. Writing JavaScript against new libraries is fairly painful if you're used to learning through IntelliSense!)

Re: How I left a 4 year career in finance and became a software engineer in 5 months

#58

Post by javajosh »

Danieru wrote: post #14
tieTYT wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Enjoying the myriad little mysteries we call "bugs" is key to being a good programmer. I disagree. I hate bugs and I do everything I can to prevent them from ever occurring. To me I find it fun to get better and better at preventing bugs.

I do not think javajosh would disagree with you on that. I think he was suggesting treating bugs as opportunities for learning, in fact I think this feeds into your point.

Yes indeed. Thanks for pointing that out.

Re: How I left a 4 year career in finance and became a software engineer in 5 months

#59

Post by jasonz »

kyro wrote: post #15

Damn good job. Genuinely happy for you, I think more so because I can relate so closely. I've made the very tough decision to not pursue a residency after medical school and to finally commit to jumping into the startup world. It's both really frightening and exciting to go in a completely different direction after dedicating 4 years of my life to rigorous education. I graduate in May, so I've been trying to absorb a…

kyro - I want to congratulate you on your decision! I went through the same thing (graduated in 2011) and it was indeed very difficult at the time. Over time your friends and family will come around and realize you made the best decision for yourself. Work hard, find a great mentor, and enjoy the ride !

Re: How I left a 4 year career in finance and became a software engineer in 5 months

#60

Post by lucidrains »

kyro wrote: post #15

Damn good job. Genuinely happy for you, I think more so because I can relate so closely. I've made the very tough decision to not pursue a residency after medical school and to finally commit to jumping into the startup world. It's both really frightening and exciting to go in a completely different direction after dedicating 4 years of my life to rigorous education. I graduate in May, so I've been trying to absorb a…

Hey kyro, me and someone else I know here are in the same boat! Get in touch!
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