Slashdot Mirror
Ask Slashdot: Stepping Sideways Into Programming?
thundertron writes "I'm a 28-year-old, non-technical, UX-focused Product Manager at a startup. Overall I'm very happy with my work, but I'm endlessly frustrated that I'm not committing code. I love the few occasions where I commit some front-end code or put together a fairly sophisticated query, but if the onus were on me to put together an entire site my hands would be tied. I've thought about going back to school (or even taking time off from my career to take courses) in CS to immerse myself in programming. The flip side is that I know I won't want to do that forever — I won't want to be employed primarily as an engineer because I like too many other aspects of the business. My best option seems to be to dive into Ruby on Rails and just pick up what I can in my spare time. Perhaps others in the Slashdot community have some suggestions/recommendations?"
Go Python.
http://diveintopython.org/
Then if you feel you need more jump into Perl. With an understanding of those two languages you should be set to pick up (just about) any other languages easier.
Just my opinion.
I agree with this-- you need enough knowledge to judge the work of the people you're managing, but often enough, it's detrimental for managers to "pitch in".
I'm sure there are people here who would disagree. If you're the person being managed, sometimes it's nice to see your manager pitch in and help. They're suddenly doing "real work". And as a manager, sometimes it's helpful to experience first-hand the difficulties that your subordinates are facing. It gives you perspective, and it gives you a better grasp on how to help your subordinates.
On the other hand, one of the primary jobs of a manager is to be detached from some of the nitty-gritty details and to be keeping an eye on the big picture. It might be that while everyone else is obsessed with making their code perfect and efficient, your time is better spent looking at the product as a cohesive whole and figuring out whether you're actually achieving your goals. It's a challenging job in its own right, and it's a job too often neglected.
Maybe you want to schedule 1-2 code reviews per week and participate in them first, just observing how the developers do it?
Start from there, then you'll be in better position to judge whether this is something you are really interested in.
You can't handle the truth.
It's just that having the degree doesn't set you too far ahead of the pack in this economy. While you're studying others are sharpening their resume in small jobs till their skills harden to the point that nobody even asks for proof of a degree when they see a years worth of related bullet points.
I'm in a similar situation to yours career-wise. Started working tech support around age 17 and since then only desktop support gigs have been offered. This summer, I finally stopped getting typecasted, thanks in part to a remote Unix server operations support gig that somehow left some programming-relevant buzzwords in my resume that I could actually prove semi-daily use of. Without the shell experience gained there, I wouldn't be working with front-end code. I'm at a small company and still transitioning, since the assignment is a short paid internship. My resume will finally say that I've done development full-time, rather than call-center or user-facing jobs.
My first suggestion to you is to re-check yesterday's discussion , which was a refreshingly civil rehash of "CS degree isn't programming, yada, yada." Make sure you scale it to >120 comments to get the most detail out of it; just take a break every half an hour to think how the comments apply to you and give it a couple days to review the whole thing seriously. Even to IT insiders, it seems that a CS degree isn't understood --I reluctanctly got one, and somewhat wish I had taken a 2 year degree at a tradeschool approach instead of being forced to plough all the way thru advanced Calculus, Math theory and a bunch of "core" humanities classes. At our age you are well rounded as you'll get and your skills will not really benefit from the degree's forced requirements... unless you quit your job to go fulltime into the 4 CS year degree. Only around half of CS classes are coding, so your job might actually be providing you with more hands-on experience with a single project than you get out of public colleges' degree programs for a whole semester.
Anyways, since you are already writing SOME code and queries towards your company's codebase and bottomline, then you don't need a full 4-year CS degree if you're looking for future jobs at mid-size and small places --the resume's degree blurb is to secure your FIRST programming job, which you indirectly are already in.
So, try to learn the languages and environments on your own (time is hard to find, but force yourself to do little things like regularly trying out examples at code-snippet blogs.) It's very important that you regularly use one or two big IDE's (Eclipse, Visual whatever) and vi / emacs for shells scripts, php and xml. Get familiar with CVS and Maven for code repositories; try out tutorials on youtube to see how they work, and force yourself to default to an Ubuntu 10.04 boot so that you have a shell handy, a compiler and are only apt-get away from Eclipse and other things. If you can live daily with tools that the other devs have, then you're a step closer to slowly push your way... oh, and since you're not a coder at the current company, you'll probably not be given a chance there --ever. A jump away might be the only way; chicken and the egg, really. It takes a good bullet point or two in your resume about "experience with X" programming skills that a junior position for a full-time programmer will appreciate. And without temp agencies, it's hard to kinda make the jump, so it can take you years to get a lucky break.