Kirsle.net
Somebody had asked me about this recently, and I thought I must have already written a blog post about it before, but apparently I had not!
If you (or someone you know) has been curious about how to break in to software engineering as a career (or a career change), then this post is for you. A proper college degree is NOT even necessary for most software jobs!
The basic steps I will recommend are as follows:
Now I'll go into each of these in more detail.
For my career, I have mainly worked in the "web development" space so my recommendations here are coming from that world. See the footnotes for some advice for other software development paths (e.g. videogame development).
If you don't know any programming languages yet, you should choose a popular language to be your first one, and you should prefer to choose one which has a large amount of companies that use it because that's where the jobs are at.
My current recommendations would be:
If you aren't familiar with what front-end vs. back-end is, I can describe them briefly:
It's also possible to be a "full stack developer" where you are building both back-end and front-end code, but that usually requires you to learn multiple programming languages and technology stacks. For somebody just getting started, your time would be better served to pick the one you resonate with the most and focus your attention on learning the programming languages and frameworks for that language.
Note: after you've learned one language, it is much easier to learn your second one. There are so many things they all have in common: functions, variables, and control flow are very similar across them all.
There are tons of free tutorials online that teach you how to build web apps in any of these programming languages. Just google for something like, "Build a web blog in Python" or "Build a Twitter clone in JavaScript".
Those two projects (a web blog and a Twitter clone) are very common examples that you'll find a tutorial for in any programming language. "To Do" apps are another example. These kind of projects will have you learning many real world skills, such as databases and authentication cookies, that you would use at a real job.
Most such tutorials will not only help you learn the programming language itself, but also use a popular "web framework library" built for that language. Almost nobody is programming a raw HTTP server in Python, but they will use a web framework that provides the basic structure and shape of their app and then they fill in their custom business logic on top.
For some specific recommendations of very relevant frameworks that currently see widespread use in business:
In my career at Python shops, we've always used Flask to build our apps and Vue.js has been most commonly used on front-ends at multiple companies I've worked. React.js is very popular as well.
If you aren't disciplined enough to teach yourself how to code, and you don't want to dedicate two to four years of going to University, you can look for some "coding bootcamps" in your area too. Those bootcamps will typically go for several weeks and teach you everything you need to know about web development.
I've interviewed and worked with people whose sole educational experience was via these bootcamps and they did just great on the job.
A very good way to learn a programming language is to actually have a project that you want to build.
If you just go to a programming language's website and read through the tutorials there, they can be rather boring. They have you writing trivial little programs to learn how if/else expressions work, and silly things like that. After you have picked up the bare basics, I recommend jumping in and starting on a project of your own.
That's where the aforementioned "build a blog" style of tutorial will come in. Those will give you a good structure to follow, using real world frameworks and libraries that professional developers use at work.
It doesn't really matter much what you choose for your project. If you don't already have a website, programming a web blog is a good first option. Then, you'll have a website that you can post things on and document your journey of learning how to be a better programmer!
You could also build something like a videogame, or a chatbot, or a little web page that connects to various social media APIs and provides status updates from all your friends in one place. Something to scratch your own itch. It doesn't really matter a whole lot what your project is!
The important part, though, is that you open source your project and get a GitHub account and put your source code on it for others to see. (If you don't like GitHub, you can try GitLab instead).
The point is: having source code online will already make you stand out from the crowd when you begin applying at places to work. I have interviewed hundreds of developers over the course of my career, and most of them don't have a GitHub link or anything on their resume. Those who do are already putting themselves off to a good start with me.
After you have gotten a project or two under your belt and have learned the basics of how to build a website, you can start applying to companies for a web developer position.
There are always a ton of little startup companies or other small businesses who need anybody that can code. They don't even care if you have a college degree or not, and that is where having some source code up on GitHub can be helpful, so you can point to that as evidence that you know how to code.
The larger corporations will often say they want their candidates to have a Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or similar, but, once you've gotten your foot in the door at a small startup company and keep at it for about 5 or 10 years, you'll start getting recruiter e-mails from even Google, Meta and Amazon with them wanting you to apply to them. A few years of "real world" experience is typically a lot more important than some piece of paper from a university.
The above was basically how I did it, and I'll tell you how.
I taught myself how to program since I was a young teenager. I learned how to write web pages in HTML when I was 12 (using the very same W3 Schools HTML tutorial that I linked above!), JavaScript soon after, and when I was 14 I taught myself Perl so that I could program chatbots for AOL Instant Messenger.
Throughout my teen years, I had published many Perl modules online as open source software. Some were related to my chatbot projects, some of them were Perl/Tk GUI toolkit modules, some were very niche things such as Data::ChipsChallenge which could manipulate data files for the old Windows 3.1 game "Chip's Challenge".
I got my first proper job as a software developer purely because of my open source projects. I just pointed at my CPAN page as a place for recruiters to see my work.
For my second software development job (because I was still fairly green with only a few years' experience), the job interview consisted 100% of me going through the source code of RiveScript.pm, my chatbot project I had written in Perl, and explain how I designed my code and what I would do better if I rewrote it all again.
And: nobody ever asked me about a college degree for any of these jobs. When I got my first job, I was only one year in to a college program (at ITT Technical Institute, rest in peace). I only even went to college because motivational speakers at my high school made me think it was absolutely required. I only finished out my Associate's degree (two years total) and called it quits, only because I wanted to have something to show for my student loan debt at least. But nobody in my entire career has ever asked or wanted to verify my college degree.
Way back when I was interviewing to get my first couple of software dev jobs, I was naturally pretty anxious and worried that I wouldn't do well enough to pass those interviews. But after I got in and then it was my turn to conduct the interviews, and got to see how it looks from the other side of the table, I wonder what I was ever so worried about.
Throughout my career, I have interviewed hundreds of software developers. Many of them were fresh college graduates who went to school for computer science, but had no "real world" coding experience. Others had come from other companies and had years or decades of experience.
A thing that surprised me is that so many people who come in for an interview, just don't know how to program. I once saw this article, "Why Can't Programmers... Program?", which may be the origin story of the "Fizz Buzz" meme of recent decades.
But, I've found it to be fairly accurate. At a software dev interview, we'd often ask the candidate to write out a quick "puzzle program" to test their logic and coding ability, and for most candidates, it was like pulling teeth. They would usually get through it, with some help, over the span of 20 minutes or so.
Usually, it was the fresh college graduates who struggle the most. You'd think, being fresh out of school, their knowledge of programming would be sharp. But, in class they learned a lot of esoteric problems and rote memorization of algorithms, so when faced with a new problem they haven't specifically seen and practiced before, they freeze. Whereas programmers who had a whole career already of real world experience at various companies, they fared a lot better on these kind of questions.
The point I'm wanting to make is: if you actually know how to program, even if you're nervous at the interview, it is a night and day difference and you will already stand out greatly compared to most of the candidates who walk through that door. Having your own "real world" projects you programmed for fun, and put on GitHub, puts you at a great advantage even above the fresh college graduates who spent the last 4 years learning about computers.
When I see a GitHub link on someone's resume, it's a huge green flag for me. In the time leading up to the interview, I'll check out their source code and prepare some questions about it. If you can walk me through your projects and explain how they work, you're basically going to pass the interview. It may not seem like much, but you would be a breath of fresh air for the interviewer after they just watched the 10 previous candidates struggle their way through a "Fizz Buzz" algorithm.
This one is a valid question and the answer is just that "we don't know."
The above advice all worked out great for me and others I met during my career. The software industry bubble may be finally about to pop soon. The industry is genuinely concerned that "junior developers" may start to go extinct, as companies race to replace them with A.I. and only retain their "senior developers" on salary. Eventually, those senior developers will retire or die off, and nobody will know how to code anymore because A.I. has made everyone dumb and companies won't be able to hire new senior developers to replace them.
However: I say learning how to program is a valuable skill to have no matter what you do for your career. Even if you don't get a job as a software developer, being able to write little scripts and programs to automate the tedious parts of your job will continue to pay dividends for your entire lifetime.
While the above advice was especially for "web development" jobs, much of it applies more broadly to any kind of software development.
If you want to get into videogame development for example, C Sharp (C#) is a useful language to learn because of its prominence in the popular game engine Unity. Those are also useful skills if you want to program Virtual Reality (VR) applications.
If you are interested in mobile apps, the answer is straightforward there: Swift for iOS and Kotlin for Android, and there are many mobile app tutorials out there to get you started.
If you want to get into "systems programming" such as to work with microcontrollers and embedded systems, C is still king and will never be going away, and Rust is a popular up-and-coming language with many new jobs opening up as it can fulfill many of the same roles that C can, but in a more (memory) safe way. Many companies are rewriting their systems in Rust lately, and Rust has a massive library of modules available for doing anything from web development to videogames to desktop/mobile applications to embedded systems development.
And the rest of my advice above still applies: pick a language, check the job market if that's a concern, and then pick a project.
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