Comment by DougWebb | Hacker News Reader

Comment by DougWebb | Hacker News Reader

This question feels similar to "I decided to switch my career and become a surgeon. Which organs should I focus on first so I can start earning income right away?"

It doesn't really work that way. "Web Dev" is not a job; it's a generic name for an industry that covers a multitude of different specific jobs, each with their own specific (and overlapping) skill sets, and all of which are a subset of the much larger "Software developer" industry.

I don't really have any advice here. My approach was learning to program computers and gradually building my skills from the ages of 12 to 26, including several paid part-time/temporary jobs towards the end. Then a friend asked me to leave graduate school and take a programming job at his company, to take over a project he didn't want to run. I took the slow road, and stumbled into the career on a whim. (I'm a Mechanical Engineer and thought I'd be building robots, with programming just being one of the tools of my job.)

This analogy makes _zero_ sense. You can make a living working exclusively with PHP, JS or RoR, for example, and the barrier of entry is nowhere near becoming a surgeon (and getting lower every day).

Plenty of people switch careers as adults, and they can be as successful as folks that “play with computers” since they were kids. It’s perfectly possible to become a productive developer with very few formal training these days.

Exclusively? I don't believe you can have a software development career working exclusively with PHP, JS, or RoR. That's far too limited a breadth of knowledge. At best you might make some money on the side if that's all you know, but no company is going to hire you as a full-time professional developer based on just that.

I wasn't saying that learning everything you need to learn for web development is as difficult as going through med school and becoming a surgeon. What I meant was that there are a ton of different technologies and specialties in web development, and you need to know what your specialty is before you can know what technologies you'll need. There are all kinds of different surgeons too, that specialize in particular organs. You can't just say "I want to be a surgeon, which organ should I learn" because it depends on what kind of surgeon you're going to be. Also, it wouldn't just be one organ because the body is a complex system of interrelated parts, and you need to know about all of that too if you want to be a good surgeon. Web development is like that too; you may specialize in PHP, JS, or RoR, but there are a lot of other related and intertwined technologies you're also going to need to know about.

While I agree with this, I don’t want to discourage OP. You don’t have to spend 10 years learning the basics before calling yourself a web dev.

Learning web dev(or programming in general) is very much like how babies learn to speak. You don’t have to learn all the alphabets, rules and grammars before you learn to speak. You can still observe what others are doing, copy it, reason about it, draw interesting patterns from it and continue your learnings from there.

Op: So go ahead, jump right in. Open your browser’s javascript console and start playing. Learn React and build small apps. Pick python and build servers. Not everything will intuitively click, but push regardless. You’ll eventually understand everything. After all, the more dots you collect, the more ways you can connect them!

Big difference is that a surgeon cannot fiddle around with a liver, jam it back in the body, wake the patient up, test how the change works, and address (or revert if really messed up) any unexpected and unwanted behavior.

I agree "Web dev" has a very long learning curve, but there is opportunity to be productive and helpful at many, many different points along that curve.

You're right, as software developers we have the advantage of being able to create an offline replica of the software we're working on, which we can experiment with without doing any harm. We've learned, through experience, to do that instead of poking around and testing things on our production website. That's one of the many things we had to learn (and which isn't an acronymed technology), which differentiates "career" software developers from hobbyists.

Like I said in my post, I don't really have advice to give. I don't know any short cuts to get from "I don't know anything but I'm willing to learn" to "I can convince a company to hire me full-time so I have a career". Companies have internships where they hire people who are just starting the learning curve, but that's generally unpaid (or very low-paid) and for very young future developers.

I consider myself very lucky to have taken the career path I've taken. It wasn't planned at all, and I don't know how I would have planned it.

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