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From an Unrelated Career To IT/Programming?
An anonymous reader writes "I hate my career of the past few years. For a long time I've wondered what I'd do after I broke even and could get into something new, and I keep coming back to computers. I'd like to get into software, since I always enjoyed coding. I have some background with C++ so I'm not starting entirely from scratch. My problem is my degrees and past employment have no practical application to the field. Where should I start? I have friends in both IT and software development who might be able to pull some strings and get me an interview or two for entry-level positions, but what can I do to make myself hireable in a short period of time? Is it possible to pick up enough of what I'd need within a couple months? If so, what and how?"
Understanding the business, understanding what the code needs to accomplish and being able to communicate with the users can be just as valuable as coding experience. This does depend on the company. Highlight these areas. It will tend to look you look a bit more than a manager than a programmer, but you will get your foot in the door.
Well, though obviously I can't advocate that approach, it's frankly not a bad idea. Your first hurdle is HR, and HR wants 5 years of this and 6 years of that, and they are going to toss everything that doesn't conform to those standards.
I've seen plenty of incompetent people lie their way through HR, so it definitely works. Now, if you do that, and get hired and it turns out you don't know what you're doing, you can expect your coworkers to turn on you big time. Nothing worse than an incompetent coworker: it's better to have no one at all.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
Learn fortran, cobol, mumps, pick, ada, k, and other legacy or non-mainstream languages. Companies that use them generally have a hard time finding people that know them, so you can get in without the experience.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
I'd say the answer is no. I've never looked at a resume and saw that they had no PAID experience and then said, wait, they played around on some open source project, they must be good...
as a part of my department's hiring team, more weight is given to paid positions, definitely.
but the programming skill / quality of some of these paid positions is the same as the programming skill / quality of the fuzzies in my sock -- non-existent.
if you work on an open source project, we can at least look back at the commit tree and see some of the actual codewrites and adds/changes in the tree. in some cases, it gives us more of a knowledge of the applicants skill then someone who is just providing a resume, and using the buzzwords-of-the-{day,month,year}, since we actually have something TANGIBLE to look at. Plus, working on an open source project, the OP may likely start on a low end, handling documentation or tickets, until progressing upwards into the high technical levels -- useful skills to have.
if you filter out all technical people right off the bat, due to past paid experience or college degree, you may lose a great hire. some of our best workers are non-ee/cs (surpisingly, civil engineers make good coders, and one of our best is a former music major, orchestra performer, & music theory professor). additionally, having someone come in without the 'dogma' from a standard ee/cs education & job background may be refreshing -- as they think and will approach problems in different ways.
YMMV, but just my experience that cares more about the people than your standard fortune 500 chairfiller...
You may also try to leverage what you do know to get your foot in the door. Using myself as an example, I spent about 5 years doing DBA work, with a smattering of generic desktop support. When I moved across the country, I found myself in a place where straight DBA work was simply unavailable. What I did find was a programming position for a company with a very small IT department who, while looking for a programmer, also needed someone who could do some DBA and general IT work as well. I had pretty much 0 programming experience, but taught myself enough in a few weeks to appear semi-competent at the interview. It was my other skills, not essential for the position, that managed to get me in the door.
Now, that isn't totally applicable to the current situation, since the OP has no IT background to speak of. But perhaps some part of their skill set can be applied - especially if they look to smaller companies where your job may include a wide array of overlapping areas and responsibilities.
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I'd recommend investing in something like: http://www.aimstesting.org/
Take into consideration your age. Are you going to fit in with a bunch of 20 somethings fresh out of school?
Corporate culture will differ with the company, but your co-workers "mini culture" will have a big effect.
Is this really something you can do long term?
By that I mean, the sheer amount of IT work in your geographic area.
If you work for company A and it goes under or you decide to leave, what else is available?
(You will have to compete with a much larger pool of candidates if you try a tele-commuting gig.)
Do you enjoy your family, hobbies, etc? Plenty of IT jobs regularly require far more than 40 hours/week. Are you prepared for this as a long term situation?
If after all that you still want to give it a shot and your contacts will pull a few strings then give it a shot.....and may God have mercy on your soul.
The reason that everyone gives conflicting advice about "how to get hired" or "what to put on a resume" is that there is no universal formula. There is none, because if there was, everybody would game it, and then it would stop working.
The stock market works the same way. If someone is publicly advocating or selling a formula, then you already know that the formula doesn't work any more.
Women work this way too. They must give conflicting signals in order to avoid getting gamed. Only by watching you flop around trying to understand what they say they want, can they gather enough data to infer your true character.
There will never be a general success formula for any of these realms, because the payoffs (salary / money / womb-space) are too big.
FATMOUSE + YOU = FATMOUSE
On the other hand, I KNOW it can be done. I made a quite insane journey from traditional wooden boatbuilding to computer programmer. It took me a long time, because I got distracted by actually working in IT support (at quite a decent paid level, 3rd line network support), but it could have been done quicker.
I had no degree (a failed attempt at economics), not a single qualification in computing, and a work history as a guitar teacher and a boatbuilder, and yet I managed to shift into IT, and then into coding. This is how I did it:
1) I went to evening classes and got some C and C++ exams under my belt.
2) I coded some ganmes from scratch and started selling them, giving me something visually impressive on my CV
3) I didn't hide my previous jobs. In fact, I think they helped my CV to stand out
4) I acted confident about getting every job I went to. Being an ex-musician helped in this. No interview for a job is as scary as playing a gig to a bunch of drunk Hells Angels on a saturday night.
When I was a boatbuilder, the most hi-tech equipment we had was a telephone. We didn't even have electric screwdrivers, or for that matter, plumbing. The floor was sawdust on concrete. If I can go from that environment to lead programmer, then anyone can do it. That doesn't mean it isn't extremely fucking hard to do so, but I can assure you it is doable.
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