Ask HN: Getting into Software Development from a Philosophy Background

1 point

5 years ago

Hello HN, I'm asking this question to help a friend. Her situation is that she's located in Eastern Europe and finished a bachelor's degree in Philosophy. Although she really enjoyed the subject as expected she finds herself unable to find a job in anything but sales/customer support which she doesn't like at all. Her current job is as a data annotator in a very small AI startup.

Through that job, she came into brief contact with Python and found out that she's interested in programming. She had a taste of using fast.ai to use some pre-trained models for the wow factor and started training on online platforms to learn the basics of coding. However, she gets very discouraged by the fact that she doesn't see a possibility of being able to ever get into Software development professionally because all companies in Europe require a cs degree to hire you. Also the company she is working in is not willing to invest time and effort to help her grow in that regard, since that's not why they hired her . Finally she's not in the financial situation to pursue another bachelor's at this point in her life.

Ideally she would like to do a master's degree or some kind of bootcamp to get her foot in the door.

Has anyone been in a similar situation, coming from a non STEM background? What would you suggest?