Comment by yluplfca | Hacker News Reader

Comment by yluplfca | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Noted. Thank you so much. In that case, it sounds like software Q/A testing or business analyst are my best bets.

If it matters, my programming experience is a couple of Java classes in HS, an intro to algorithms and data structures (in Java) in college, the research project I mentioned (which was in Matlab), and many small Python scripts for various math/physics classes.

I'm pretty confident I could self-teach and/or learn on the job whatever programming I need to get up to speed as a professional developer, and I've heard of people who got programming jobs right out of college with an unrelated technical degree. So I guess I'm just wondering whether they are outliers or if this is actually a feasible thing to try (and if so, how I would go about doing it).

Also, as far as getting into larger or higher-tier companies, I could really care less about the size or prestige of a company as long as it meets all my other goals (esp. salary). And I actually would rather not live in Silicon Valley (or California in general) due to the high taxes and cost of living.

No worries, just hope some of it helped.

Regarding teaching yourself programming, that's always a good idea. There are enough people who get programming jobs out of college with unrelated degrees so it's definitely not just outliers, but still not close to the norm either. I just wasn't sure what you meant by basic knowledge, but from what you describe you could easily teach yourself, though I would expect it to take some time.

If you can wait anywhere from 1-6 months and are willing to study programming like it's your job for that time I'd wager you could learn enough to get a job as a programmer. In 1 month you can target the skills toward a particular type of position (ex. Ruby on Rails, Node.js, iOS, Android, etc.) and given longer time you could study more core computer science concepts (system design, security, more advanced algorithm analysis, etc.)

If time is in short supply, then you should try to look into companies where software QA/testing can be a transition to a programmer. In this case you could work in QA for 6 months while building stronger coding skills and then transition pretty smoothly.

However, given that programming interviews are so variable and usually stick to fundamental data structures or puzzles, there's a good chance you could find a programming job with your background. In that case, go for it, the pay will be better for sure. Expect to work quite hard the first year as you catch up.

TL;DR anything is possible, don't let my limited experience steer you too much

Thank you. That is very helpful.

As time unfortunately is in short supply, it seems like it will probably make the most sense for me to just jump right into QA/testing and go from there.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com