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?"

Comments

Re:You could just lie and go for it.

[SatanicPuppy]

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.

try it old school

[larry bagina]

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.

Re:Be Proactive

[fwice]

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...

It can be done. I did it

[cliffski]

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.