Just idly considering programming as a future career at the moment and wondering about a way into it. I think I have the basics but no specialised experience

Started off doing C++ modules at uni as part of my course, and some .ASP and PHP modules, however I left in 2006! Covered MS Access and SQL databases, even built a full content management system for an online store in PHP… it never went live though.
Since then I’ve used Matlab a lot and more recently VBA in Excel.

So I think I have the basics, most of which is self taught. I’m certain I could pick up something else pretty quickly, so how would I go about a) choosing something to specialise in and b) getting experience/a job in it?

Can you compete with a graduate?

Honest answer, try seeing if there was a job that your current skill sets match that include programming.

Can you compete with a graduate?

Pay wise, probably. I am in a graduate position currently as have changed the industry sector I work in (due to moving to Edinburgh) but current job/career path is quickly losing its appeal.

My specialism is currently acoustics, noise, audio with some programming and some electronics experience

As an employer/more senior guy I would rather a better skilled grad than someone with a bit of this experience. If you can combine your current grad skills with something else then maybe.

As an employer/more senior guy I would rather a better skilled grad than someone with a bit of this experience.

However his background sounds like their an electronic engineerer, so if there was any maths required in the programming they’d probably be much better suited.

I’ve had a modest IT company for 25 years.. A degree was never a consideration when employing.. BUT.. the ex employees of mine who have gone on to be successful or make a packet have all (with one exception) been graduates.

have all (with one exception) been graduates.

Graduates of Computer Science?

Graduates of Computer Science?

Suprisingly.. no 😕

Well I’m a graduate with a BSc (Hons) and an MSc not in computer science so is there hope?! 🙂

I am very much out of touch but from what I understand a lot of the lower level programming is done offshore now in low cost countries. I would suggest focusing on higher level stuff / design / interacting with businesses/system users. It would seem ideal to try and leverage your work experience too.

Get to know some people locally ask them about companies, work, skills, experience.

I’ve benefited more from people knowing me than from just sitting in a room quietly writing a program.

Also, should you ever find yourself writing the word ‘leverage’ then either go and work in sales or read Politics and the English language 😈

Not many places will take on a “junior” developer as they would rather have someone who requires less training/support etc however positions do exist.

Good way in might be as application support / devops type role then move into programming?

To pick this up again, I’ve been thinking. At the last few companies I’ve worked at I’ve immediately seen the way that they process data and use software as being grossly inefficient, e.g. using Excel but manually calculating whether a value exceeds another value or manually copying values one by one from one piece of software to another where there is an ODBC import option instead. I’ve then suggested and implemented much more efficient ways of working.

I don’t find this sort of thing complicated and actually find it bit strange people work the more inefficient way. Sorting out these issues hasn’t been the main part of my role though, but think it is something I could build on in another role focusing on it. Any ideas what that job would be?

Well I think there is a change brewing in the industry (could be optimistic) I see more an more companies running IT apprenticeships / trainee schemes as they are unable to attract senior experienced candidates at, frankly, sensible salaries who have the right attitude.

Contractors work out expensive long term and there are often communication/quality/contractual issues with offshoring using third parties. Certainly a lot of smaller firms are all about team based agile development, which I’ve found works best with collocated motivated team players (which tend to be the fresh faced grads, or 1-2 year experienced guys) with a good all round tech lead / mentor in the mix.

We’ve hired 50 or so trainees in the last couple of years, and all but one has turned out to be successful productive developers (and testers). I was sceptical we would get such a high success rate, but the proof is there.

Start applying. Most of the schemes are aligned to the student calendar though, so begin in Sept/Oct though expect the applications earlier.

I was a law graduate and started on an IT grad programme with an insurance company 13 years ago or so, then left when we outsourced IT to an India firm. It’s interesting to see it come full circle and now be in a company that is rebuilding its perm capability

EDIT – in answer to your last post do some research on business intelligence tools, some really good stuff out there which makes the excel number crunching stuff far far easier (if you are talking about reporting). Or I could read that as data transfer between systems, which is generally a sign of bad architecture / poor integration. Likely from the systems being built a different times, probably by different people/projects/companies, and the ‘making it work together bit’ being descoped or forgotten or badly designed. Which happens a lot.

I wouldn’t do it myself. Programming is an awful job in many cases. Deadlines, long hours, chained to a desk, expected to learn the latest stuff in your own time (training budgets usually poor), not particularly well paid (for IT). I write short programs to get a job done and a bit of hobby stuff for fun, but I couldn’t sit there doing it all day, every day for all the tea in china.

expected to learn the latest stuff in your own time

I expect everyone (myself included) to learn stuff on their own time. If it’s vital to the company I’m happy to pay for training but if you’re in a knowledge based role and expect me to constantly drip feed you every single thing, it won’t go well.

TBH if you’re prepared to start at the bottom from a salary PoV and are a GOOD developer then you’ll do okay. If you’re mediocre/a journeyman then it’ll be hard to compete with newly minted grads or school leavers. I’ve never cared about uni transcripts as there’s a lot of bad courses out there.

start at the bottom from a salary PoV

What would be a typical salary?

Copy/paste etc… I don’t find this sort of thing complicated and actually find it bit strange people work the more inefficient way.

I find it amazing the amount of people who work with computers day-in, day-out who have no idea that the computer is there to do the work for you. It seems to go hand-in-hand with a lack of initiative.

when I led a development team I preferred grads / post-grads and second jobbers who could demonstrate a natural aptitude, rather than qualifications or specific experience. Variously I think I had an astrophysicist, an economist, a business management and a philosophy graduate (amongst others). All my team were expected to (and did) read up and keep up on external developments in their own time.

I don’t think that’s unusual. If you’re able to compete with grads in terms of starting salaries etc and finance interests you then I can put you in touch with some decent agencies. But then I’m London (City) based so I suspect slightly out of your way…

(BTW – I have an arts degree, joined a grad program with an IT consultancy to get programming experience and then took it from there. Not sure whether that’s an option – looking at the ‘milk round’ at the usual suspects to see whether you can get into a post-graduate training scheme)

peakyblinder – Member
……. I write short programs to get a job done

What line of work are you in?

I expect everyone (myself included) to learn stuff on their own time. If it’s vital to the company I’m happy to pay for training but if you’re in a knowledge based role and expect me to constantly drip feed you every single thing, it won’t go well.

I don’t expect you to drip feed me anything and I’ve had to learn everything in my job in my own time and at my own expense. But it’s only fair to let someone know before they go down a career path what the reality is.

What line of work are you in?

I’m a freelance ethical hacker.

Any ideas what that job would be?

Data Scientist

What the degree is in doesn’t necessarily matter – I can’t remember what the best degree is supposed to be for producing good programmers but it isn’t computer science.

A lot of people who do computer science will never be decent programmers.

Years ago Silicon Graphics took a bunch of criminally ‘delinquent’ teenagers from whatever institution they were in and taught them to program as an experiment, then gave a number of them jobs as they turned out to be decent at it.

Why programming? It’s not clear that it’s a great love of yours from what you describe. Whilst I’d not agree entirely with PeakyBlinders’

Programming is an awful job in many cases

any programming job will entail deadlines, seemingly intractable problems, and people.

I saw the words ‘data scientist’ in one response. If you’ve a strong stats/maths leaning with the ability to turn your Matlab skills to R or even SAS then that’s one potential route. Although lots of ‘data science’ jobs aren’t billed as such. You’ll likely have a local R-users’ group which will give you an idea of some of the opportunities around that might interest you.

If you’re in Edinburgh, have you considered biotech? There’s a partially-recognized need in some companies for diverse, mathematically-adept, business-savvy, computer-savvy folks to do various ‘modelling’, informatics, or ‘business intelligence’ work. Have a look around. Some companies require previous healthcare/research experience for some jobs. It can be worth having a call with the hiring manager if the field interests you.

If you’re in Edinburgh, have you considered biotech? There’s a partially-recognized need in some companies for diverse, mathematically-adept, business-savvy, computer-savvy folks to do various ‘modelling’, informatics, or ‘business intelligence’ work.

The Key words you’ll be looking for are Big Data and Analytics – much more mathematically and statistics based.

Other areas (given what you say above) would be to look more at the Process Management side of things (look for DevOps) and another key area is UX (user experience – which is the progression from being on the design side of web development).

It all depends on where you want to work really – do you want to head down the big corporate consulting route (high stress, good money), the more technical coding route or the more hipster web dev side of things?

I thought you needed a Data Science degree, or some experience working with Hadoop, or something relevant to processing large data volumes or computations to get into “Big Data”?

Even a DevOps role will need you to be familiar with some programming/operations stuff (Python/Go or Wintel/TCP/IP stuff). Not something you can just switch into on a whim!

I quite like programming, solving problems and the sense of satisfaction when you get something new working.

Like most careers, there are bad jobs and good jobs and good and parts of these.

I was a programmer for about 13 years after Uni (Computer Science), taught English for 9 years and now trying to get back into it. So far, with little success, no-one has replied to any of my job applications. Never mind, I’ll keep going.

I wouldn’t do it myself. Programming is an awful job in many cases. Deadlines, long hours, chained to a desk, expected to learn the latest stuff in your own time (training budgets usually poor), not particularly well paid (for IT).

Anything to do with operations, of a system or of a network, is way worse.

At least with programming you are creating something and your work is somewhat visible – running networks/systems is much more of a thankless task as not many people notice that you are doing a good job just because there haven’t been any problems recently.

Most decent programmers welcome the chance to learn and work with new technologies, although the constant need to do so can get a bit boring.

At least with Microsoft the churn of technologies is a little less than it was, and most of the technologies are quite decent now which contrasts with having to keep learning poor frameworks. Although we can only hope that one day VB and VBA will be consigned to history…

And the pay is pretty also decent considering.

I suppose it depends on what type of organisation you work for. Many programmers in front-office type positions in banks work long hours and to deadlines, and are compensated for it, but they welcome the pressure.

Where the pressure becomes problematic is when it is coming down as a result of entrenched incompetence at higher levels within the organisation, such as insisting on trying to write production systems using things like Excel, and using terms like strategic and tactical solutions to try to disguise their stupid decisions.

i.e pressure to produce something worth-while is good, pressure to fight fires because of continual junk decisions from above is not.

If the OP has no problem with C++, then he is probably not going to have any problem with anything else.

One, probably slow, way might be to get involved with a significant open-source project, then start running a blog of your experiences/thoughts, then maybe start your own open-source project based on some nifty idea you have come up with along the way.

Get yourself known and rated on something like stack-overflow.

Then when you apply to places you have something to show and be assessed on.

Somewhere like microsoft might entertain such an application – a lot of their top programmers seem to have been brought in from open source projects – like NUnit for example. One could even get the impression that they are incapable of growing their own talent…

Anything to do with operations, of a system or of a network, is way worse.

Agree, you couldnt pay me to be a sys admin – i don’t even like dev ops. There are loads of free courses on coursera for just about anything programming/data science related that could worth a go. If you have any good ideas and some time it could be worth creating a github account and making a project or two on there. Something that you can show employers, although that works both ways – if you write any poor code they’ll be able to see that too..
I’ve had people send me emails about jobs off the back of my github and mine is pretty shocking tbf (all pretty old code)!

My specialism is currently acoustics, noise, audio with some programming and some electronics experience

http://www.linn.co.uk/careers ?

expected to learn the latest stuff in your own time

I think this is what sorts the wannabes from the real deal 🙂

been learning new stuff perpetually throughout my programming life 20+ years…

Still love programming ….

IF you have a engineering background don’t aim to be a general programer. You will miss out to the kids who have programed since they were 10 and love computers. Use your maths / engineering skills to get into a engineering based programming job. Most “hardcore” programmers I know are not super up on the high end engineering.

Most coders I meet are pretty miserable. Although in fairness its usually during a debrief when I’m telling them how I emptied their databases of credit card details due to a mistake they made!

Most coders I meet are pretty miserable

I am struggling to think of any miserable ones I have worked with in nearly 30 years of programming.

There is one here who often looks miserable, but he is god fearing and thinks things like cancers are things imposed by god as punishments for being gay. I sent round a link to that spoof CERN April 1st release about finding The Force, and he replied that he couldn’t understand why these people couldn’t just accept God instead of continually looking for answers… We had to point out that it was a joke.

Your lot are probably miserable as they are working for you and you are paying them poorly and imposing stupid deadlines…

I got into it via being a mainframe operator 🙂

I think as already said if you go via support or help desk roles you should be able to slip into a programming role later….

VBs fine the problem is with vb programmers tbh…

Your lot are probably miserable as they are working for you and you are paying them poorly and imposing stupid deadlines…

wtf?

I don’t employ any coders. I just deal with them from lots of companies all the time. The team leaders, dev managers etc are always chipper, at least while they are not under threat of being offshored. The code-miners are usually throwing CV’s and bits of stolen source code to agents to wangle a better position elsewhere.

The coders I know who love what they are doing are mostly working on open source projects. I know some Microsoft and Google guys who really love their job. But jobbing code-miners in banks, insurance, bookmakers, game companies, retail etc are mostly a bit glum. You might not be, I’m just saying what I see. And it’s only fair to give both sides of the story to the OP.

I’m not miserable ….but have met a fair few….

I got into it for the Porsches and rockstar lifestyle 🙂

I ride my bike to work every day and do something I love an get paid for it and I can get away with wearing shorts 9 months of the year….can life get any better…

can life get any better…

You could be commuting on an Airwheel?

Oh god no…..saw someone having to ride around in circles waiting to cross the road…looked a total tool on it 🙂